Yves here. I do not even remotely understand the very strong message here of “optimism good, pessimism generally bad”. It has been repeatedly documented that pessimists are much better at accurately estimating the likelihood of bad events occurring than optimists. Note some of the highly questionable reasoning here, such as:
One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action.
Dear God, the climate action to date and the rainbows and unicorns schemes like the Green New Deal are inadequate? What good is “solutions-oriented messaging” is if all it produces is putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds?
As Lambert says apropos the near-total abandonment of Covid precautions, “The optimists will kill us all.”
By Katarina Zimmer, a science and environment journalist. Her work has been published in Knowable Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Grist, Nautilus Magazine, and more. Originally published at Undark
Hope is often said to be the best medicine, essential to getting people through difficult times. So it’s unsurprising that it has seemingly become a mantra of climate communication in recent years. Instilling hope, the theory goes, is key to motivating people to act; without it, people will succumb to despair and apathy.
The emphasis on hope may help explain why so many climate scientists keep their predominantly grim views about our future climate to themselves, while cautioning against what they perceive to be doom-and-gloom narratives in social media (although many scientists are genuinely optimistic). Last year, when a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that we’ll likely fail to contain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, many scientists — and journalists — nonetheless presented the 1.5 degree goal as achievable. In reality, most scientists believe that warming will reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius, according to a recent survey by The Guardian. Being unhopeful about climate change is so unpopular that I myself, an environment-focused journalist, am fearful of publicly admitting my own pessimistic outlook.
But social science and psychology research presents a more nuanced picture of the emotions that drive action. Certainly, hope is an important psychological motivator for many people, and relying solely on doom-and-gloom messaging could push some people into despondency. But not all hope is equally effective; wishful thinking often falls short. And certain breeds of pessimists are actually highly motivated by threat-centered communication.
What matters, it seems, is not so much whether a person feels hopeful or unhopeful about the future, but how constructively they deal with their emotions. “How people interpret their emotions and rationalize the threat of climate change might be the determining factor in whether it leads to action or inaction,” Matthew Ballew, an environmental psychologist at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington, wrote to me in an email. In this light, effective climate communication means not only highlighting the rosier end of climate trajectories and the solutions that may help get us there, but also the possibility of a bleak future and the massive amount of work it will take to avoid it.
These nuances of climate emotions were illustrated in a 2019 study that Ballew co-authored, which surveyed American adults during the Obama administration. One arm of the survey encompassed 1,310 adults demographically representative of the U.S. population, focusing on people who believed that climate change is happening.
The researchers distinguished between participants with what they call constructive hope (who agreed to statements like “humanity will rise to the occasion”) and those with false hope (“we don’t need to worry about global warming/climate change because nature will take care of it”). They similarly distinguished between constructive doubt (“most people are unwilling to take individual action”) and fatalistic doubt (“humans can’t affect global warming/climate change because you can’t fight Mother Nature”). Participants were then asked how likely they’d be to contact their government officials, sign petitions demanding more climate action, or support policies like regulating carbon emissions or instituting tax rebates for electric vehicles. Remarkably, the authors found that constructive doubt and constructive hope both correlated with increased policy support and willingness to take political action, whereas false hope and fatalistic thinking had a negative association.
The study is limited in that it looked at people’s self-reported willingness to engage in climate action rather than their actual behavior, noted co-author Brittany Bloodhart, a social psychologist at California State University, San Bernardino. And it’s not clear if feeling doubtful necessarily caused people to be more willing to take action, or if the two correlate for other reasons. Nevertheless, the relationship between constructive doubt and political engagement, the authors wrote, suggests it may be worthwhile to recognize the difficulties inherent in addressing climate change.
