A reporter and a reader discuss the news.
Reporter: “Long night. I had a deadline on a story, and I just finished on time. Kept the usual cursing by my editor at bay.”
Reader: “I’ve never had to meet a newspaper’s deadline, but I’ve had to finish school papers on time, so I have some sense of your urgency and pressure. What was the story?”
Reporter: “About how climate is ruining our mental health.”
Reader: “What!!!???”
Reporter: “Yeah. Really. People are increasingly more upset emotionally and mentally because of global warming. You know, the hurricanes, fires, heatwaves, tornadoes, tropical disease migration, droughts, floods, sea level changes, and even polar vortexes. Well, all that weighs heavily on people. It’s giving them a ‘climate identity.’ * People are becoming increasingly more distraught because of climate change. And I’m not the only one reporting on this. There’s an article by Daniela Sirtori-Cortina out just yesterday about mental health being in jeopardy because of global warming.”
Reader: “Come on, are you serious?…Oh! I can see you are. Hmnnn…Have the DSM people…Have the people who write the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders labeled this yet? I’ve skimmed through the fifth rewrite, and I don’t remember seeing ‘Climate Identity Disorder,’ but maybe I wasn’t looking for it at the time. Is it just a subset of anxiety disorders?”
Reporter: “Trust me; there are people out there who are pretty upset about global warming. Look at all the articles we have had to write over the past twenty-five years. Look at all the reports coming out of the UN. Look at poor little Greta Thunberg who said we robbed her of her childhood. I’ve been thinking about my next article on the subject already. I’m going to call it ‘Climate-Denier Dysfunction’ and approach the subject from a different angle, going to list some ‘deniers’ and their conspiracy theories.”
Reader: “Aren’t conspiracy theories actually hypotheses? Never mind…just my wandering mind. Theories, as I understand them, are the product of demonstration. But I’m off the topic. Sorry. Okay, so you were writing about mental health and climate change. Is that like something similar to like… like… PTSD, maybe PCCSD, Post Climate Change Stress Disorder? Wait! Let me go back and combine the thoughts. We can name it Climate Hypothesis Anxiety Disorder, or CHAD. And as for Greta, who prevented her from playing hopscotch, or jacks, or some other games? Who kept her from her childhood? Greta, sorry to say sarcastically, might want to spend a day in the life of a child sold into slavery if she wants to experience a stolen childhood.”
Reporter: “You joke, and joke cruelly. You can see in Greta’s angry face that she’s distraught over climate change. There are people who are genuinely stressed out about global warming, about all the stuff that’s going on, all the natural disasters caused by climate change.”
Reader: “Droughts?”
Reporter: “Yes, and fires.”
Reader: “Floods and sea level changes?”
Reporter: “Those, too. All of them. There’s a whole population out there who can’t shake their personal fear over climate change; it’s making them anxious.”
Reader: “So, you wrote another story for them to read about how they are stressed out.”
Reporter: “It’s my job to keep them informed.”
Reader: “Informed about how they feel, about how anxious they are? But isn’t that some version of self-fulfilling prophesy? Is it also your job to keep people on edge because of what ‘might happen’ if the world warms up? Does an article that says how many feel the same do anything but confirm beliefs? If they know they are stressed out, doesn’t another article that tells them they are stressed out just magnify the stress, just convince them that they are doomed?”
Reporter: “You’re simplifying.”
Reader: “Not as much as you. What can your article do beyond confirming their ‘neuroses’ about natural phenomena, about climate? Do you direct them to cures?”
Reporter: “Cures?”
Reader: “Sure, cures of Nature and cures of people. Ways to ‘save the planet’ stuff, ways to deal with the coming doom and the extinction of the species, verbal anti-depressants and verbal anti-anxiety drugs. You’re basically just reporting on perceptions of helplessness.”
Reporter: “Well, I haven’t written about cures. I just report the news as is. Things are bad and looking worse. I simply tell the readers. There are many people out there who feel this way about climate. It’s an upward trend of a downward neurosis. In fact, I’ve felt similarly. There’s a real problem. We’re going to have big shifts in demographics, in the geography of diseases, in famines, wars, resources. All because of climate. People…Well, not people like you…are concerned about their future.”
Reader: “Okay. I’ll grant there are people who are, in my mind, inordinately disturbed by talk of climate change. And I’ll grant that natural phenomena change. But don’t all the articles you and yours write exacerbate mental dysfunction? Show me this article by what’s her name, Sirtor…”
Reporter: “Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela. Here it is.”
Reader: “Give me a sec…Hmnnnn (reading)…”
Reporter: “Sure, blame me, the messenger. Remember, I just report. Sirtori-Cortina is just reporting; she’s a messenger, too.”
