“‘It’s too late’ means ‘I just want to be as comfortable as possible in my life, because I’m already comfortable,'” Mr Aiken said. “...
“‘It’s too late’ means ‘I just want to be as comfortable as possible in my life, because I’m already comfortable,'” Mr Aiken said. “‘It’s too late’ means ‘I have nothing to do, and the responsibility slips away from me, and I can continue to exist as I want.'”
To ward off his own sense of doom, Mr. Aiken monitors his consumption of climate information. He offered a metric: focus 20% on problems and 80% on solutions. He has come to understand that he has a lifetime of work ahead of him and is focused on grassroots movements and local changes. “This job fills me,” he said, “and keeps me optimistic about a future in which we can still survive and thrive.”
Kate Marvel, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, said even she freezes when she encounters fear-based climate messages. But she’s focused on everything humans can still do. She highlighted the positive effects of federal legislation on air and water quality and the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 to phase out chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, which has helped fill the hole in the ozone layer, prevented millions of cases of skin cancer one year and even worse global warming.
“We still face very serious threats, it’s legitimate,” Dr. Marvel said. “But that doesn’t mean that no policy has ever been effective and that no progress has ever been made. And that certainly does not mean that progress is not possible.
Or, as Mary Annaïse Heglar, climate essayist and co-host of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter, put it, “Look at all life in the balance between 1.5 and 1.6 degrees.” She was referring to the additional drought, heat, flooding and destructive storms that scientists predict will occur with every fraction of a degree of global warming.
For Ms Heglar, as bad as climate doomism is, so is what she called “hopeium” – an unfounded optimism that someone else will come up with a magic bullet-like climate fix.
“Beneath doomericism and hope lies the question ‘Are we going to win? “, Ms. Heglar said. “It’s premature at this point. We have to ask ourselves if we’re going to try. We don’t know until we try if we’re going to win. will always be worth it.
Sound produced by Tally Abecassis.
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