Interestingly, a recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that people experiencing psychological distress related to climate change were more likely to engage in collective climate change action or to report a willingness to do so. And other research has found a positive correlation between climate anxiety and climate action. While anxiety or distress are not exactly the same as doubt or pessimism, they’re similarly believed to cause people to shut down, when in fact they may be a helpful driver of action. “The people that I know who are really seriously working on these issues and who are engaging in climate change activism,” Bloodhart said, stressing that this is her personal observation, “they have a little bit of hope, but they mostly are pretty pessimistic and concerned.”
So why do people choose to act when they believe the worst outcomes are the most likely?
Some light may come from psychological research on so-called defensive pessimists. While run-of-the-mill pessimists might become immobilized and despondent by focusing on negative outcomes, defensive pessimists take action to avoid them. “They use their worry and their anxiety about that worst possible outcome to drive them to take action so that it never becomes a reality,” said social and health psychology researcher Fuschia Sirois of Durham University. In one 2008 experiment, for example, defensive pessimists performed relatively poorly in a word puzzle when prompted to imagine a positive scenario, but they did much better, on average, when they were prompted to imagine the opposite, negative effect.
In another study that tracked university students for over four years, researchers found that defensive pessimists had higher self-esteem compared to other students with anxiety, and even eventually reached nearly similar levels of confidence as optimists. Research comparing optimists and defensive pessimists has often found similar benefits, although pessimists tend to have a less enjoyable journey towards achieving outcomes, Sirois added.
Although there is no data on how defensive pessimists cope with collective action problems like climate change, existing studies suggest they may respond well to clear information about threats — provided it’s paired with guidance on how their individual actions can help avoid negative outcomes. “For people who are defensive pessimists, that’s what’s going to mobilize them to action,” Sirois said.
None of this is to say that purely doomsday messaging can’t have counterproductive outcomes: One recent survey of 59,440 people from 63 countries found that messages focusing solely on the catastrophic nature of climate breakdown performed more poorly than solutions-oriented messaging in motivating climate action. Fortunately, however, surveysof the American public do not indicate a rise in fatalism in the population. The percentage who believes it’s too late to act on climate change has hovered around 13 percent for years, social scientist John Kotcher of George Mason University wrote in an email. “At the very least, this calls into question whether there’s actually a growing sense of fatalism among Americans, despite the online discourse and concern around doom-and-gloom messaging.”
It just means that we shouldn’t hold back from clearly communicating the risk at hand and the scale of work that lies ahead. Indeed, some of Kotcher’s studies have found that threat information can help increase public engagement with climate change in productive ways. Research from health psychology, meanwhile, suggests that people need both explicit information about the threat — for instance, that smoking can cause lung cancer — and what they can do to avoid it. Highlighting the solutions that are already underway is also important. Some behavioral experiments suggest that people are more willing to help tackle a problem if they know that they’re not starting from scratch.
If anything, the public is not worried enough about climate change, said Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath. And while it’s hard to pinpoint the right amount of hope, Whitmarsh thinks people tend to be overly optimistic. One poll suggests that although 64 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change, less than half of those report they are “very worried.” Whitmarsh said she believes this stems from techno-optimism among policymakers and the media that has fostered a widespread belief that incremental changes through recycling or green technologies will be enough, without requiring behavioral changes such as reducing meat consumption or using more public transportation. “Maybe a lot of those people are acknowledging that there is a major problem but they think that — because they’ve heard it from politicians and many other people — technology will save us,” Whitmarsh said, adding, “and like, there’s not much that I can do as an individual.”
This is why climate communication should not just be about instilling hope. It means also confronting the worst possible outcomes and the tough, transformative work that lies ahead. That means inspiring not only the optimists among us but the pessimists, too.
There is a form of optimism amounting to climate denial among people that know climate change is happening and that the damage will be serious. Informed commentators talk about the competition between the G7 and the BRICS, the New Cold War, and other global happenings and don’t mention the disruption that will happen shortly from climate change. It is so bad, I sometimes doubt myself. If upwards of a billion people to more than a billion people will soon be migrating from the heat, how are our economies to function? Guns, walls, and geoengineering appear to be where humanity is headed. Optimism, pessimism: how about realism. We can’t fight wars and climate change at the same time.
