Climate Doomism Is the New Climate Denial
It’s a slippery slope to losing hope
In 2018, I thought humanity was doomed.
Doomed as in we would eventually succumb to being wiped out by the forces of climate change and there was nothing we could do to stop the trajectory we were on.
In other words, I had become a climate doomer.
Fast forward to this year, and I have just graduated with my MS in Environmental Sciences and Policy and am devoting the rest of my life to taking on the climate crisis.
So how in the world did I go from believing that we were all doomed to now believing that it’s not too late to make a difference?
My journey into the depths of despair
For most of my life, I didn’t worry much or know much about climate change. I suspect this is the case for most Millennials, and perhaps most people in general.
The schools I went to from elementary through high school barely covered the topic. During my undergraduate and graduate studies at Cal Poly, my focus was on my biomedical engineering curriculum. Plus, the general education courses that I took didn’t cover climate change. The mainstream media rarely covered climate change in much depth, and when it did, it mainly focused on the impacts of natural disasters with a brief mention about the connection to climate change. My family, friends, and colleagues rarely spoke of it.
But I’ve always been a curious learner and a natural skeptic. So when I graduated from Cal Poly and started working as an engineer, I had a lot more free time and I used some of that time to start learning more about the world.
I’ve always been a big fan of documentaries. One day in 2017, I came across the documentary Chasing Ice. I remember watching James Balog’s time-lapse photography of melting glaciers and thinking why isn’t this front-page news? Why aren’t more people talking about this?
That lit a fire in me to start absorbing as much climate change-related content I could get my hands on. For anyone that’s done a similar deep dive into climate change, much of the content I came across was negative and focused on the daunting impacts of climate change (e.g., rising sea levels, melting glaciers, worsening wildfires, lengthening droughts, dwindling water supplies, etc.).
I increasingly found myself engaging with even more negative climate change content that became a sort of positive feedback loop where reading one scary-sounding article would lead me to an even scarier one as I attempted to learn more and more about what was happening to our world.
Before I knew it, I was reading articles and listening to people like Guy McPherson who were saying that climate change had already become so bad that there was little we could do to stop it now. And I soon started parroting that same defeatist narrative to my close friends and family.
In 2018, I even had the idea to drop everything and just travel the world to see what was left of nature and human civilization before it would all be gone. That year happened to be a particularly bad one for me. I was increasingly unhappy with the work I was doing, unhappy in my relationship, unhappy with my living situation, and unhappy with where I was at in my life. To top it off, I lost my nana— the greatest role model in my life — that year. This all compounded with my revelations about climate change that things were only going to get worse from here and we had already bided our time for too long to make any difference.
Some have called what I felt “climate despair”, “human futilitarianism”, or “climate nihilism”, but I prefer the term “climate doomism”.
Climate doomism is a belief that humanity’s fate is already sealed and we are powerless to stave off catastrophic warming that will ultimately lead to our extinction along with most other species.
Climbing out of the depths of despair
As I wrote about in a previous story, one thing I learned from my nana was how to achieve long-term happiness through acts of selflessness and helping others. This was counterintuitive at first because Western society teaches us to be individualistic and focus on our own success as a way to achieve happiness. I had largely followed that norm for most of my life until I realized that it wasn’t actually making me happy at all. Quite the opposite in fact.
I decided to challenge this norm by trying something that I now call “radical caring” while also working to address my own personal issues.
At the beginning of 2019, I started putting these ideas into action. I got out of my toxic relationship, moved into a new apartment, started engaging more with my community, volunteered with groups like the Sunrise Movement and 350.org, and began thinking about how I could affect more positive change with my career.
I found that as I worked on improving the aspects of my life that I was unhappy with and put radical caring into action, not only did my mood improve, but I was also able to think more clearly and critically.
I began to challenge my climate doomism by evaluating more critically the sources I was reading and actively sought out information from reputable sources that counterbalanced my pessimistic viewpoint.
Starting with some of the biggest climate doomers like Guy McPherson, I realized much of what they were saying was not backed up by actual peer-reviewed science and was rather total speculation. In a 2016 interview, Guy said that he can’t “imagine there will be a human on the planet in ten years” and that we’re “headed for a temperature within that span that is at or near the highest temperature experienced on earth in the last two billion years.”
It’s now 2021, five years into Guy’s prediction, and despite a global pandemic and steadily rising temperatures, humans are nowhere close to going extinct. On the contrary, the global population keeps rising and will do so for quite some time. It’s also interesting that he claims we’ll experience temperatures not seen since two billion years ago, yet none of our proxy records for measuring earth’s past climate (e.g., ice cores, oxygen isotopes) can tell us what the climate was like beyond a few hundred million years. Furthermore, none of what he claims in the interview is backed up by the scientific literature. As climate scientists and other experts have pointed out, his grasp of climate science is shaky at best. The same poor grasp of climate science can be found among other climate doomers like Professor Jem Bendell, author of the “Deep Adaptation” paper.