Reader: “But you report and report and report the same mantra. This is the result of climate change. That is the result of climate change. This is the result of…Every article ties some natural phenomenon to climate change. Remember that news lady on CNN, Deborah Feyerick, I think. She asked Bill Nye, the Science Guy, if a passing asteroid was the result of global warming. ** Okay, here in Sirtori-Cortina’s article I see the story of a Mariana Menezes.
“Sirtori-Cortina reports that Mariana was happy when the US signed the Paris Agreement and ‘crestfallen’ when Trump pulled out of the agreement. She quotes Mariana as saying, ‘I started getting really worried, thinking, “oh no, we’re not going to make it”…I became very anxious. I couldn’t sleep…I was thinking about my children.’
“I see that the sentence that provides the context for her statements is the one written by Sirtori-Cortina just before the quotation. The reporter writes, ‘The more she learned, the worse it got.’ You know the old saying, ‘If you say something often enough?’ Well, the corollary of that is ‘If you read something often enough….’ Think of what Mariana believes and feels when she says, ’We’re not going to make it.’ Really.
“You think Mariana has actually ‘learned’ as Sirtori-Cortina writes? Or has something else been going on, such as indoctrination of one sort or another? You think Mariana has studied climatology and paleoclimatology? You think she is aware that over the course of 200,000 years or more of human evolution and of our species dealing with natural phenomena, that during swings in climate our ancient ancestors talked about how they ‘felt’ about a prolonged drought or a rise in sea level? Or did they simply act to survive by moving around to find water and by moving farther inland? You think Mariana knows anything about centuries-long droughts and eustasy?”
Reporter: “But we know that the world is warming. I wouldn’t be a good reporter if I didn’t mention it and its effect on people.”
Reader: “I can envision that If you had lived during the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, you would have written the articles on impending physical aspects of climate change BUT without the Chicken Little anxiety slant. And as climates cooled or warmed, you would have noted physical changes, but not projections into the then future that might have caused psychological distress. You would have noted efforts to find food on the hoof, shelter, or a place to grow stuff, or different stuff, just as in the Little Ice Age northern Europe shifted from drinking wine to drinking beer (Thank you, climate change). If you had lived when the Pueblo or Maya underwent severe droughts, do you think you would have reported on their mental health or emotional state or about how they either methodically or randomly sought a better place to live under their altered circumstances?
“Mariana needs to take a deep breath and read about flooding in ancient Mesopotamia, about how five millennia ago the ancient city of Ur was inundated by a rising sea. *** Mariana might be a little less anxious if she learned about the history of eustasy.”
Reporter: “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Reader: “What if you are giving your readers a false dichotomy? What if you are telling your readers or implying an Either/Or? Are you telling your readers that their only future lies in either a complete reversal of climate trends or a destruction of life as we know it? That there are no alternatives in a complex world? Remember the Dust Bowl years? How many Californians are descendants of people who moved off farms in the Midwest to escape the drought and then took up residence as farmers in California? How many Californians suffering from wildfires and drought today might pick up and move to their ancestral homeland in the Midwest?
“Think of poor Mariana. She believes that doom is inevitable and that humans can’t cope with climate changes because of her sense of limited alternatives. But the truth about the natural environment is that it DOES change and people have coped with it. I keep thinking of sea level, for example, and how it started to rise about 20,000 years ago, having been as much as a football field’s length lower than it is today, maybe rising by 120 meters, with some of that rise being reached during Sumerian times to alter the lives in the ancient city of Ur. That rise occurring in steps, increasing transgressions of the sea onto the land, as they are called.
“Can anyone say Miami? Is Miami the modern Ur? Will it be inundated? Sure, if the trend of the last 20,000 years continues. I think a better article would be focused on the folly of shortsighted humans to see that coastal communities are ephemeral at best. So, will an Ur-like inundation of Miami mean the end of the world as Mariana probably thinks it will be?
Reporter: “I hadn’t thought of…”
Reader: “Without compunction that you might be indoctrinating and frightening, you reporters keep writing that climate will inevitably destroy us unless we act fast. And now you are writing about how there’s an anxiety over climate. False dichotomy, I say. You remind me of the current Leader of the Free World saying when asked why the US left Afghanistan the way it did, ‘Well, what choice did we have? What alternative in the way we pulled out of Afghanistan?’ Just as the sequence of withdrawal could have been altered from military-out-then-civilians-out to civilians-out-then-military-out or from close-Bagram to keep-Bagram open, or from leave-weapons-behind to destroy-weapons-left-behind, or any other set of choices, but definitely not limited to Either this/Or that. To say there were only two choices like withdrawing chaotically or throwing whole new armies into the fray is to offer a false dichotomy. And that’s exactly what’s going on with all your doom-and-gloom articles, such as the one on the ‘climate identities’ of anxious people.