> We can’t fight wars and climate change at the same time.
Quotas, dear boy, quotaz.
Sure we can: Defund the military by 50%!
There are times when positive thinking is useful. But I believe those are limited and generally very specific and mostly of a psychological benefit of allowing people to continue functioning.
With that caveat, the war on pessimism could also be considered a war on realism. Most of the time for the more serious concerns of life, optimism means ignoring or discounting inconvenient facts. Covid, climate change, American foreign policy and exceptionalism are all riddled with optimistic fantasies, maybe. See I would also posit that many of those most vehemently pushing the optimistic scenarios know very well that it is a fantasy, aka full of cow manure, but their finances/businesses/way of life would be adversely impacted by facing the reality of the situation. And as with so much, the desires and prosperity of a few determines the conditions of the majority, even when those conditions are dangerous, disastrous and deadly.
It’s not even optimism, it’s delusion and a boat load of USA, USA, USA. I would like to believe that optimists act out of facts, while people who are deluded act out of feelings, it’s kinda like 70% of people believe they’ll make the top 1%.
For me, I am trying hard to not be either one. If one plus one is equal to two, then it is what it is, I am just trying to enjoy whatever time that’s left to me as best as I can. Not that I am ill or anything, but you just never know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_Hope_poster.jpg
I take the same approach. Enjoy every day. Our ultimate demise may well come from something no one is even considering.
This reminds me of a climate channel I watched. They were discussing climate change, and one scientist talked about the steps Canada was taking to combat it. However, another scientist called out the data, stating that, in his opinion, Canada was failing in its fight against climate change. What shocked me was the host’s response — instead of addressing whether the scientist’s claim was accurate, the host simply said, “We can’t be negative.” It made me wonder: do these people really care about the climate, or are they more concerned with maintaining a certain narrative?
This is a very useful encapsulation: “We can’t be negative”. What arrogant and misguided privilege. Tell that to the people in Gaza.
I have heard from several Climate journalists and authors that their editors almost always demand that any article or book they write that focuses on what might be called climate realism – which is by necessity highly pessimistic – end with a note of optimism.
I’m not sure that’s much different than the happy endings the characterize almost every American film versus films from the rest of the world.
The editors attitude is clearly that of we can’t allow our readers to walk away with a truth if not the truth about the climate crisis.
“The negative judgment is the peak of mentality.” (Alfred North Whitehead)
But you can’t sell that like you can sell The Power of Positive Thinking, The Secret, and Think and Grow Rich.
This is a bit off topic (not climate change related) but in the US, we have a sick (IMHO) culture of having to be positive and happy all the time.
I’m a realist and I like to say it like it is. After over 25 years in a corporate job, I’m starting to see that this doesn’t fly these days. They want a positive spin on everything. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t ask any hard questions.
If you don’t present yourself with an element of positivity and “coddling” (so as not to disrupt the delicate nature of your coworkers), you receive feedback.
I’m in my mid 50s. I’ve seen a lot of nonsense. But this is at its highest level lately in the workplace. Curious if others are experiencing it too.
This has been a long standing pet peeve of mine, and I am disheartened to learn it is being even more forcefully promoted in Corporate America than before.
See The Dark Side of Optimism from the Conference Board Review:
http://auroraadvisors.com/articles/Optimism.pdf
I went to a group job interview back in the 90s and it was quickly obvious that for them, they only wanted ‘enthusiastic’ people. Not ones that had experience or could do the job but just enthusiastic people. It kinda creeped me out and I was glad to leave that session early. If I had stayed, they would probably have talked about having flair-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno (1:34 mins)
Curious if others are experiencing it too. Yes, and this from people whom I regard as highly intelligent/intellectual. I’m wondering if it’s a some kind of defense mechanism which protects the defended from having to further contemplate or discuss the unthinkable, like how friggin’ close we are to committing suicide as a species.
