Overcast and cured with bit of a chilled breeze this early Thursday on California’s north coast — maybe rain, maybe not.
We’re forecast for it the next couple of days, but it’s all blowing in the wind.
Even in a whiff, it’s all crazy — CNN headline this morning, ‘Maine nurse in Ebola controversy bikes from home, then returns,’ and you wonder, what the shit?
Yesterday, in a post about time and our delusional dependence on clocks, I also noted a personal disorder, termed the ‘sadness factor,’ an infirmity found amongst news/information/data addicts nowadays, or ‘too much shitty-ass-news-for-any brain-to-handle syndrome.’
(Illustration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity),‘ found here).
Anyone who pays a just about amount of time keeping-up with current events understands the shit-pie reality. And great portion of my ‘sadness factor,’ is grounded in ‘climate change,’ or the earlier, ‘global warming,’ or the much-earlier, ‘greenhouse effect‘ — and its impact on all aspects of life.
And being the observant fellow that I am, climate change didn’t ring my chimes until 2007 — when it became real, first in scientific papers and random weather events, and then more papers/studies, and “extreme weather” became a norm. Here in California we’re in the throes of a major drought, though supposedly not directly caused by climate change, but way-most-certainly exacerbated by it. And the whole picture is only getting worse.
Couple climate change with the clusterfuck life of humanity’s present configuration, and you’ve got some serious ‘sadness factor.’
As I’ve noted on this blog before, sometimes there’s an all-too-realistic, science-fiction sense of like watching the end of an age on my laptop.
Of course, climate change is also by way-far a way-serious, way-real-big event. Yet it seems no one in real power, though, is paying attention — the train is rocketing along the rails without any engineer at the throttle, but with a shitload of assholes pouring fuel to the runaway engine.
And also with climate change and those who have studied it, there’s got to be a personal ‘sadness factor,’ too.
Related, a piece I didn’t spot until this morning at Grist from Tuesday by Madeleine Thomas on near-about the same thing, except it’s “professionally depressed” — applied to climate scientists and their ilk.
And most-likely, the malady is not confined just with the brainics, but probably anybody else with half-a-brain associated with research on climate change, and could easily be effected by what they’ve helped uncover, expose and report in a shitload of studies all over the planet for a number of years.
Cops probably get “professionally depressed,” and ER people.
But climate scientists have all of mankind to figure into the depressed mix.
Thomas explains through an example of Camille Parmesan, a professor at Plymouth University and the University of Texas at Austin, who got so bummed by the whole climate-change bullshit, she quit the business.
Parmesan has a pretty serious stake in the field.
In 2007, she shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for her work as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In 2009, The Atlantic named her one of 27 “Brave Thinkers” for her work on the impacts of climate change on species around the globe.
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg were also on the list.
Despite the accolades, she was fed up.
“I felt like here was this huge signal I was finding and no one was paying attention to it,” Parmesan says.
“I was really thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
She ultimately packed up her life here in the States and moved to her husband’s native United Kingdom.
“In the U.S., [climate change] isn’t well-supported by the funding system, and when I give public talks in the U.S., I have to devote the first half of the talk to [the topic] that climate change is really happening,” says Parmesan, now a professor at Plymouth University in England.
…
Climate scientists not only wade knee-deep through doomsday research day in and day out, but given the importance of their work, many also find themselves thrust into a maelstrom of political, ideological, and social debate with increasing frequency.
“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan is quoted saying in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.”
“It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again, and decided to visit residential mental health facilities for teenagers instead”
Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens.
“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says.
And for some, it’s a preoccupation that extends well outside of the office.
“Everyday irritations as parents and spouses have their place, they’re legitimate,” she says.
“But when you’re talking about thousands of years of impacts and species, giving a shit about whether you’re going to get the right soccer equipment or whether you forgot something at school is pretty tough.”
And this from Jeffrey Kiehl, senior scientist for climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder: “I’m not talking about religion here, I’m talking about facts. It’s equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, ‘I don’t believe you.’ How would a doctor feel in that moment, not think, but feel in that moment?”
Yeah — an offing from Dr. Kathryn Railly: “Cassandra, in Greek legend you will recall, was condemned to know the future but to be disbelieved when she foretold it. Hence, the agony of foreknowledge combined with impotence to do anything about it.”
And onto today’s news…