“The question about climate change doesn’t have be centered on ‘we’re doomed unless we destroy the world economy or an individual country’s economy.’ It doesn’t have to be ‘accept the Paris Agreement’ or be condemned to natural disasters.’ Climate change could be as highly variable as climates are today. Changes will appear, if I can speak teleologically, to ‘favor’ some areas over others, enhancing living conditions at Site A while degrading them at Site B. Some will see lush growth; others will see desertification.
“Let me belabor the point, though I know you are in a hurry to meet that next deadline. Say sea level does continue to rise. I’ll take it as a given because I know that sea level has fluctuated, as I said, by tens to hundreds of meters during the past two and a half million years, rising, by the way, pretty fast through the first six millennia of the current interglacial period, the Holocene that people now want to call the Anthropocene because of human influences on the natural world. Anyway, not everything is an Either/Or thinker, but you reporters seem to think that people like Mariana need a black-and-white version of reality. If people keep moving to coastal locations, aren’t they inviting inevitable trouble? I live a thousand feet above sea level. I can’t be inundated. Is it nice to live in Miami? Sure. I lived there once, but I can’t see making a permanent residence in a modern Ur, though it’s silly to think of sea level rise as being so rapid that people can’t adapt. I think of Obama, a guy who proclaimed the seas were rising but who has built homes in Hawaii and Massachusetts right on the coast. Is he really worried about sea level? Yet, he proclaimed the worrisome mantra of ‘the seas are rising; the seas are rising.’
“Poor Mariana. She was under the false assumption that the Paris Agreement offered a climate panacea and that the government could stop the seas from rising. It was either adopt the Agreement, or suffer the—in her mind—immediate end of things. But I can’t put the blame solely on Mariana for her despair. You people in the news just keep saying over and over that the sky is falling—or heating up. And you never seem to center any stories on the hypocrisy of the alarmists that is the corollary of the anxiety you say is widespread.”
Reporter: “Your mind is wandering…People are worried. What if you lived in Miami? What if you lived on the Mississippi Delta?”
Reader: “Right, sorry. Sea level. I was making a point…Oh! Yes. Sea level has been rising for 12,000 years, at different rates, of course, and variably at different places. The Mississippi Delta? You know it’s only about 7,000 years old, right? That it’s there because of sediments laid down by the rivers and that for anyone living in Colonial Time, there would have been no land on which to build State Road 23 that runs down the delta through communities like Venice. And as for sea level rising? When the ice melted, its weight was removed from the land, so crustal rebound occurred the way carpet fibers spring back after being stepped on—and much of the land that was depressed in northern states under ice sheets is still rebounding upward. Crustal rebound offsets some of the increases in sea level caused by glacial meltwater flowing back to the sea. It isn’t a matter of a universal and uniform rise around the planet. Some coasts will see a greater increase than others. And in the case of tectonically rising landmasses, some will see a fall in sea level.”
Reporter: “Still, there’s a reality to more anxiety over climate.”
Reader: “Yep, and isn’t the modern world characterized by anxiety in general? You think I’m just hammering this, don’t you?”
Reporter: “Yada, yada, yada…”
Reader: “So, you simplify with your false dichotomies. It’s the way of the world, I guess. I’m thinking of a book called The Anxious Years, an anthology of essays about the 1930s. This emphasis on anxiety over a myriad of phenomena has been around ever since Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. I think the Western World entered into a ‘woe-is-me-funk’ that became the zeitgeist of the modern world. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre added to it, with philosophy framing the growing number of types of psychological analyses. Climate is just the latest ‘woe-is-me’ focus.”
Reporter: “Whoa. Hold on. You’re trying to snow me with books I haven’t read. And, as usual, you’re trying to make something from…”
Reader: “Here’s the problem with the Sesame Street Generation. Or should I say Sesame Tweet Generation? If something is longer than an aphorism, it’s too long for the current generation to contemplate. People want short snippets, like those letters Sesame Street flashes on the screen. People don’t want a dialogue. They don’t want developed arguments, and they don’t have time for anything more than a quick article that proclaims something is a reality, like climate identity and its associated anxiety.”
Reporter: “I have deadlines.”
