[✔️] July 23, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Why not fear?, Bill McKibben names the ogres, in 1979 "we knew the consequences of carbon combustion would be severe"

Sun Jul 23 11:01:44 EDT 2023

/*July*//*23, 2023*/

/[ Fear bothers me greatly ] /
*Why aren’t we more scared of the climate crisis? It’s complicated*
Despite extreme heat and weather in the US, most Americans aren’t 
cowering in fear. There’s a psychological reason for it
Maggie Mertens
Sat 22 Jul 2023

This summer in the United States, millions of people have experienced 
the intense effects of the climate crisis. The “heat dome” that has 
gripped the south-west for the past three weeks is expanding into the 
south-eastern states. Catastrophic flooding in the north-east has 
claimed lives and wiped out farmers’ crops. And the worst wildfire 
season in Canadian history has not only caused tens of thousands of 
Indigenous people to be displaced, but the accompanying smoke has also 
billowed over into the north-eastern and midwest US, setting records for 
poor air quality. In many cases, these events have caused irreparable 
damage and trauma to those directly affected, and can certainly feel 
like they’re encroaching on those people on the periphery. And yet 
despite the fact that we’re living through a climate disaster, most 
Americans aren’t cowering in fear every day about the future of our 
planet. There’s a psychological reason for that.

For one, the climate crisis is a much lower priority for Americans than 
other national issues, such as the economy and healthcare costs. That 
isn’t to say that we aren’t concerned: two-thirds of Americans say they 
are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, while 30% are 
“very worried”, per a Yale University survey. But because of the nature 
of the way that many humans experience fear, connecting this emotion to 
something as vast and complex as the climate crisis is difficult. 
According to Brian Lickel, a social psychologist who researches human 
responses to threats, we aren’t designed to remain in a high state of 
fear for long. “A very fundamental feature of the normal kind of 
expected emotional processing is hedonic adaptation,” he said. “Our 
emotion system is designed to be labile, to go up or have certain 
responses, but then to not stick there.”

The emotional response to the climate crisis – even if we feel fearful 
during an episode of wildfire smoke or flooding – is similar to what 
many people who live in war zones may experience, Lickel said. While at 
first, the threat of bombs and attacks are imminent and extremely 
frightening, eventually those who remain in these areas adapt somewhat 
to a life in which the threat becomes just another thing to deal with 
daily. “If they’re not escalating or the nature of the threat’s not 
changing,” Lickel said, “it is to be expected that the felt emotion is 
going to go down.”

Though the climate crisis is altering our planet rapidly on a geologic 
time scale, on a human one, changes are happening relatively slowly. 
That means that even if we see record-setting temperatures or experience 
our first indoors-due-to-smoke-days, those occurrences will become a new 
normal within the timespan of our lives. “I’m skeptical that there is 
going to be an event that’s going to catalyze us more than any of the 
things that have already happened,” Lickel said.

Instead, humans tend to adapt to our stressors, which happens in one of 
two ways, according to Susan Clayton, a psychologist who studies the 
relationship between humans and nature. When faced with a fear, for 
instance, Clayton told me that there are two things we can address: the 
situation or our reaction to the situation. Since the climate crisis is 
not something we can deal with in the moment, and most people don’t even 
understand it fully, we often choose to ignore it as a way to protect 
our emotional selves. “We’re really, really good at avoiding things that 
bother us in many cases,” she said. “It’s denial.”

However, as more of the weather events we are seeing this summer affect 
a larger number of people, that denial might be harder to maintain. “You 
do find that the more people have direct experience of climate change 
the more they are able to perceive it as a risk,” Clayton said. “It’s 
kind of hard to engage in denial after your own house is burned down or 
gets flooded.” In her 2019 research surveying a sample of some 200 
Americans, Clayton found that up to 20% said that their anxiety about 
the climate crisis is so bad that it impairs their ability to function 
normally, meaning they lose sleep or the ability to work or socialize 
normally. One part of the discussion that tends to come up, though, 
especially among young people, is the concern that others aren’t 
worrying enough. Two-thirds of Americans say they rarely or never 
discuss the climate crisis with family and friends, according to the 
Yale survey. Clayton says this is likely also due to how humans process 
and internalize fear privately: “You think the scarier it is, the more 
we should talk about it. In fact, it’s often the reverse. It’s too scary 
to talk about.” However, there may be an ironic upside to more people 
experiencing the effects of the climate crisis directly, she said, in 
that others who were already fearful won’t feel so isolated.

