[✔️] May 27, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Harvard medical, Deep ocean, Comedy show, Fake news etc, Endgame study, 2008 Rockefeller

[Richard Pauli]

/*May*//*27, 2023*/

/[  Harvard Medical examines  ] /
*Climate Anxiety*
The existential threat posed by climate change is deeply troubling to 
many young people
Youth and Mental Health
by Charles Schmidt
Elizabeth Pinsky used to think of climate change as less a near-term 
threat than one whose effects loomed in the distant future. Then 
headlines about a 2018 climate report from the United Nations caught her 
eye. In the report, scientists claimed that if greenhouse gas emissions 
continue unabated, rising sea levels caused by warming temperatures 
would likely inundate some global coastlines and intensify droughts and 
poverty in other parts of the world by 2040. This was far sooner than 
previously projected. “I immediately thought of my two young kids,” says 
Pinsky, MD ’06, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts 
General Hospital. “I wondered what the world would look like to them. I 
started realizing these changes might affect their lives profoundly — 
and that would likely affect mine as well.”

A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported 
that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between 
the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried 
about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily 
functioning. Since young people expect to live longer with 
climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the 
face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says...
- -
As she feared, damage that threatens the planet’s future — and the 
anxiety that this threat can engender — is affecting the lives of young 
people. And it has changed her life: Pinsky now works at the forefront 
of mental health efforts to help young people manage the emotional 
burdens of climate change.

*Anticipated peril*
Compared to threats to our physical health from climate change — 
heat-related injuries, for instance, or the spread of tropical diseases 
— its mental health consequences are less researched. But emerging 
studies reveal a mounting toll, especially among young people. Young 
survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, 
depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues. Nearly three quarters 
of the child and adolescent population in Pakistan experienced learning 
difficulties after widespread floods devastated the country in 2010.

Young people also suffer emotionally from climate change’s anticipated 
effects. The twenty-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who 
chastised world leaders for inaction on carbon emissions during a speech 
at the United Nations in 2019, struggled for years with depression over 
climate change as young child. For many young people, worry over threats 
of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive 
thinking, and other symptoms. And those feelings are often amplified by 
a pervasive sense that older people aren’t doing enough to fix the 
climate problem. “There’s a feeling of intergenerational injustice,” 
says Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist based in 
Washington, DC, who specializes in the mental health effects of climate 
change. “Many young people feel invalidated, betrayed, and abandoned.”

Managing these issues poses hard challenges. Research on effective 
interventions is virtually nonexistent, and parents and other people who 
want to help have little to go on. Professional organizations are only 
now beginning to provide needed resources. The Climate Psychiatry 
Alliance, whose members span academia and community care, has a 
searchable directory of “climate aware” mental health professionals on 
its website. These sorts of licensed therapists are described by the 
psychiatry alliance as “professionals who recognize that the climate 
threat is both a global threat to all life on Earth, and a deeply 
personal threat to the mental and physical well-being … of each 
individual, family, and community on the planet.” Another professional 
group, the Climate Psychology Alliance, provides a similar directory and 
lists support programs and resources for young people, parents, and 
teachers...
- -
Pinsky emphasizes that any attempt to help young people navigate 
climate-related emotions must start by acknowledging the validity of 
their fears. News reports and researchers often refer to these feelings 
collectively as climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, but Pinsky admits to 
having misgivings about the terms.

“Many people interpret anxiety as a pathological response that needs to 
be treated and solved,” she says. “But it’s also a constructive emotion 
that gives us time to react in the face of danger. And anxiety in the 
face of climate change is a healthy response to a real threat.”

Some people manage their climate-triggered emotions without spiraling 
into distress. But others become progressively hyperaroused and panicky, 
Pinsky says, or else fall into a sort of emotional paralysis. These 
reactions can be especially debilitating for people who already struggle 
with underlying mental health disorders. Moreover, anxieties over 
climate change can interlace with broader feelings of instability over 
the pace of technological and cultural change, argues Ann-Christine 
Duhaime, the Nicholas T. Zervas Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery 
at HMS, an associate director of the Mass General Center for Environment 
and Health, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Mass General, and author of 
Minding the Climate, recently published by Harvard University Press, 
which explores connections between environmental crises and 
neuroscience. “Technology is accelerating faster than culture can keep 
up, and humans in general are unmoored and struggling to adapt,” she 
says. “For some people, climate change is psychologically the last 
straw. You realize you can no longer count on the stability of your 
planet, your atmosphere — your very world.”...