Reader: “And I have a desire to explore to the point of exhaustion. So, people like you and Sirtori-Cortina write about something you assume is true on the basis of anecdotes. Couldn’t I just as easily write an article about people who are unconcerned about matters like sea level? What about an article about Obama, an article that proclaims that rising sea level is not a problem. If it were, why did he build two homes on shorelines? Wouldn’t that allay fears of people like Mariana? She probably has no idea that those homes exist—expensive homes, by the way. And couldn’t some of those people who are unconcerned be, as you call them, ‘climate deniers’? Obama was or is a climate alarmist, but he appears to be unconcerned. Those two homes are proof of that.
“And isn’t it possible that the ramifications of a warmer world might be beneficial in some areas, but detrimental in others? Isn’t it possible that the anxious people are people who would find another focus for their anxiety if they did not have climate to worry them? I’m sorry, but the current term ‘snowflake’ applies to many concerned about global warming. The very idea threatens to melt them. And since they believe themselves to be helpless against the onslaught of bad news, they have little choice but to feel melancholic or anxious.
Reporter: “You sound like one of those conservatives. Definitely, you’re one of those right-wing nuts.”
Reader: “Really? I’m sorry if I come off that way. I think I’m more Hegelian in that I want to read thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And I’m willing to tear apart the new synthesis. I don’t want to hear emotional pleas from the anxiety-ridden for somebody to do something. I don’t want to hear that someone is worried because of some possible or probable future. I think global warming is quite likely, but give me a lifetime longer than a couple of centuries for me to actually see whether it is harmful or helpful.”
Reporter: “So, you want to put the blame for mental illness on a milieu?”
Reader: “I want to read you a passage from H. L. Mencken’s The New Deal Mentality. I think it applies here. Hold on. Here it is. Mencken writes about political and social matters that have become for some theological matters and for others the prevalent psychology of the times. Global warming has become a religion, and the IPCC is the head of the ‘church.’ Mencken was writing about progressivism and the promise of communism or socialism, but I’ll quote him in the context of global warming alarmists.
‘What has it [Think: the threat of global warming alarmism] to offer the poor fish who fall for it? What it has to offer, I greatly fear, is only a long series of splitting headaches. It may sooth[e] them transiently, but it leaves all their chronic agonies unrelieved, all their pathetic questions unanswered. When they throw it off in the end they will be precisely where they were when they embraced it—helpless, disconsolate, forlorn. Yet, they go on cherishing it with innocent and unflagging devotion, as little children cherish the concept of Santa Claus. They believe in it as firmly as they believe that they have immortal souls and will be transformed….’****
“Isn’t that Mariana? You report increasing numbers of people ailing over some possible, probable, or unknown future. They walk around thinking their only choice is the false dichotomy of doom or glory, of a world of innumerable climate-caused disasters or a world of flowers and bunnies in which humans act positively to control that which they have never been able to control. So, even if humans have set the stage for a warmer world, they have also set the stage for more conferences, more dire warnings, more articles like yours and Sirtori-Cortina’s, more anxiety in the general population, and more despair that nothing can be done because not enough people care to act to save the planet from humanity. Not enough people take the Paris Agreement seriously. Not enough people are willing to sacrifice their personal economies for the good of all mankind. So, people like Mariana will, in the words of Mencken, feel ‘helpless, disconsolate, forlorn.’”
Reporter: “I have a deadline.”
Reader: “Go. Meet your deadline. And write more stories about how people feel.”
Notes:
*Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela. 17 Sept. 2021. Mental health could be the next casualty of global warming. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-09-mental-health-casualty-global.html Accessed September 18, 2021.
**https://www.upi.com/blog/2013/02/12/CNN-anchor-asks-if-global-warming-caused-asteroid-fly-by-VIDEO/6711360683868/ and other easily found links. Accessed September 18, 2021.
***Mörner, Nils-Axel. 25 Dec 2014. The Flooding of Ur in Mesopotamia in New Perspectives. Archaeological Discovery. Vol 03 No. 01 (2015), Article ID:52979. 10.4236/ad.2015.31003 The author reports that a fossil shore was 0.3 meters higher than current sea level. The Holocene Maximum (of sea level) occurred sometime between 4550 and 5100 years ago. Online at https://www.scirp.org/html/3-1140038_52979.htm Accessed September 20, 2021.
****Mencken, H. L. 1936. The New Deal Mentality. In Louis Filler. Ed. 1963. The Anxious Years. New York. Capricorn Books. pp. 126-140. The essays in this anthology indicate that much of the current anxiety-ridden milieu has roots in the 1930s. At the time, for example, proponents of socialism and communism were waging verbal wars against those in favor of capitalism. In Filler’s introduction to the collection, he writes, “It is not possible to understand 1930’s radicalism without also understanding 1930’s fascism… (115).” Think now of your present circumstances: Do you favor controls imposed upon you by government in the name of the “greater good” or favor a libertarianism that prefers a “natural selection and freedom to both fail and succeed”?