The question of whether humans are scared enough of the climate crisis 
might be the wrong one to ask altogether, though, according to Lickel. 
That’s because fear isn’t always the best motivating factor for action. 
The changes we need to make as a species to address the climate crisis 
are huge and logistical, so they probably have nothing to do with any 
one person’s individual fear response. “Fear appeals can be effective 
for things like cigarette smoking, if people know what they can do to 
address the threat,” Lickel said. But the huge, slow-moving, complex 
issue of the climate crisis doesn’t have a lot of answers on the 
individual level. Most of us feel – and really are – pretty helpless.

Instead of spiraling, Lickel said it’s important to take care of our own 
mental health as we go through these scary times. One way to do that if 
you’re worried about the climate crisis might be to figure out life 
changes you can make that are good for you and for the planet, such as 
installing a heat pump if you live in a smoky area or a place with 
extremely hot summers, or switching your car commute to a bike commute 
where possible.

Clayton and Lickel both agree that we, of course, shouldn’t ignore the 
realities of the climate crisis. But not absorbing every bad piece of 
news about it, and taking steps to ease our own fears, including sharing 
those fears with others, are also important. After all, Clayton noted, 
nothing will be addressed if everyone just becomes “stressed out and 
anxious all the time”. Our ability to eventually effect change, big or 
small, is directly tied to how we manage the stressors that come along 
with this issue.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/22/climate-crisis-fear-psychology

/[ Bill McKibben offers some basic understanding ]/
*Big Heat and Big Oil*
A rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating that has 
caused extreme damage in recent weeks; and that rapid end is possible.
By Bill McKibben
July 16, 2023

In the list of ill-timed corporate announcements, historians may someday 
give pride of place to one made by Wael Sawan, the new C.E.O. of Shell, 
the largest energy company in Europe. In 2021, Shell said that it would 
reduce oil and gas production by one to two per cent a year up to 2030—a 
modest gesture in the direction of an energy transition. But Sawan, who 
assumed command of the company in January, signalled a different 
direction. The rise in oil and natural-gas prices, following the 
invasion of Ukraine, had doubled Shell’s annual profits, to a record 
forty billion dollars. That windfall had an effect. While Shell remains 
committed to fighting climate change, Sawan told the BBC, cutting 
fossil-fuel production would actually be “dangerous and irresponsible,” 
because doing so could cause the “cost of living” to start to “shoot 
up.” (The company has also said that it already met the target it set in 
2021 through asset sales, which would include the sale of various 
drilling sites to ConocoPhillips—a step that seems unlikely to fool the 
atmosphere.)

The BBC aired the interview on July 6th—the day that many scientists 
believe was the hottest so far in human history. Since 1979, a global 
network of satellites, ocean buoys, and land stations has been recording 
average daily temperatures, measured two metres above the ground, around 
the world. We’re at the very start of what seems likely to be a major El 
Niño warming event; the previous global high temperature came at the 
height of the El Niño in 2016, when the average hit 16.92 degrees 
Celsius, or 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit. Estimates vary somewhat, but on 
July 3rd the average temperature reached 17.01 C, and three days later 
it hit 17.23 C, or 63.01 F. Scientists who calculate historic 
temperatures by examining proxy records, such as lake sediments or ice 
cores, believe that this may well be the hottest it’s been on Earth 
since at least the peak of an era known as the Eemian, a hundred and 
twenty-five thousand years ago, when rising temperatures pushed 
mastodons north from present-day Texas to the Yukon. This would mean 
that nothing even remotely resembling a human civilization has ever 
known a world this hot.