Putting the They Live glasses on is painful and most people are incapable of doing it until pushed by their material conditions.
Stomach, the Growler, is the engine of revolutions…
Every society is only three meals away from chaos.
It’s more than that. Many intelligent people have figured out what humans are all about, and realize that our course is set. As to being happy, I am not sure what that even means, but whatever it is, I aint.
I call it the Chamber of Commerce elevator speech horse-apple. Upbeat Realtors(tm) in the post Paulson/Bush Obama 2008 implosion. Ask the title company how their order count is?
Are you doing sales, refi’s or Trustee’s Sale Guarantees?
I mean, c’mon, man!?
Absolutely Yes.
Just before I retired one of my (too many) “managers” asked me there was anything I thought needed addressing in my area of expertise
I started by saying, “This is one of our problems…”.
No no, the manager said. We don’t have “problems”, we have issues.
I just gave her a big smile and said, no. It’s a problem, and you know that.
Of course she completely agreed while telling me, “Yes it is, but we’re not allowed to say that word.”
Two years later… still a problem. And mainly because it was looked at as only an “issue”.
Problems aren’t issues. They are “opportunities”.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Jeez, where have you two been? Get with the program – problems are neither issues nor opportunities – they are challenges.
Oh, so much of it. Cannot bother with these cheerleading types. HR has been unleashed on me several times. I learned to roll with it.
I don’t understand this essay at all, or what it argues for. My primary cause for pessimism is the failure of our political system. Did we have a chance to turn a corner on climate? Possibly, if we had started early, when we had both recognition of the problem and the international sway to bring others along.
I have been an optimist my entire life: confronted by situations in which information regarding a given future likelihood was lacking or absent, I chose to “look on the bright side”, fearing that I would be more apt to miss serendipitous opportunities if I assumed none would present themselves. But data regarding our future climate are bleak; with respect to political actions, there is no cause for optimism. Why?
Because US policy makers have wilfully chosen to ignore this existential threat, choosing instead to focus national attention on waging war overseas. There has been a steady crescendo of warning from the scientific community since the 1950s. Keeling started Mauna Loa measurements in 1958. Work on GCMs began in the 1960s, with coupled ocean-atmosphere models, DSDP/ODP and ice core data arriving in the 1980s. Hansen testified before Congress the year I started my PhD.
All of this was 40-60 years ago. Since then we’ve done worse than nothing, we’ve actually accelerated the process, with our political parties choosing instead to: OMG! Look over there!! We’ve gotta expand NATO, and let’s invade the middle East! Forget about Kyoto, Paris, let’s subsidize SUVs! Our MIC’s still driving the boat, and we’re always busy ginning up plans to go toe-to-toe with Russia, Iran, China (LOL). With that history, there is zero cause for optimism regarding action on a national level. Not going to happen. Of that, I am certain:
What we can do is collectively change our own habits of consumption, educate our children, help our neighbors, strengthen local community resources, and prepare for the worst. Now.
I am optimistic that people come together in times of emergency. But I think it is foolish to expect results from people in Washington DC. They are paid to look elsewhere.
“What we can do is collectively change our own habits of consumption, educate our children, help our neighbors, strengthen local community resources, and prepare for the worst. Now.”
Thank you for expressing my own view but unfortunately several generations now have been conditioned to do nothing but mindlessly consume.
Techno-optimism is presented by people who stand to profit from it, along with diehard Trekkies.
There is also Econ-optimism to go with Techno-optimism.
See economist Tyler Cowen’s perspective on having more children to combat climate change:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-14/want-to-help-fight-climate-change-have-more-children
Yet Economics is cast as the “Dismal Science” by some, when most MSM economic statements about population are optimistic that adding more people to a country is positive and that economic growth, which appears well correlated to increased energy consumption, can continue without limit.
Economics is the “no-limits, optimistic profession” and far from dismal.