*Ways of coping*
Counselors who work in this area travel in relatively uncharted 
territory, especially when it comes to managing anticipatory anxiety 
over future climate effects. Van Susteren describes that anxiety as a 
type of pre-traumatic stress disorder, with few existing precedents in 
the United States apart from fears of nuclear annihilation and the 
decades-ago experience of living through classroom drills on how to 
survive an atom bomb attack. Talk therapy for anxiety typically aims to 
help people identify and replace irrational thoughts, called cognitive 
distortions, with alternative thinking that isn’t so stressful. But 
since climate anxiety is based on rational fears, this particular 
approach risks alienating anyone who might feel their worries are being 
dismissed.

“You don’t want to give the impression that the client’s anxiety is 
exaggerated, or rooted in some experience from childhood,” says Andrew 
Bryant, a clinical social worker with a private practice in Seattle, 
Washington. “Otherwise, clients will think ‘this person doesn’t get me’ 
or ‘he’s in denial.’ They will leave and not come back.”

Bryant began specializing in climate anxiety in 2016, after nearby 
forest fires left much of Washington State blanketed in heavy smoke. 
Warming temperatures are fueling larger, more destructive fires in the 
Pacific Northwest, and, for Bryant, their effects on air quality were a 
wake-up call “that climate change was something that my clients and I 
are living with right now.” Younger people were increasingly arriving at 
Bryant’s office frightened, depressed, and confused about how to manage 
climate-triggered emotions. Some were even wondering if they should 
bring children into such a world.

Bryant says his first step during counseling is simply to have people 
identify and express their feelings about these issues. “We’re not 
saying that anxiety is good or bad,” he says. “We just want to bring 
those feelings out into the open. It’s more about validating that 
climate concerns are reasonable given what we’re reading in the news 
every day.”...
- -
Emerging evidence suggests that young people do best by cultivating a 
sense of agency and hope despite their climate concerns. The aim during 
therapy is for them “to engage with the world in a way that feels more 
meaningful and in alignment with who they are,” Bryant says. But getting 
to that point involves talking through feelings like despair, grief, or 
rage first. Without doing that, he says, many people get stuck in 
maladaptive coping strategies that can lead to burnout, frustration, or 
hopelessness. Bryant describes jumping into an urgent, problem-focused 
coping strategy as “going into action mode so you don’t have to feel any 
grief.”

Problem-focused coping has a societal benefit in that it leads to 
“pro-environmental behavior,” meaning that young people who engage in it 
typically spend a lot of time learning about climate change and focusing 
on what they can do personally to help solve the problem. But climate 
change is far beyond any one person’s control, and problem-focused 
coping can leave people frustrated by the limits of their own capacity 
and make them unable to rid themselves of resulting worry and negative 
emotions, according to Maria Ojala, an associate professor in psychology 
at Örebro University in Sweden.

Ojala studies how younger people think, feel, and communicate about 
global environmental problems and is an author of a 2019 paper in 
Environment and Behavior on coping strategies young people are using to 
deal with their climate change concerns. In it, she and her colleagues 
describe emotion-focused coping, whereby young people ignore or deny 
climate change as a means of avoiding feeling anxious about it. In an 
email, Ojala notes that people who gravitate toward emotional distancing 
typically come from families that communicate about social problems in 
“pessimistic doom-and-gloom ways.” But since one type of emotion-focused 
coping involves de-emphasizing the climate threat, she says, it also 
precludes actions young people might take against it, and therefore has 
no environmental upside.