Reporter: “Long night. I had a deadline on a story, and I just finished on time. Kept the usual cursing by my editor at bay.”
Reader: “I’ve never had to meet a newspaper’s deadline, but I’ve had to finish school papers on time, so I have some sense of your urgency and pressure. What was the story?”
Reporter: “About how climate is ruining our mental health.”
Reader: “What!!!???”
Reporter: “Yeah. Really. People are increasingly more upset emotionally and mentally because of global warming. You know, the hurricanes, fires, heatwaves, tornadoes, tropical disease migration, droughts, floods, sea level changes, and even polar vortexes. Well, all that weighs heavily on people. It’s giving them a ‘climate identity.’ * People are becoming increasingly more distraught because of climate change. And I’m not the only one reporting on this. There’s an article by Daniela Sirtori-Cortina out just yesterday about mental health being in jeopardy because of global warming.”
Reader: “Come on, are you serious?…Oh! I can see you are. Hmnnn…Have the DSM people…Have the people who write the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders labeled this yet? I’ve skimmed through the fifth rewrite, and I don’t remember seeing ‘Climate Identity Disorder,’ but maybe I wasn’t looking for it at the time. Is it just a subset of anxiety disorders?”
Reporter: “Trust me; there are people out there who are pretty upset about global warming. Look at all the articles we have had to write over the past twenty-five years. Look at all the reports coming out of the UN. Look at poor little Greta Thunberg who said we robbed her of her childhood. I’ve been thinking about my next article on the subject already. I’m going to call it ‘Climate-Denier Dysfunction’ and approach the subject from a different angle, going to list some ‘deniers’ and their conspiracy theories.”
Reader: “Aren’t conspiracy theories actually hypotheses? Never mind…just my wandering mind. Theories, as I understand them, are the product of demonstration. But I’m off the topic. Sorry. Okay, so you were writing about mental health and climate change. Is that like something similar to like… like… PTSD, maybe PCCSD, Post Climate Change Stress Disorder? Wait! Let me go back and combine the thoughts. We can name it Climate Hypothesis Anxiety Disorder, or CHAD. And as for Greta, who prevented her from playing hopscotch, or jacks, or some other games? Who kept her from her childhood? Greta, sorry to say sarcastically, might want to spend a day in the life of a child sold into slavery if she wants to experience a stolen childhood.”
Reporter: “You joke, and joke cruelly. You can see in Greta’s angry face that she’s distraught over climate change. There are people who are genuinely stressed out about global warming, about all the stuff that’s going on, all the natural disasters caused by climate change.”
Reader: “Droughts?”
Reporter: “Yes, and fires.”
Reader: “Floods and sea level changes?”
Reporter: “Those, too. All of them. There’s a whole population out there who can’t shake their personal fear over climate change; it’s making them anxious.”
Reader: “So, you wrote another story for them to read about how they are stressed out.”
Reporter: “It’s my job to keep them informed.”
Reader: “Informed about how they feel, about how anxious they are? But isn’t that some version of self-fulfilling prophesy? Is it also your job to keep people on edge because of what ‘might happen’ if the world warms up? Does an article that says how many feel the same do anything but confirm beliefs? If they know they are stressed out, doesn’t another article that tells them they are stressed out just magnify the stress, just convince them that they are doomed?”
Reporter: “You’re simplifying.”
Reader: “Not as much as you. What can your article do beyond confirming their ‘neuroses’ about natural phenomena, about climate? Do you direct them to cures?”
Reporter: “Cures?”
Reader: “Sure, cures of Nature and cures of people. Ways to ‘save the planet’ stuff, ways to deal with the coming doom and the extinction of the species, verbal anti-depressants and verbal anti-anxiety drugs. You’re basically just reporting on perceptions of helplessness.”
Reporter: “Well, I haven’t written about cures. I just report the news as is. Things are bad and looking worse. I simply tell the readers. There are many people out there who feel this way about climate. It’s an upward trend of a downward neurosis. In fact, I’ve felt similarly. There’s a real problem. We’re going to have big shifts in demographics, in the geography of diseases, in famines, wars, resources. All because of climate. People…Well, not people like you…are concerned about their future.”
Reader: “Okay. I’ll grant there are people who are, in my mind, inordinately disturbed by talk of climate change. And I’ll grant that natural phenomena change. But don’t all the articles you and yours write exacerbate mental dysfunction? Show me this article by what’s her name, Sirtor…”
Reporter: “Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela. Here it is.”
Reader: “Give me a sec…Hmnnnn (reading)…”
Reporter: “Sure, blame me, the messenger. Remember, I just report. Sirtori-Cortina is just reporting; she’s a messenger, too.”
