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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>July</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 23, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"> </font> <br>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Fear bothers me greatly ] </i><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><b>Why aren’t we more scared of the
climate crisis? It’s complicated</b><br>
Despite extreme heat and weather in the US, most Americans aren’t
cowering in fear. There’s a psychological reason for it<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">Maggie Mertens<br>
Sat 22 Jul 2023<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/22/climate-crisis-fear-psychology">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/22/climate-crisis-fear-psychology</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[ Bill McKibben offers some basic
understanding ]</i></font><br>
<b>Big Heat and Big Oil</b><br>
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.<br>
By Bill McKibben<br>
July 16, 2023<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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. ♦<br>
Published in the print edition of the July 24, 2023, issue, with the
headline “Higher and Higher.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/big-heat-and-big-oil">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/big-heat-and-big-oil</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - looking back at when we
could have awakened to danger -- a distressing history]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>July 23 , 1979</b></i></font> <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf">http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M">http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M</a><br>
<br>
</font>
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