Ojala and other experts favor a third coping strategy that balances 
negative feelings about climate change with faith in the power of social 
forces working to overcome it. Called meaning-focused coping, this 
approach takes strength from individual actions and climate beliefs, 
while “trusting that other societal actors are also doing their part,” 
Ojala says in her paper. And since meaning-focused coping allows 
negative and positive climate emotions to coexist, young people who 
adopt it have an easier time maintaining hope for the future.

Pinsky would agree. The overall goal, she says, is for young people to 
achieve more resilience in the face of climate change, so they can 
function in spite of their environmental concerns. When people find 
meaning in what they do, she says, they have a greater sense of their 
own agency and self-efficacy. “You’re more empowered to take action, and 
that can be a powerful way to deal with strong negative emotions,” 
Pinsky says.

But Duhaime cautions that anyone taking action against climate change 
should know they shouldn’t expect a quick payback. The brain’s reward 
system, which forms a core of human decision-making, evolved over eons 
of history to strengthen neural associations between actions and 
outcomes that promote short-term survival. And that system, she says, 
responds to the immediate consequences of what we do. One problem with 
climate change, Duhaime says, is that because it’s so vast and complex, 
people can’t assume that any single act will lead to a discernible 
effect on its trajectory. So, in place of near-term climate 
improvements, Duhaime says young people may benefit from seeking the 
rewards that come from being part of a group or a movement working to 
advance an agenda that furthers actions that protect the planet’s 
climate. “Social rewards are really powerful in the climate change 
battle, especially for young people,” Duhaime says. Recognizing the 
mismatch between how the brain processes reward and the novel challenges 
of the climate crisis may help people persist when it feels frustrating 
and ineffective compared to causes with more immediately visible 
effects. Even if you don’t see climate improvements or policy changes 
right away, she says, “that won’t diminish the importance of engaging in 
these efforts.”

*Strength from unity*
That theme resonates with Julia Malits, a fifth-year MD candidate at HMS 
and a graduate of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Malits 
says that like many of her peers, she grew up with a certain amount of 
climate anxiety, which she attributes to being overwhelmed by the scale 
of the problem and the immense effort required to address it. But Malits 
adds that she wasn’t overly burdened by her emotions. “I’m an optimist 
by nature and feel that society does have the capacity to make needed 
changes,” she says. “And what also helps me avoid climate anxiety on a 
daily basis is the community that I’ve been lucky enough to connect with 
here at Harvard. It helps to surround yourself with people who are 
similarly worried about these issues and are also engaging with you on 
solutions, in whatever capacity is meaningful to you.”

Malits says her interest in the health effects of climate change 
blossomed during conversations with professors and other HMS students. 
She became a student ambassador with the Harvard Chan Center for 
Climate, Health, and Global Environment (C-CHANGE), which has a mission 
to deliver solutions-based research that shapes climate actions — 
especially those that improve health for vulnerable populations.

In January, following a presentation delivered by Gaurab Basu, an HMS 
instructor and primary care physician with Cambridge Health Alliance, 
and jointly developed by Malits, Madeline Kline, a student in the 
Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program, and HMS students in an environment and 
medicine interest group, the HMS Educational Policy and Curriculum 
Committee voted to officially incorporate climate change and health into 
the MD curriculum as a priority societal theme. The curricular change 
builds on the pioneering work of students, faculty, and alumni, such as 
Eric Chivian, MD ’68, who founded and directed the HMS-based center that 
is now C-CHANGE, and Aaron Bernstein, an HMS assistant professor of 
pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and former interim director of 
C-CHANGE.

Thanks to their efforts, climate themes will now be integrated into 
existing courses across all four years of the MD program and cover 
topics such as how climate change affects human health, how health care 
systems contribute to the problem, and how physicians can help in the 
move toward solutions.

“Climate anxiety is an important catalyst for the work I do,” Malits 
says. “I think you need avenues to channel it and talk about it with 
loved ones and peers, and have communities through which you can process 
those feelings and come up with remedies.” Collaborative activism 
dampens the anxiety, Malits says, and gives young people a sense of 
renewed hope for the future. “That’s why it’s important to roll up your 
sleeves and think about how you’d like to tackle the problem,” she says.