Like these?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4V9GxaBo
. . . ” without requiring behavioral changes …”
Like what? Taking the bus where no bus goes? Taking the train when there is no train to take?
You don’t need buses and trains in 15-minute cities.
I think those diehard Trekkies would call it “boldly going where no man has gone before” . . .
“Everybody, on their knees!
Everybody happy, please!”
(Kalahari Surfers, “National Party”)
is my take from the official optimism inculcated by the establishment. We have it in South Africa, where our republic of racists, thieves, murderers and timeservers is proclaimed to be the best of all possible worlds now that big business controls the government.
…on becoming a media-based culture…i.e….dwelling on the mundane…
with emotions subverting conjunctive probabilities…
in just one “four year election cycle”…the mantra of voting against their own self interest…
now manipulated /employed by populists…to captivate the forever disabused
Meaningful climate action is not going to happen, because:
– Despite warming being very fast geologically speaking, it is still slow enough to be not an acute problem on a human timescale. (Five years from any moment in time won’t be significantly worse, so there is never any urgency)
– People in decision making positions (i.e. the rich) are generally not affected personally.
– Focus is mostly on how to divide the climate money pie among the oligarchs. Therefore “solutions” are always along the lines of stuff like subsidizing electric cars (i.e. more money for the oligarch) and elephants in the room like cement production and wars aren’t discussed because that would cost them money.
It’s a lost cause and always has been. So just get ready for the geopolitical instability caused by famine and mass migration due to areas becoming uninhabitable.
1. Congratulations for the synthesis.
2. May I add that each entity (quanta, planet, living beings…) is primarily directness driven = centric? Efficiency driven = laziness centric!
Here and now is easier to integrate than there and later. It is entropy. LB committed suicide because of him not understood.
3. JSM wrote 100 before I was born “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
4. Could we get united by having Ives coordinating the process? If yes, count on me. Contact me through email.
Wonder why both NGO’s and officials keep pushing techno fixes, and leave out basic conservation (insulation, drive less, don’t use AI) and capture carbon in your own yard (backyard garden, no more pesticides and tillage)?
Short answer is because conservation is antithetical to capitalism.
You missed do not nor have or use a Car, or other vehicle. Walk or Use a bike or walk,.
That option needs to be reinforced, and needs to be reinstated as it previously was possible for most, and been an option in history.
Perhaps we are we too late, and mother nature will reset the the balance.
You mean we can’t have the long lines of cars waiting, with motors idling, outside the local school to drive junior and junioress home?? With child abductors and sex criminals hiding behind every bush? Looking back, I’m not sure how my generation survived walking a mile or more to and from school every day.
I’m not sure how my generation survived walking a mile or more to and from school every day
And it was uphill both ways too!
The unstated premise of this is that we live in a workd where ordinary people’s willingness to “take action” is relevant, and that there are actions they could take that would make a difference. In reality, the one form of action we can supposedly take, voting for “the right people” who would implement needed policies presupposes we know who those people are and that they exist. In the meantime, we are left with individualist non-solutions like consuming less meat and hoping it will somehow add up to a solution, if only enough people do likewise.
The best thing individual people can do is stop making so many new people. And apparently they are doing it. Birth rates in Western countries have been below replacement levels for some time now. Even China and India are now below replacement levels. The only part of the world with a birth rate above replacement levels is Africa, but that has also sharply declined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
The issue is the “right people” seem to think this is a bad thing. I’ve seen article after article in recent years from the Western PMC press wondering how we will survive as wealthy old people if there aren’t enough young people around to wipe our posteriors.
This does read like one of these strangely empty, contemporary articles that exists to point to a problem and say, “wow, hey, this is a problem and here’s a couple things I searched that have opinions on this problem, thanks for reading.”
There’s a 1986 book by theology professor Richard K. Fenn called, “The Spirit of Revolt: Anarchism and the Cult of Authority” that takes a harder look at this issue by studying, among other things, how individuals who live or work in communities under imminent danger — specifically using interviews with people who survived Bhopal disaster (1984) or a town situated under a failing dam (sorry, I can’t remember the town name and don’t have my copy of the book with me) — continue to live and work in those settings despite “knowing” the increasing risks.