Reader: “But you report and report and report the same mantra. This is the result of climate change. That is the result of climate change. This is the result of…Every article ties some natural phenomenon to climate change. Remember that news lady on CNN, Deborah Feyerick, I think. She asked Bill Nye, the Science Guy, if a passing asteroid was the result of global warming. ** Okay, here in Sirtori-Cortina’s article I see the story of a Mariana Menezes.
“Sirtori-Cortina reports that Mariana was happy when the US signed the Paris Agreement and ‘crestfallen’ when Trump pulled out of the agreement. She quotes Mariana as saying, ‘I started getting really worried, thinking, “oh no, we’re not going to make it”…I became very anxious. I couldn’t sleep…I was thinking about my children.’
“I see that the sentence that provides the context for her statements is the one written by Sirtori-Cortina just before the quotation. The reporter writes, ‘The more she learned, the worse it got.’ You know the old saying, ‘If you say something often enough?’ Well, the corollary of that is ‘If you read something often enough….’ Think of what Mariana believes and feels when she says, ’We’re not going to make it.’ Really.
“You think Mariana has actually ‘learned’ as Sirtori-Cortina writes? Or has something else been going on, such as indoctrination of one sort or another? You think Mariana has studied climatology and paleoclimatology? You think she is aware that over the course of 200,000 years or more of human evolution and of our species dealing with natural phenomena, that during swings in climate our ancient ancestors talked about how they ‘felt’ about a prolonged drought or a rise in sea level? Or did they simply act to survive by moving around to find water and by moving farther inland? You think Mariana knows anything about centuries-long droughts and eustasy?”
Reporter: “But we know that the world is warming. I wouldn’t be a good reporter if I didn’t mention it and its effect on people.”
Reader: “I can envision that If you had lived during the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, you would have written the articles on impending physical aspects of climate change BUT without the Chicken Little anxiety slant. And as climates cooled or warmed, you would have noted physical changes, but not projections into the then future that might have caused psychological distress. You would have noted efforts to find food on the hoof, shelter, or a place to grow stuff, or different stuff, just as in the Little Ice Age northern Europe shifted from drinking wine to drinking beer (Thank you, climate change). If you had lived when the Pueblo or Maya underwent severe droughts, do you think you would have reported on their mental health or emotional state or about how they either methodically or randomly sought a better place to live under their altered circumstances?
“Mariana needs to take a deep breath and read about flooding in ancient Mesopotamia, about how five millennia ago the ancient city of Ur was inundated by a rising sea. *** Mariana might be a little less anxious if she learned about the history of eustasy.”
Reporter: “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Reader: “What if you are giving your readers a false dichotomy? What if you are telling your readers or implying an Either/Or? Are you telling your readers that their only future lies in either a complete reversal of climate trends or a destruction of life as we know it? That there are no alternatives in a complex world? Remember the Dust Bowl years? How many Californians are descendants of people who moved off farms in the Midwest to escape the drought and then took up residence as farmers in California? How many Californians suffering from wildfires and drought today might pick up and move to their ancestral homeland in the Midwest?
“Think of poor Mariana. She believes that doom is inevitable and that humans can’t cope with climate changes because of her sense of limited alternatives. But the truth about the natural environment is that it DOES change and people have coped with it. I keep thinking of sea level, for example, and how it started to rise about 20,000 years ago, having been as much as a football field’s length lower than it is today, maybe rising by 120 meters, with some of that rise being reached during Sumerian times to alter the lives in the ancient city of Ur. That rise occurring in steps, increasing transgressions of the sea onto the land, as they are called.
“Can anyone say Miami? Is Miami the modern Ur? Will it be inundated? Sure, if the trend of the last 20,000 years continues. I think a better article would be focused on the folly of shortsighted humans to see that coastal communities are ephemeral at best. So, will an Ur-like inundation of Miami mean the end of the world as Mariana probably thinks it will be?
Reporter: “I hadn’t thought of…”
Reader: “Without compunction that you might be indoctrinating and frightening, you reporters keep writing that climate will inevitably destroy us unless we act fast. And now you are writing about how there’s an anxiety over climate. False dichotomy, I say. You remind me of the current Leader of the Free World saying when asked why the US left Afghanistan the way it did, ‘Well, what choice did we have? What alternative in the way we pulled out of Afghanistan?’ Just as the sequence of withdrawal could have been altered from military-out-then-civilians-out to civilians-out-then-military-out or from close-Bagram to keep-Bagram open, or from leave-weapons-behind to destroy-weapons-left-behind, or any other set of choices, but definitely not limited to Either this/Or that. To say there were only two choices like withdrawing chaotically or throwing whole new armies into the fray is to offer a false dichotomy. And that’s exactly what’s going on with all your doom-and-gloom articles, such as the one on the ‘climate identities’ of anxious people.