But Malits says she worries most about how climate change is affecting 
marginalized communities, singling out those who live in urban heat 
islands, where inadequate green space intensifies extreme heat. While 
it’s true that extreme weather events are occurring with mounting 
frequency in wealthier nations, many countries in the developing world 
continue to bear the brunt of the climate problem.

*The problem at our doorstep*
Indeed, the countries suffering most from climate change now are also 
the least able to respond to its psychological effects. In Somalia — 
which is one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa — climate 
change is fueling the worst drought in decades and putting 8 million 
people, nearly half the population, at risk for famine. Catastrophic 
floods linked to climate change in Pakistan recently affected more than 
33 million people living in the area. In addition, according to 2019 
data from the World Bank, nearly 30 percent of Honduras’s population 
works for the agricultural sector, where rising temperatures and drought 
are contributing to a mass exodus, as documented that year by PBS NewsHour.

Researchers are finding that young people with the most extreme fears 
over climate change live predominantly in the developing world. The 
Philippines and India, for instance, are near the top of a list of 
recently surveyed countries where young people report climate-driven 
feelings that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”

Mental health systems in the developing world need more resources to 
deal with this growing crisis, cautions Caleb Dresser, an emergency 
medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a fellow 
at Harvard Chan School’s C-CHANGE. Disasters linked with climate change 
can create huge mental health needs, Dresser says, “and while many good 
programs and organizations step in to help, the need for services easily 
outpaces resources both during and after the disaster occurs.” Nearly a 
year after Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, 18 percent of 
children living in the area were still struggling with PTSD-like 
symptoms, and nearly 30 percent of those who lived through Hurricane 
Katrina in 2005 wound up with complicated grief, in which strong 
feelings of loss linger for a long time.

Dresser leads research focused on the health implications of climate 
change, especially in terms of its effects on emergency care and 
operations during extreme weather events. In 2017, he cared for people 
who had left Puerto Rico for Boston after Hurricane Maria decimated the 
island. Many were suffering emotional trauma as a result of both the 
storm and having been uprooted from their communities.

“We know from other displacement events in history that seeking life in 
a new location is extraordinarily stressful and comes with long-term 
risks of anxiety and depression related to a loss of place and a change 
in one’s sense of self,” Dresser says.

Emergency responders need to be ready for the forced migration of people 
affected by climate change, Dresser says, adding that many could benefit 
from access to care for mental health problems.

Even when people are not uprooted by disaster, a variety of 
climate-related mechanisms can affect their mental health or the safety 
of their mental health treatment. High heat and humidity worsen 
irritability and cognition, he points out, and they can also exacerbate 
side effects from some common psychiatric medications. Levels of lithium 
— a mood stabilizer used for treating bipolar disorder and major 
depression — can rise to potentially toxic concentrations in a person 
who is perspiring heavily; they can become dehydrated and  may develop 
impaired kidney funtion, potentially causing tremor, slurred speech, 
confusion and other dangerous effects. In addition, serotonin-reuptake 
inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, and benzodiazepines may affect 
the body’s physiological response to heat with varied effects on blood 
pressure, sweating, and cognition. Patients with chronic mental health 
issues are at increased risk during hot weather and more likely to need 
emergency care. In extreme cases, heatstroke can occur, with potentially 
fatal results.

Pinsky points out that even as the effects of climate change on 
pediatric mental health are increasingly recognized, research in the 
field is in its early stages. She was an author on a 2022 Academic 
Psychiatry paper investigating the perspectives of more than a dozen 
scientists who work in this area. They identified several pending needs, 
including additional interventions to support and foster the resilience 
of young people experiencing climate anxiety, more funding, and the 
removal of logistical barriers that block access to care for affected 
individuals. Resistance from colleagues in the field was also raised as 
an issue. Pinsky and others stress that efforts aimed at responding to 
the mental health challenges of climate change must engage with broader 
work aimed at removing the root cause of the problem: our reliance on 
fossil fuels.

Pinsky now works with several organizations to raise awareness of 
climate change, including the Mass General Center for the Environment 
and Health and the new Youth Working Group of the Climate Psychiatry 
Alliance, which had its launch meeting in April 2023. And like others on 
the front lines of the climate change battle, she has her hands full as 
the pace of warming only accelerates.