If memory serves Fenn uses a matrix of “trust authority / distrust authority” and some version of “passive / active” to try and identify what actors in a community are likely to take action to protect themselves and others. Fenn was interested in how we help germinate increased numbers of actors (Lambert calls them ‘helpers’) in a secular society facing increasing corporate, climate, and military threats.
Fenn’s approach continues to have relevance to me in an era of deliberate misinformation by government and media authorities about issues like climate change, or Covid, or many other ‘worries’ we live with daily, and is a far better approach to the complications that Katarina Zimmer seems intent on reducing to “optimism” and “pessimism.”
The disaster was the Buffalo Creek flood, West Virginia, and the ordeals of people in these mountain hollow coal towns was chronicled by Kai Erickson (Erik Erikson’s son, BTW) in his earlier book, Everything In Its Path.
Well . . . they didn’t have the money to move and they didn’t have the power to torture and terrorise the dam owners into fixing the dam, so what were they supposed to do?
it’s been a while but my memory is that the author covers the economics of the situation while also writing about how the cracks in the dam were entirely visible, but the local government kept assuring them it was fine, and they believed that. I believe his point with this example was that rather than apply pressure to make changes in the years between the damn showing visible stress and the actually disaster, the residents accepted the assurances of the authorities. I think it’s a false premise to position the residents’ only option as “to stay or leave” when collective action had a potential to force repairs or possibly fund relocation.
Meanwhile. The biggest 3 battery companies all Chinese are moving rapidly to sodium ion batteries. They will be same cost as LFP which is the best least expensive current solution by end of year 2025 and 70% less 2 yrs after. And all with much simpler more abundant materials.
Solar panel production is rapidly increasing again out of China with costs dropping from about $.2 to $.1 per watt. Yearly production is 1.1 trillion watts of manufacturing this year and expected to be 1.3 trillion by 2026/7.
This is massive and is certainly going in the right direction.
And while the US is looking to move backwards the rest of the world is moving forwards.
Your comment reminds me of a quote I came across in one of yesterday’s linked articles:
“…it turns out that if you want someone to administer capitalism well, you could do a lot worse than a Communist Party.” From Numb in India, part 7: Land of gloop
As for your observation that that “while the US is looking to move backwards the rest of the world is moving forwards”, I would suggest that we are in a moment of imperial contraction. The natives of the periphery are restless, threatening the unequal relations between nations upon which our supply lines and aggregate over consumption depend. About where this might lead us in a long run that probably none of will live to see, I am tentatively optimistic.
Optimism is psychically necessary to maintain the veil of cognitive dissonance that so many people rely upon to get out of bed in the morning. Hopium and copium and good ol’ opium are indulged because our primate brains cannot handle the thought that indoor plumbing and microwaved food are a blip in this planet’s history.
As I have written before, Mother Nature is slowly making the gravity of the situation known, and before long it will be impossible to ignore. However, we will continue to ignore it anyway because procrastination and delusional thinking is all too human.
I used to work with a renowned scientist in the Ivy League. He was convinced that the recent LLM-induced AI hysteria will allow us to save ourselves from climate change. What an indictment of humanity that somebody who was otherwise intelligent became a hopium addict. You are not immune to propaganda.
Alas, the Golden Calf is alive and well again. Some would say it was never destroyed.
Well stated.
Only speaking for myself, willing to give up all military ships, cargo container ships from China, LNG ships to Europe. And no driving around Erie PA – Buffalo NY in the winter.
Well aware I have dogma on this, but a few things occur to me sitting in my blindered silo :
-worry has yet to be productive or have any effect on anything. Complete waste of time , cause of stress.
-waiting on ‘leaders’ is a fools errand. Leaders are the late-adopter .