To use Sawan’s first adjective, that heat is clearly dangerous. The 
fires and floods that have occurred in just these past weeks, all of 
them exacerbated by the heat, are too numerous to even begin to list 
here. If you’re not in a place currently experiencing or recovering from 
some weather emergency, consider yourself lucky, and use the respite to 
make preparations for the inevitable. (There was something symbolic 
about last week’s historic flooding in the Hudson Valley overwhelming 
West Point, the spiritual heart of what many might call the most 
powerful human force ever assembled.) The damage goes well beyond what 
you can capture in a cell-phone video: estimates indicate that at least 
forty per cent of the world’s oceans are currently undergoing what 
biologists have dubbed “marine heat waves,” doing systemic damage that 
we can only guess at; the temperature of the ocean, like that of the 
air, has never been higher in human history.

To use Sawan’s other adjective, standing by as this warming happened is 
the most irresponsible thing that humans have ever done. In June, 1988, 
the NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress to expect more or less 
what we saw last week. Fossil-fuel companies were already aware of the 
risks, but they decided to deny the science of climate change through 
three decades, when we could have been doing preventive work. There’s 
always been a reason for oil companies to stand in the way of action. At 
the moment, Sawan cites the risk of temporary inflation, and also the 
idea that, if we don’t expand oil and gas production, children in the 
Global South—he mentioned Bangladesh and Pakistan in particular—will 
have to study by “the light of candles.”

But solar lights that can shine all night charged with just four hours 
of sunlight can be had for a dollar, and Bangladesh is a world leader in 
small-scale solar. In recent years, homes in that country that do not 
get their power from the national grid have relied on rooftop solar 
panels to cope with power cuts. As for Pakistan, last fall it had the 
worst flooding in at least a decade—the kind of sustained deluge that 
happens only on a heating planet where the air holds increased amounts 
of water vapor. It left a third of the country underwater, and, more 
than six months later, UNICEF estimated that twenty million Pakistanis 
in the flood zones, including nine million children, were still in need 
of humanitarian aid.

The Earth’s temperature is going to go higher, no matter what we do: 
this month’s all-time records will almost certainly be broken in the 
coming year, as the new El Niño gathers strength. Many scientists 
predict that we will at least temporarily pass the 1.5-degree-Celsius 
increase that nations vowed, in the Paris Climate Agreement, to try to 
avoid. But how much higher is still an open question: a rapid end to 
burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating; and that rapid end is 
possible, because solar and wind power and batteries to store it are now 
cheap and available. Texas got through an epic heat wave in the past few 
weeks largely because it has increased its solar and wind capacity, 
which kept air-conditioners running even as conventional power plants 
faltered.

But, in Texas, the Republican-led legislature spent much of the past 
year at work on laws that would discourage the use of renewables and 
prop up oil and gas. In Congress and on the campaign trail, the G.O.P. 
is expending far more energy in defending gas stoves than in doing 
anything about this growing crisis. So far, there’s no real political 
penalty for that kind of reckless behavior. Indeed, Sawan told the BBC 
that, while there are not currently any plans, Shell wouldn’t rule out 
moving its headquarters from the United Kingdom to the United States, 
where oil companies get higher market prices for their shares. (Britain 
has also implemented a windfall-profits tax on energy companies. ) This 
suggested to him that the U.S. is more supportive of oil and gas 
companies, and, as he has told investors, he wants to “reward our 
shareholders today and far into the future.”

That is pretty much the definition of “business as usual,” and it’s 
precisely what has generated this completely unprecedented heat. If the 
disasters we’re seeing this month aren’t enough to shake us out of that 
torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and 
twenty-five thousand years seem remote. ♦
Published in the print edition of the July 24, 2023, issue, with the 
headline “Higher and Higher.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/big-heat-and-big-oil

/[The news archive - looking back at when we could have awakened to 
danger -- a distressing history]/
/*July 23 , 1979*/

July 23, 1979: The National Academy of Sciences begins work on a 
groundbreaking report regarding the risks of carbon pollution. The 
report makes it clear that the consequences of a warming world will be 
severe.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf

http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M

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