“The question about climate change doesn’t have be centered on ‘we’re doomed unless we destroy the world economy or an individual country’s economy.’ It doesn’t have to be ‘accept the Paris Agreement’ or be condemned to natural disasters.’ Climate change could be as highly variable as climates are today. Changes will appear, if I can speak teleologically, to ‘favor’ some areas over others, enhancing living conditions at Site A while degrading them at Site B. Some will see lush growth; others will see desertification.
“Let me belabor the point, though I know you are in a hurry to meet that next deadline. Say sea level does continue to rise. I’ll take it as a given because I know that sea level has fluctuated, as I said, by tens to hundreds of meters during the past two and a half million years, rising, by the way, pretty fast through the first six millennia of the current interglacial period, the Holocene that people now want to call the Anthropocene because of human influences on the natural world. Anyway, not everything is an Either/Or thinker, but you reporters seem to think that people like Mariana need a black-and-white version of reality. If people keep moving to coastal locations, aren’t they inviting inevitable trouble? I live a thousand feet above sea level. I can’t be inundated. Is it nice to live in Miami? Sure. I lived there once, but I can’t see making a permanent residence in a modern Ur, though it’s silly to think of sea level rise as being so rapid that people can’t adapt. I think of Obama, a guy who proclaimed the seas were rising but who has built homes in Hawaii and Massachusetts right on the coast. Is he really worried about sea level? Yet, he proclaimed the worrisome mantra of ‘the seas are rising; the seas are rising.’
“Poor Mariana. She was under the false assumption that the Paris Agreement offered a climate panacea and that the government could stop the seas from rising. It was either adopt the Agreement, or suffer the—in her mind—immediate end of things. But I can’t put the blame solely on Mariana for her despair. You people in the news just keep saying over and over that the sky is falling—or heating up. And you never seem to center any stories on the hypocrisy of the alarmists that is the corollary of the anxiety you say is widespread.”
Reporter: “Your mind is wandering…People are worried. What if you lived in Miami? What if you lived on the Mississippi Delta?”
Reader: “Right, sorry. Sea level. I was making a point…Oh! Yes. Sea level has been rising for 12,000 years, at different rates, of course, and variably at different places. The Mississippi Delta? You know it’s only about 7,000 years old, right? That it’s there because of sediments laid down by the rivers and that for anyone living in Colonial Time, there would have been no land on which to build State Road 23 that runs down the delta through communities like Venice. And as for sea level rising? When the ice melted, its weight was removed from the land, so crustal rebound occurred the way carpet fibers spring back after being stepped on—and much of the land that was depressed in northern states under ice sheets is still rebounding upward. Crustal rebound offsets some of the increases in sea level caused by glacial meltwater flowing back to the sea. It isn’t a matter of a universal and uniform rise around the planet. Some coasts will see a greater increase than others. And in the case of tectonically rising landmasses, some will see a fall in sea level.”
Reporter: “Still, there’s a reality to more anxiety over climate.”
Reader: “Yep, and isn’t the modern world characterized by anxiety in general? You think I’m just hammering this, don’t you?”
Reporter: “Yada, yada, yada…”
Reader: “So, you simplify with your false dichotomies. It’s the way of the world, I guess. I’m thinking of a book called The Anxious Years, an anthology of essays about the 1930s. This emphasis on anxiety over a myriad of phenomena has been around ever since Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. I think the Western World entered into a ‘woe-is-me-funk’ that became the zeitgeist of the modern world. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre added to it, with philosophy framing the growing number of types of psychological analyses. Climate is just the latest ‘woe-is-me’ focus.”
Reporter: “Whoa. Hold on. You’re trying to snow me with books I haven’t read. And, as usual, you’re trying to make something from…”
Reader: “Here’s the problem with the Sesame Street Generation. Or should I say Sesame Tweet Generation? If something is longer than an aphorism, it’s too long for the current generation to contemplate. People want short snippets, like those letters Sesame Street flashes on the screen. People don’t want a dialogue. They don’t want developed arguments, and they don’t have time for anything more than a quick article that proclaims something is a reality, like climate identity and its associated anxiety.”
Reporter: “I have deadlines.”
Reader: “And I have a desire to explore to the point of exhaustion. So, people like you and Sirtori-Cortina write about something you assume is true on the basis of anecdotes. Couldn’t I just as easily write an article about people who are unconcerned about matters like sea level? What about an article about Obama, an article that proclaims that rising sea level is not a problem. If it were, why did he build two homes on shorelines? Wouldn’t that allay fears of people like Mariana? She probably has no idea that those homes exist—expensive homes, by the way. And couldn’t some of those people who are unconcerned be, as you call them, ‘climate deniers’? Obama was or is a climate alarmist, but he appears to be unconcerned. Those two homes are proof of that.
