Trajectories

What emotions should we have toward the climate crisis?

What do people think about the climate crisis? How do people feel about the climate crisis? Do parents feel guilty about not taking action, given that inaction means dire consequences for their kids? Do adults feel guilty about leaving behind an unpleasant legacy that today’s children will have to deal with? Do people who participated in downplaying the climate crisis feel remorse? I wonder whether all of the thoughts out there will move in the direction of recognizing that not taking action means lighting one’s own dreams on fire. And I wonder whether all of the emotions out there will cause people to take action.

Lee McIntyre writes in his 2018 book Post-Truth: there “are several excellent resources on the history of how science denial was born in the debate about smoking”; in 1953 “the heads of the major tobacco companies came together to figure out what to do in light of a devastating scientific paper that had recently been published linking cigarette tar to cancer in lab mice”; the executives decided to fund an effort to “convince the public that there was ‘no proof’ that cigarette smoking caused cancer and that previous work purporting to show such a link was being questioned by ‘numerous scientists’”; this effort was successful and provided “a blueprint that could be followed by others who wished to fight scientists to a standstill”; “climate change became a partisan issue in the early 2000s”; by that time there was a well-oiled and corporate-funded machine of science denial; and climate-change “denial may have started with the economic interests of oil companies, but it quickly became a political ideology with potentially catastrophic impact”.

I think that it’s disturbing and infuriating that powerful interests would seek to confuse people about scientific topics. The deception alone is disturbing and infuriating—the trickery becomes murderous when people’s health is at stake. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway write—in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt—about efforts to undermine public understanding of science. They write about the contributions that four physicists—Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow—made to these efforts to deceive the public. Oreskes and Conway write: “Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg, and Jastrow had all served in high levels of science administration, where they had come to know admirals and generals, congressmen and senators, even presidents”; Seitz and Singer had both “previously worked for the tobacco industry, helping to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking smoking to death”; regarding tobacco litigation, millions of pages of documents were released; these documents “show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt”; the tobacco-industry strategy targeted science and relied heavily on scientists; the scientists received guidance from industry lawyers and from public-relations experts; the released “documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the” tobacco-industry “strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns” like (A) asbestos, (B) secondhand smoke, (C) acid rain, and (D) the ozone hole; in “case after case, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues”; the tobacco-industry strategy was used in order to attack science and scientists; and the tobacco-industry strategy was used in order “to confuse us about major, important issues affecting our lives”.

I find it shameful that the media failed to respond appropriately to the tobacco-industry strategy—the media was complicit. Oreskes and Conway write: “Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power”; they used this power to attack science and to attack their fellow scientists; whatever “the reasons and justifications of our protagonists, there’s another crucial element to our story”; it’s “how the mass media became complicit, as a wide spectrum of the media—not just obviously right-wing newspapers like the Washington Times, but mainstream outlets, too—felt obligated to treat these issues as scientific controversies”; in “2004, one of us showed that scientists had a consensus about the reality of global warming and its human causes—and had since the mid-1990s”; “throughout this time period, the mass media presented global warming and its cause as a major debate”; “another study also published in 2004 analyzed media stories about global warming from 1988 to 2002”; the study “found that ‘balanced’ articles—ones that gave equal time to the majority view among climate scientists as well as to deniers of global warming—represented nearly 53 percent of media stories”; another “35 percent of articles presented the correct majority position among climate scientists, while still giving space to the deniers”; what was presented in the major media diverged from the actual state of the science; and this divergence “helped make it easy for our government to do nothing about global warming”.

I think that everyone should read Oreskes’s and Conway’s book—it describes truly heinous efforts to trick the public. Oreskes and Conway write: a 1974 Science article says that acid “‘rain or snow is falling on most of the northeastern United States’”; chemical “analysis showed that most of the acidity was due to dissolved sulfate”; the “government would have to take acid rain into account when it set rules and regulations for air pollution”; nearly a quarter of Americans “still think that there’s no solid evidence that smoking kills”; “as recently as 2007, 40 percent of Americans believed that scientific experts were still arguing about the reality of global warming”; in “writing this book, we have plowed through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents”; as “historians during the course of our careers we have plowed through millions more”; often “we find that, in the end, it is best to let the witnesses to events speak for themselves”; “we close with the comments of S. J. Green, director of research for British American Tobacco, who decided, finally, that what his industry had done was wrong, not just morally, but also intellectually”; Green said that a “‘demand for scientific proof is always a formula for inaction and delay, and usually the first reaction of the guilty’”; he said that the “‘proper basis for such decisions is, of course, quite simply that which is reasonable in the circumstances’”; and as William “Nierenberg put it in a candid moment, ‘You just know in your heart that you can’t throw 25 million tons a year of sulfates into the Northeast and not expect some…consequences’”.

I like the Nierenberg quote—there’s an absurdity and a profound recklessness to the idea that polluting with abandon will somehow not have consequences. I think that looking at the ecosystems might be the best way to get a sense of just how serious the climate crisis is—we’re carrying out an enormous and frightening assault on nature. A climate scientist named Kimberley R. Miner writes in a 17 August 2023 Nature piece: climate scientists have—for four decades—“advocated for recognition of the destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems”; “climate scientists across a range of fields are faced with comprehensive, esoteric challenges as ecosystems begin to cross tipping points”; knowing “how to look at these huge changes and still be able to relax at the end of the day can be an ongoing problem”; last September, her field team learned that it was “probably too late for half the blue oaks affected by California’s drought in the region in which we were working”; Miner sat outside a meeting the next morning and cried; and a “friend sat with me and explained that she had just recovered from an” extreme episode of climate grief.

