From The Independent:
Plummeting insect numbers. A sixth mass extinction. Thinning of ice sheets. Sea level rise. Wildfires in California. Thawing Arctic permafrost. The full tragedy of climate change is unravelling before our eyes.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, we have 12 years to stop this catastrophe. Climate action has become part of the zeitgeist, yet global emissions keep inching up and reports of Earth’s ecosystems collapsing come thick and fast.
Donald Trump is still in denial.
In 1958 scientists first noticed levels of carbon dioxide creeping up. In the 1980s global temperatures began to rise but warnings were ignored and covered up. For most people, the first nail in the coffin came 40 years later with the 2018 IPCC report, which said we faced major environmental catastrophe within our lifetimes, and potentially as soon as 2040.
So far so blah, here's the fun part:
For many, the news was a bereavement – a calamity we engineered without knowing it. “You’re talking about a mix of confusing feelings, including depression, grief, rage, despair, hopelessness, guilt and shame. All of those feelings come with it,” says Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at the University of Bath and member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
For many, these conflicted feelings are now part of daily life. The American Psychological Association describe this “chronic fear of environmental doom” as eco-anxiety.
Ms Hickman has been a psychotherapist for more than 20 years and before last year she had two or three patients at any one time with eco-anxiety.
“Pretty much everybody is referring to it now. Lots of people are saying they won’t have children. Other people say they don’t want to feel guilty about having a child and bringing it into a world where they know there’ll be lots of problems.
"One woman told me she fantasised about killing her child. In fact I’ve had eight women who have said that to me. These are women desperately thinking about how to protect their children. They’re talking about despair, impotence and powerlessness."
Monday, 24 June 2019
Tip-top climate change porn
My latest blogpost: Tip-top climate change pornTweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 13:31
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7 comments:
Do you believe Ms Hickman?
"Lots of people are saying they won’t have children. Other people say they don’t want to feel guilty about having a child and bringing it into a world where they know there’ll be lots of problems.
"One woman told me she fantasised about killing her child. In fact I’ve had eight women who have said that to me"
Are these people genuinely scared of "climate change" or are they just that small percentage of women who really don't want to give birth and are using this invented issue as a figleaf?
G, why do they do they need a fig leaf? Want kids, have kids, don't want kids, then don't. Not for anybody else to judge.
Independent and Guardian - two misnamed papers.
Until the mid Seventies, environmentally concerned scientists tended to believe that emissions from
factory chimneys were causing GLOBAL COOLING. There appeared to be evidence of a “tipping point”
In 1972/3 when the Russian Autumn-sown wheat crop was destroyed by unusually low temperatures
accompanied by low snow cover.
The CIA produced a memorandum saying that there was consensus in the scientific community that
Canada, Northern Russia and China would be covered with hundreds of feet of snow and ice. Failing
action such as strewing the arctic ice cap with soot, the advance of glaciers was certain. They
were confident that accurate forecasting of temperatures had been achieved.
This hypothesis was also accompanied by prophecies of mass famine because of over population
Being in the grain trade, I experienced the effects of this at second hand when the Soviets managed
a buying raid on the Chicago market and the wheat price ( having increased steeply on joining the EEC)
more than doubled again.
However, the early/mid Seventies produced a series of unusually hot Summers. The concerned scientist
held a meeting in 1975 under the title “ The Atmosphere, endangered and endangering” . They agreed
to change their hymn sheet from freezing to frying and to coordinate their representations to the UN
along these lines.
I wrote it up almost ten years ago. Available on request to independently minded blogs and websites.
JH, just names.
Ed, I'd love to read it. My email address is at top right of blog.
Go back a few decades and change "global warming" to "nuclear war" and you get exactly the same worries by, presumably, exactly the same sort of people.
B, true. But everybody should have been worried about nuclear war. Very unlikely to happen, but outcome disastrous.
Modest warming is likely to continue for a while, but is not disastrous.
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