“And isn’t it possible that the ramifications of a warmer world might be beneficial in some areas, but detrimental in others? Isn’t it possible that the anxious people are people who would find another focus for their anxiety if they did not have climate to worry them? I’m sorry, but the current term ‘snowflake’ applies to many concerned about global warming. The very idea threatens to melt them. And since they believe themselves to be helpless against the onslaught of bad news, they have little choice but to feel melancholic or anxious.
Reporter: “You sound like one of those conservatives. Definitely, you’re one of those right-wing nuts.”
Reader: “Really? I’m sorry if I come off that way. I think I’m more Hegelian in that I want to read thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And I’m willing to tear apart the new synthesis. I don’t want to hear emotional pleas from the anxiety-ridden for somebody to do something. I don’t want to hear that someone is worried because of some possible or probable future. I think global warming is quite likely, but give me a lifetime longer than a couple of centuries for me to actually see whether it is harmful or helpful.”
Reporter: “So, you want to put the blame for mental illness on a milieu?”
Reader: “I want to read you a passage from H. L. Mencken’s The New Deal Mentality. I think it applies here. Hold on. Here it is. Mencken writes about political and social matters that have become for some theological matters and for others the prevalent psychology of the times. Global warming has become a religion, and the IPCC is the head of the ‘church.’ Mencken was writing about progressivism and the promise of communism or socialism, but I’ll quote him in the context of global warming alarmists.
‘What has it [Think: the threat of global warming alarmism] to offer the poor fish who fall for it? What it has to offer, I greatly fear, is only a long series of splitting headaches. It may sooth[e] them transiently, but it leaves all their chronic agonies unrelieved, all their pathetic questions unanswered. When they throw it off in the end they will be precisely where they were when they embraced it—helpless, disconsolate, forlorn. Yet, they go on cherishing it with innocent and unflagging devotion, as little children cherish the concept of Santa Claus. They believe in it as firmly as they believe that they have immortal souls and will be transformed….’****
“Isn’t that Mariana? You report increasing numbers of people ailing over some possible, probable, or unknown future. They walk around thinking their only choice is the false dichotomy of doom or glory, of a world of innumerable climate-caused disasters or a world of flowers and bunnies in which humans act positively to control that which they have never been able to control. So, even if humans have set the stage for a warmer world, they have also set the stage for more conferences, more dire warnings, more articles like yours and Sirtori-Cortina’s, more anxiety in the general population, and more despair that nothing can be done because not enough people care to act to save the planet from humanity. Not enough people take the Paris Agreement seriously. Not enough people are willing to sacrifice their personal economies for the good of all mankind. So, people like Mariana will, in the words of Mencken, feel ‘helpless, disconsolate, forlorn.’”
Reporter: “I have a deadline.”
Reader: “Go. Meet your deadline. And write more stories about how people feel.”
Notes:
*Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela. 17 Sept. 2021. Mental health could be the next casualty of global warming. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-09-mental-health-casualty-global.html Accessed September 18, 2021.
**https://www.upi.com/blog/2013/02/12/CNN-anchor-asks-if-global-warming-caused-asteroid-fly-by-VIDEO/6711360683868/ and other easily found links. Accessed September 18, 2021.
***Mörner, Nils-Axel. 25 Dec 2014. The Flooding of Ur in Mesopotamia in New Perspectives. Archaeological Discovery. Vol 03 No. 01 (2015), Article ID:52979. 10.4236/ad.2015.31003 The author reports that a fossil shore was 0.3 meters higher than current sea level. The Holocene Maximum (of sea level) occurred sometime between 4550 and 5100 years ago. Online at https://www.scirp.org/html/3-1140038_52979.htm Accessed September 20, 2021.
****Mencken, H. L. 1936. The New Deal Mentality. In Louis Filler. Ed. 1963. The Anxious Years. New York. Capricorn Books. pp. 126-140. The essays in this anthology indicate that much of the current anxiety-ridden milieu has roots in the 1930s. At the time, for example, proponents of socialism and communism were waging verbal wars against those in favor of capitalism. In Filler’s introduction to the collection, he writes, “It is not possible to understand 1930’s radicalism without also understanding 1930’s fascism… (115).” Think now of your present circumstances: Do you favor controls imposed upon you by government in the name of the “greater good” or favor a libertarianism that prefers a “natural selection and freedom to both fail and succeed”?
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