A 22 June 2023 Nature article says: a “major concern for the world’s ecosystems is the possibility of collapse”; stress levels are accelerating, extreme-event frequencies are increasing, and intersystem connections are strengthening; “conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems”; the authors “conduct experiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes”; collapses “occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%”; and the authors discuss “the need for humanity to be vigilant for signs that ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previously thought”. The article refers to: “‘ghastly futures’”; “‘widespread ecosystem collapse’”; “‘domino effects on sustainability goals’”; speculation “on ‘end-of-world’ scenarios”; and “an ever-deepening vortex of degradation”.

I wonder which emotions we should have toward the climate crisis—should we cultivate in ourselves whichever emotions are most conducive to action that’s productive? A 2021 Journal of Climate Change and Mental Health article says: various “new terms to capture the emotional responses to the climate crisis include ‘eco-anxiety’ (anxiety experienced in response to the ecological crisis) and ‘solastalgia’ (distress caused by the painful ‘lived experience’ of environmental destruction)”; the authors examined how three negative eco-emotions—eco-depression, eco-anxiety, and eco-anger—each relate to mental health and to pro-climate behavior; “less activating emotions lead to disengagement from a perceived threat”; “more activating emotions predict behavioural attempts to lessen the threat” either by approaching the situation or by avoiding it; the “predicted effects of different negative eco-emotions on action to preserve planetary health are clear”; in “the context of eco-emotions and climate change, eco-depression should inhibit climate action, eco-anxiety should motivate active avoidance, and eco-anger should promote climate action”; the authors found that experiencing eco-anger predicted three things; first, better mental-health outcomes; second, greater engagement in pro-climate activism; third, greater engagement in personal behaviors that were pro-climate; the authors’ “findings implicate anger as a key adaptive emotional driver of engagement with the climate crisis”; the authors’ “results indicate that eco-anger may be a healthy and adaptive form of expressive coping, while eco-depression and eco-anxiety may instead be debilitating”; there’s a caveat regarding causality; it’s “possible that engaging in pro-climate behaviours evokes certain emotions about climate change, rather than the reverse direction”; people whose mental health is poorer might react to climate change more negatively; and the authors’ “research forges a path for future research on what makes people angry about the climate crisis, how to foster eco-anger without simultaneously inducing other negative eco-emotions, and how to harness eco-anger to drive pro-climate action”.

I find it interesting that anger might be the best emotional response to the grim trajectories that threaten us—I don’t think that most people view anger in a positive light, though I could be wrong. A 21 August 2023 Guardian piece says: anger “is by far the most powerful emotional predictor of whether somebody plans to take part in a climate protest, research suggests”; the “study, which asked 2,000 Norwegian adults how they felt about the climate crisis, found the link to activism was seven times stronger for anger than it was for hope”; the “researchers in Norway, a rich oil-exporting country, found that for every two steps a person took along the anger scale, they moved one step along the activism scale”; the “methods were sound and typical for the field but the effect sizes were small, said Cameron Brick, a social scientist at the University of Amsterdam”; the “researchers also only looked at what people said they would do, rather than what they did, he added”; and “messages that make people angry can also push others to shut down, particularly if they feel powerless”.

I think that a lot of people feel powerless—they feel like there’s no action that they can take that might be useful or productive. Despair results when you feel powerless. There are people who look at the climate crisis’s grim trajectories and react—because they feel powerless—with despair. A 2023 Journal of Climate Change and Health article says: a recent multinational study “examined climate anxiety in 10,000 young people in 10 countries with varying climate-related vulnerabilities”; “a concerning proportion of young people reported high levels of” three things; first, distressing emotions; second, associated impacts on functioning; third, negative perceptions of their future; the authors replicated the global study’s methods in order “to generate knowledge about climate emotions and climate anxiety among young people (aged 16–25) in Canada”; young Canadians “report feeling afraid (66%), sad (65%), anxious (63%), helpless (58%), and powerless (56%)”; given “the extent to which young Canadians are experiencing difficult emotions, it is not surprising that young people also reported” daily-functioning and mental-health impacts; young Canadians are experiencing (1) distress and (2) mental-health consequences; regarding (1) and (2), “it is essential to recognize that young Canadians are experiencing” these things “because of the failure of adults, decision-makers, and governments to adequately address the climate crisis”; the mental-health burden of the climate crisis is growing; regarding climate change and Canada’s response, young Canadians feel powerless and betrayed; and regarding climate change and Canada’s response, young Canadians don’t feel cared for, don’t feel valued, and don’t feel protected.

I want to distinguish two types of climate-crisis despair—some people think that we aren’t up to the task of saving ourselves, whereas others think that we’ve already locked in enough destruction to seal our fate. The 2023 Guardian piece says: climate “scientists have raised fears that a glut of doom-laden headlines and negative rhetoric—some of it based on incorrect claims—will push people into despair and stop them from acting”; a “survey of 10,000 young people in 2021 found most agreed with the statement ‘humanity is doomed’”; and “experts suggest the gloom reflects a lack of faith in society, rather than a misunderstanding of the physics”.

I hope that despair will be transformed into whatever emotion—or set of emotions—is most conducive to climate action. People surely understand that the climate crisis threatens their property, their family, and their future—people can become educated if they don’t. The climate crisis is an enormous thing—people might feel powerless. But regarding this crisis, there are countless ways that each of us can make a difference. We can each build up our own sense of being able to achieve climate-related goals. And we can then transmit—to others—that sense of capability. Our fate isn’t sealed—it remains in our hands.