Climate science has also evolved tremendously over the past two decades and our understanding of the climate system continues to improve. Many of the doomsday, worst-case scenarios presented in mainstream media and books like The Uninhabitable Earth are no longer seen as likely to occur based on current emissions trends and government policies. Although avoiding the worst-case scenarios may not be the greatest achievement, it still represents a step in the right direction.
Now having studied climate science in-depth through my MS program at Johns Hopkins, I feel silly and ashamed for ever taking such people seriously and reading fearmongering, unscientifically-based sources less critically. But I now understand how people can be led down a rabbit hole in the search for the truth whether that be with topics like climate change or conspiracy theories like QAnon. Unfortunately, in our search for the truth, it is easy to be led astray.
The dangers of doomism
It’s completely normal to be fearful, angry, depressed, and/or anxious about climate change. Where it becomes dangerous is when those emotions pull you further and further into a sea of despair from which you lose all hope for a better future — like what happened to me.
“Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.” — Michael E. Mann, climatologist
It’s not just dangerous for us in terms of our own mental health, but it’s also dangerous for us as a society if enough people get trapped in this sea of despair.
This is a critical moment in time for humanity. Not in the sense that we’ll all die off in a few years, but rather that this is a moment in which we need to act boldly and challenge the status quo.
Climate deniers think humans aren’t contributing to climate change or that climate change isn’t happening at all while climate doomers think humans have contributed so much to climate change already that it’s now too late to do anything about it. Although both are wrong in their viewpoints, they both help perpetuate the status quo of continued fossil fuel emissions by making us feel powerless or indifferent to change this status quo.
“In many ways, McPherson is a photo-negative of the self-proclaimed ‘climate skeptics’ who reject the conclusions of climate science. He may be advocating the opposite conclusion, but he argues his case in the same way.” — Scott K. Johnson, hydrogeologist
The great irony is that if enough people end up believing either camp (and increasingly young people seem to be joining the climate doomer camp), then the doomsday prophecy might become a self-fulfilling one.
“A quarter of children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.” — Australian Childhood Foundation
Although it may be true that climate denial is the greater threat since it still has such a stranglehold over the Republican Party while climate doomers have little to no influence in either party, I fear that climate doomism may become a rising threat to climate action. In fact, climatologist Michael E. Mann already believes doomism could be the larger threat.
Polling data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) shows that climate denial in the U.S. is falling steadily with a growing percentage of Americans believing climate change is real and is being caused by humans. Last year’s polling data from YPCCC also shows that 26 percent of Americans are alarmed about climate change compared to only 7 percent who are dismissive of it.
If these types of trends continue, then I expect some percentage of those who fall into the “alarmed” category to be susceptible to the same climate doomism misinformation that I fell for and I know many others have as well. In the coming years, the climate doomers could well outnumber the climate deniers and become a more influential force in society. Therefore, they should not be underestimated.
Finding balance in a sea of despair
The negative news headlines won’t stop rolling in any time soon. In fact, just a few weeks ago, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) stated that the 1.5°C global temperature threshold above pre-industrial levels could be temporarily breached in the next five years while carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere hit their highest level on record in the month of May.
However, what we can do is change how we react to these headlines and how much we engage with them.
When reading these types of headlines, our initial reaction shouldn’t be “crap, we’re screwed and there’s nothing we can do” but rather “crap, we really need to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
We can still treat the climate crisis as a crisis without resorting to apathy and despair. Furthermore, it’s important for us to be clear-minded so we can make the best possible decisions for how we can build a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient world.
To illustrate this further, it wasn’t until I worked out my own personal issues and challenged my pessimistic attitude that I was able to come up with the idea of creating the Climate Conscious publication and figure out that what I really wanted to do careerwise was work on developing and implementing climate policies at the local level. Taking these actions also lessened my pessimism over time as did networking with like-minded individuals through the publication, my Master’s studies, and my volunteer work.
I also made sure to not overly focus on the negative news and tried to balance my news consumption. For every negative article, there is an equally positive one worth reading and celebrating. I believe it is the small but important victories against the status quo that will move us in the right direction as a society.
If you find yourself suffering from climate despair, I highly recommend finding ways to get involved and take action whether that be volunteering with environmental groups, attending climate strikes, talking and educating others about climate change, making your job a climate job, or applying your skills in whatever ways you can so you can feel like a part of a larger movement. For me, this was key in eventually ridding myself of the doomer mindset and focusing on how I could help. With enough of us taking action and advocating for solutions, we will build enough climate momentum to become an unstoppable force for good.
Ultimately, I was able to find balance in a sea of despair. I hope you do too.
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