-individual, conscious, persistent, thoughtful action is the only answer.
-short of suicide, doing nothing, literally, is the most elegant solution. I mean, doing little, with less.
Live simply, that others may simply live.
-a deeper thought about lifestyle, choices, impacts is a very bleak exercise. Gets to the nubbin’ right quick. It is an UGLY nubbin! You should have that checked!!!
-Delusional Cognitive Dissonance is our warm blanket, perfect cup of cocoa life preserver.
-Questioning western modern industrial capitalist /consumer culture, our apparent very essence-
is a non-starter: too depressing. Intractable problem, how does one self-extract? How do I fit in the ecosystem?
– Nihilism, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead lemming congo line is a (perverse) logical reaction.
-Making all the change we want to see in the world threatens a LOT of paychecks and power- will be resisted with whatever means and resources it takes. (viz Exxon/Koch propaganda…)
Add a dollop of Covid, a bit of global perpetual war, and nihilism – inexcusable as it is for a moral being with some agency… well. It is understandable.
And it is the right of the other to do their own thing, right? Freedumb!
And who am I to judge?
And doing little, with less… boy watch friends and family react negatively to the opting out!
Crazy world, crazy people doing crazy things. Hence, pessimism.
Happy Holidays!
Huh? Worry is a fantastic motivator. Do you pay your credit card out of optimism or because you are worried about the consequences of being late? How about your taxes? Fear of getting fat again is how I have stayed thin, while anecdata says most people who lose a lot of weight gain it back.
The rest is very sound and I think most will agree but IMHO you undermined your thoughtful points with your opener.
Two main problems here. First, a false equivalence is being out forward between a pessimist and a depressive. Second, and this is a conversation I had with PMC relatives during the Kamalomenon, the problem of hope: what is it? So far as I can tell, it refers to a pleasurable emotion, a feeling when thinking about the future. Ought this to occupy such a large space within our discourse about things as weighty as climate change? Or is it perhaps a personal issue, which could be dealt with in a number of ways, without making it everyone else’s problem?
The assumption the author seems to operating on is that activism can deliver the institutional changes she thinks will, what, avert the worst? And that looking the facts in the face depresses potential activists too much to get them out of bed. I think the assumption could use some checking, but then I’m a pessimist.
None of the actions in any of the comments above will have any effect on the downward trajectory. It’s too late. It’s been too late for 20 years. The amount of climate changing gasses in the atmosphere right now will cause warming to rise for 40 more years even if all humans died today.
When the Trans Mountain pipeline went through our land here in B.C. destroying my orchard in the process and forcing us to cede one third of our property to them forever, the “negotiations” were a joke. When I presented the dire state of the climate, the agent said, “So what do you propose? Going back to horse and buggy?” and I said, “No, that’s too much. Only going back to the stone age will have any effect.” He snorted in my face.
No one will voluntarily do this. I’ve been an environmentalist my whole life. There is a plaque with my picture on it on the wall of the Sustainability Department at the university where I used to teach for being the person who pushed for its establishment all those years ago. I’m 76 now and it’s over. It kills me to watch the descent, but there is nothing to be done now.
I don’t care if we commit suicide as a species, it is essential that we give another life form the chance to do it right. What I can’t stand is the fact that we will take most of the other species with us. That’s not right. They are innocent but will suffer the most.
Ann, it sounds like you’re ready for the “post doom” perspective – see Wikipedia. Big changes in the biosphere are baked in, as you point out. I’m about your age and know I won’t see much more of what happens. The mass extinction currently under way may sweep away the very great majority of animal and vegetable living forms. Or perhaps changes will be so restrained that a few pockets of our species will persist in the coolest regions, living sustainably by hunting and gathering. I used to regard as plausible an intermediate outcome: Oreskes and Conway’s 2014 The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, which projects a revival in a few hundred years, led by the 2nd People’s Republic of China. Now I think it is a very optimistic scenario.