According to the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change, released on March 20, it is likely that without 
swift action, the world will exceed a global average temperature 
increase of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels by 2030. 
Beyond that threshold, the panel warned, heat waves, crop failures, the 
spread of infectious diseases, floods, and species extinctions could 
outstrip humanity’s capacity to adapt. Warming will cease only if humans 
stop adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.

“I believe the fundamental and best treatment for youth climate distress 
is a rapid and just transition from fossil fuels,” Pinsky says. “I 
genuinely consider all that work to be in the area of mitigating climate 
anxiety.”
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety

/
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///[   Could this be related to the beached whale news ??  ]/
*'Very Bad News Indeed': Study Sounds Alarm on Threat of Deep Ocean 
Current Collapse*
"It's something that is a concern because it touches on so many aspects 
of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine life," said one 
oceanographer.
BRETT WILKINS
May 25, 2023
Antarctic currents that enrich 40% of Earth's deep ocean with oxygen and 
nutrients that are vital for marine life have slowed dangerously in 
recent decades and could collapse by mid-century, a study published 
Thursday revealed.

The research—which was published in the journal Nature Climate 
Change—showed that a 30% slowdown in deep water currents around 
Antarctica since the early 1990s.

Currents known as Antarctic bottom waters—which are driven by cold, 
dense waters off the Antarctic continental shelf—power a worldwide 
system of currents. The most important of these, known as the Southern 
Ocean overturning circulation, comprises two massive cells—one 
subducting downward and the other upwelling—that connect the various 
water basins in a global circulation system...
- -
"If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them," Matt England of 
the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales 
in Australia, a co-author of the new paper, said in a statement.

"Our modeling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the 
current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40% 
in the next 30 years—and on a trajectory that looks headed towards 
collapse," England added...
- -
Steve Rintoul, co-author of the study and oceanographer at the 
Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research 
Organisation, toldThe Guardian that "changes in the overturning 
circulation are a big deal."

"It's something that is a concern because it touches on so many aspects 
of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine life," he added.

England and Rintoul were part of a team of researchers who in March 
published a study in Nature that found the vital deep ocean current is 
"on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse" over the coming 
decades...
- -
Scientists from Australia examined the deep ocean current below 
approximately 13,000 feet that originates in the cold, dense waters off 
the continental shelf of Antarctica and flows to ocean basins across the 
planet.

"The model projections of rapid change in the deep ocean circulation in 
response to melting of Antarctic ice might, if anything, have been 
conservative," Rintoul said Thursday. "We're seeing changes have already 
happened in the ocean that were not projected to happen until a few 
decades from now."

England toldThe Guardian in March that "in the past, these circulations 
have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but this is happening 
over just a few decades."

"It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down," he 
added. "We are talking about the possible long-term extinction of an 
iconic water mass."..
- -
The new research comes after the European Union's Copernicus Climate 
Change Service reported in February that its analysis of satellite 
imagery showed Antarctic sea ice coverage was 31% below average the 
previous month, significantly lower than the previous January low mark 
set in 2017.

In January, a 600-square-mile iceberg nearly the size of Greater London 
broke off Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf, although scientists said the 
event will affect—but was not caused by—climate change. January is 
summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/deep-ocean-current



/[ it is difficult to produce comedy shows for global warming - keep 
trying ]/
*CU Boulder Inside the Greenhouse & Nowhere Comedy Los Angeles, CA 
'Comedy to Save the Climate' show*
Climate Comedy
May 26, 2023
This show closed out our 2023 climate comedy season with a show May 7.

This is a partnership with LA-based Ben Gleib who runs the 'Nowhere 
Comedy Club' https://nowherecomedyclub.com/

"When COVID-19 hit, every comedian lost their ability to tour and live 
entertainment shut down. Nowhere Comedy Club is a way around all that - 
a full comedy club experience from the comfort of your home! (Assuming 
your home is comfortable). Watch your favorite performers in a more 
intimate setting, but with the live laughter and excitement of a night 
out. And since there's no travel costs, tickets are more affordable to 
fans! We hope you enjoy the world's first digital comedy club. Welcome 
to Nowhere!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ebn4d6qr4



/[ Training for the information battles to come ]/
*Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History 
(Prof. Andie Tucher)*
NCAS Video
Oct 13, 2022
Fake news has marked American journalism since "Publick Occurrences" hit 
the streets of Boston in 1690, but an even greater danger is posed by 
the more recent phenomenon of fake journalism: the exploitation of the 
outward forms of professionalized journalism in order to lend 
credibility to falsehood, propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy. As 
the media have grown ever more massive and ever more deeply entwined in 
the political system, so has fake journalism, to the point where it has 
become an essential driver of the political polarization of public life. 
What happens to democracy when fake journalism looks more and more like 
truth, and fake truth like journalism?

Professor Andie Tucher, the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the 
director of the Communications PhD Program at the Columbia Journalism 
School, writes widely on the evolution of conventions of truth-telling 
in journalism, photography, personal narrative, and other nonfiction 
forms. Her most recent book is "Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake 
Journalism in American History"  (2022). She previously worked in 
documentary production at ABC News and Public Affairs Television, and 
holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University.
Views expressed in this video are those of the speaker and do not 
necessarily reflect the views of the National Capital Area Skeptics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-7ZgLXX9U



/[ climate crimes  ]/
*A series by CCNow and the Guardian investigates Big Oil's complicity in 
the climate crisis and examines attempts to hold the fossil-fuel 
industry accountable.*
As the impacts of the climate crisis multiply across the US, from 
intensified drought and wildfires in the west to stronger hurricanes in 
the east, a question is echoing ever louder: who should be held responsible?

According to an unprecedented number of lawsuits filed by US cities and 
states that are currently making their way through the court system, the 
answer is fossil fuel companies.

“Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene…The crime in 
question is the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years of lying about climate 
change,” writes Covering Climate Now’s executive director Mark 
Hertsgaard in a Guardian article that kicked off the series.

The lawsuits marshal a sweeping array of well-established facts that 
detail how for decades, major petroleum corporations knew that burning 
fossil fuels wreaked havoc on the environment.

Industry elites heard dire warnings from their own scientists who 
predicted the urgency of the climate crisis nearly 60 years ago. But 
instead of taking swift action, the oil conglomerates staged a 
coordinated disinformation campaign to suppress political action and 
public awareness around the growing scientific consensus pointing to a 
climate emergency.

To help raise awareness around the climate crisis and the role of fossil 
fuel companies, the Guardian’s series, Climate Crimes, launched in 
collaboration with Covering Climate Now, examines these attempts to hold 
the industry accountable and investigate the tactics used by the 
companies to elide their own role in global heating. It also 
interrogates the central question that emerges from these lawsuits: Is 
the climate crisis in fact a crime scene?

Much of the content produced for the series is available for CCNow 
partner news outlets to publish. Below you’ll find the stories published 
in the series.

https://coveringclimatenow.org/
https://coveringclimatenow.org/projects/climate-crimes/



/[ Last year's study from renowned climate scientists deserves return 
review - this has plain language ]/
*Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios*
Luke Kemp https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7447-4335 ltk27 at cam.ac.uk, Chi Xu 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1841-9032, Joanna Depledge, +7, and Timothy 
M. Lenton https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-7498Authors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
Cambridge, MA; received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022
August 1, 2022
119 (34) e2108146119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

    *Abstract*
    Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case
    scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are
    poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in
    worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At
    present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are
    ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a
    global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme
    consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and
    inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current
    knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss
    why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons
    for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put
    forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main
    questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass
    extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in
    human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies'
    vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from
    conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How
    can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global
    dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe
    assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with
    the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*May 27, 2008*/
May 27, 2008: The New York Times reports:

"The Rockefeller family built one of the great American fortunes by 
supplying the nation with oil. Now history has come full circle: some 
family members say it is time to start moving beyond the oil age."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html



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