Ann, I think you have pretty well described all I have been thinking. Is it ultra-pessimism when you start to realize there is no way out?
Back in the 70’s I realized that human population growth was the major problem for the world and yet all human lives protection was accepted as de facto sacrosanct. I honestly felt things like MADD were counter productive. We should accept random culling of the human herd as useful. Not comfortable but useful.
A decade later I became aware of climate change, or global warming as I think it was called then. The data I saw seemed solid, yet many, otherwise rational, people I talked to thought it was bullshit. Humans, as most animals, given a choice between comfort or less comfort… well they can’t be weaned from the petroleum teat.
Now we are where we are. For a couple decades I’ve though maybe as climate kills food production and therefore a large portion of humanity, that might stem the worst of world sterilization. Your comment, “the atmosphere right now will cause warming to rise for 40 more years even if all humans died today”, may be more accurate.
I sometimes find a gallows humor benefit in this gloom — when there are clown show realities like Trump as president or Harris as a viable candidate, I think, well the whole damn thing will collapse in not too long, so this is just a blip. Why not try to enjoy this minor insanity?
One of my favorite sayings: “The good thing about being a pessimist is that all the surprises are to the upside.”
As opposed to the optimists always being surprised by the downside. To be pessimistic about climate change is to be a realist.
“You can only manage what you measure” – says Al Gore
At COP29 in Baku, Climate TRACE co-founders Al Gore and Gavin McCormick presented the latest Climate TRACE emissions inventory. For the first time, this inventory provides monthly emissions data for every country and every major individual source of emissions in the world. An earlier video released of this presentation omitted the slides – this one has included them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w2d-SnjXsU
PESSIMIST: There is an asteroid headed our way in 2029 (True). Chances are, it’ll avoid us. But we should be prepared for, at best, it passing us relatively close (in universal measurements) of several thousand miles. At worst, well I don’t have to tell you that it wouldn’t be the first asteroid to hit earth.
OPTIMIST: I’m not worried about it. Scientists will figure something out. I mean, if it were REALLY a problem would we not be hearing about it now and preparing for it somehow? Besides, I’m too busy to worry about it now; I’ve got my Starbucks and social media to keep me busy.
DINOSAURS: *facepalm*
One can’t know if the author (Katarina Zimmer) reads these comments, like Rob Urie or Michael Huddon apparently does, to judge from their replies to comments about their material.
It would be good to get her comments on the NC comments, either in the comment area or in a separate posting.
Being inside the pay envelope of the recent Coffee Pot Fire here was really enlightening in watching how the Fire Industrial Complex operates.
As of Sept 8th, the cost was up to $43.6 million to quell the 14,000+ acre blaze, probably closer to $55-60 million when the fire was eventually put to bed by recent storms.
The Big Heat of climate change will come with oh so many more wildfires, and at some point we wont be able to afford to fight them-that is if Benedict Donald turns traitor on the Golden State even sooner in not doling out Federal funds to fight conflagrations.
Luckily for me, most of the stuff I worry about never pans out.
It’s different living within nature as opposed to a city, in terms of seeing the profound changes occurring in warp speed. I’m optimistic that there will still be trees in the Sierra should I live to a long life, but pessimistic that any will be any left, perhaps.
An angry 1/8th of an inch invader has now been documented as killing Giant Sequoia trees, and if they are on tour as they have been the past 15 years, beetlemania ought to ravage the largest living things, go see ’em while you can.
https://warnercnr.source.colostate.edu/new-research-provides-insight-into-bark-beetle-involved-in-giant-sequoia-tree-death/
fwd – musical antidote, environmentalist-themed rock song “Manifesto Colibri” (“Hummingbird Manifesto”) from Colombian band Aterciopelados. Non-Spanish speakers may enjoy the song for the beat and the humanitarianistic emotion you can feel from Andrea’s singing.
https://youtu.be/G9YQ0Z_wYzk
lyrics https://genius.com/Aterciopelados-manifesto-colibri-lyrics