
A Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy - eaguyhn
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy
======
chicob
This article raises a lot of suspicion, and it has many of the hallmarks of
bad reporting.

\- The Vice piece is shallow and didn't investigate the claims and arguments
of the cited article (And what's with the authors photo? Is Zing Tsjeng really
serious about this?);

\- The author of the paper, Jem Bendell, is not an academic in climate science
nor in sustainability, but in "Sustainability Leadership", a field in
Management;

\- The paper reads like an opinion piece.

\- The paper, as provided in the author's website, makes reference to the
journal to which it was intended in the past tense, which raises the question
of whether it is the original or an edited version;

\- Many of the references cited in the paper are from news websites, and only
a few are proper scientific articles: I was expecting a lot, lot more;

And the worst red flag of them all:

\- After being rejected by a not exactly relevant yet serious journal, the
author made it public nonetheless, hinting at some form of censorship of an
inconvenient opinion.

~~~
dogma1138
It's Vice that's all you need to know these days, this isn't journalism
period.

------
flexie
Don't let tales of a collapse of civilization lead to an immediate collapse of
your judgement and focus.

This article is full of doom and gloom. Many predictions are made, and they
are conveniently quoted as someone else's:

"Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe
that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of
civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the
northern hemisphere" (written around 12 months ago)

I for one won't hold my breath.

~~~
LyndsySimon
From my perspective, the paper reads like a far-right "survivalist" piece from
the early 90s. It's almost laughable in the way it presents the view.

That said, the 90s anti-authoritarian survivalists _did_ nail some things,
especially in light of Snowden. I think it would be wise to take it under
advisement and pay attention to what's going on, but to go buy a farm and a
bunch of heritage seeds based on this paper would be pretty ridiculous.

------
FailMore
Until we include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods
things will not change. When we do we will encourage a wave of environmentally
friendly innovation. It will take a lot of courage for any government to do
this.

I’ve started the seed of a small political party in the UK which will push for
Envionmental Economics - [https://weOptimise.it](https://weOptimise.it) /
[https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit](https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit)

~~~
kuzehanka
I don't think any kind of consumer driven environmental activism is even close
to enough to stem the tide.

To really drive home the severity of the situation, understand that if we
ceased all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the global mean temperature
would continue to rise for another century before hitting equilibrium. We are
past the point of no return.

The only way civilisation continues existing as we know it, is if over the
next decade we roll out a heap of nuclear power and dedicate a significant
portion of it to carbon sequestration. Fusion would be great but even fission
is sufficient. Anything less, including geoengineering projects like space
based mirrors or albedo boosting aerosols, are at best a 50/50 gamble on the
outcome.

Feel-good activism like using less plastic straws or rolling out renewable
power at meaningless scales is a distraction from the real and only course we
have left.

I am really worried that a large number of people still believe that
renewables can unfuck this situation and so put their guard down after
watching some feel-good news segment about Germany hitting an arbitrary
target. It's not Europe or USA you need to worry about, it's China India and
Afrtica. Renewables would have helped 20-30 years ago. Today we are so far
gone that we need to greatly exceed our total energy demand and channel the
excess into sequestration.

I strongly suggest that everyone read the 2018 IPCC report. It should be
mandatory reading material at all schools universities and workplaces.
[https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/)

~~~
vixen99
You are right. As Judith Curry has pointed out. 'even if all the states
respected (the current commitments) —an unlikely prospect—the temperature
reduction in 2100 would be an insignificant two-tenths of a degree. And this
assumes that climate-model predictions are correct.'. No one would even be
able to sense a difference.

She also points out the fact that “almost half of the warming observed in the
twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-
dioxide emissions became large.”. Natural factors thus had to be the cause.
None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United
Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the
climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread
warnings about the onset of a new ice age.".

~~~
kuzehanka
Your post conveys confusion and suggests a bad actor. Let me try to clear up a
few points in good faith:

1: The impact of the united states and Europe is now negligible. They have
undergone their transition and have emitted most of the greenhouse gases they
were going to. There was a time delay between those emissions and the
associated global temperature rise. The incoming transition of
China/India/Africa dwarfs that.

2: Atmospheric CO2 is not the only and not the most potent greenhouse gas we
are emitting. It is just the most abundant.

3: We are in fact overdue for an ice age. We are experiencing a relatively
extremely young climate period called the Holocene[1]. It is a warm gap in the
middle of an ice age. This warm gap for the last few thousand years is what
allowed civilisations to form. Given what we know about historical trends, we
should have plunged back into the ice age right about now. It is entirely
possible that anthropogenic climate change is the only reason we are not in an
ice age today.

4: We are uncovering new positive feedback effects in the greenhouse loop on a
monthly basis now. Whatever climate models exist, no matter how alarmist, are
actually turning out to be conservative due to all the new feedback mechanisms
we're discovering.

5: We face a double threat. Either a runaway greenhouse effect that turns
earth into Venus 2.0, or a natural reversion to the ice age which brings an
end to civilisation. The only way we continue to thrive as a species is if we
get good at predicting and manipulating the climate of our host planet. One
way or another, it will end us if left unchecked.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene)

------
xbmcuser
I came to the realisation that human world is fucked about 3 years ago.
Haven't seen anything in the last few years to change my mind. We might be
able to push it a few decades into the future but there will be a reckoning as
the real choice is to let a few hundred million die today or few billion in
the future.

~~~
qubex
I tried hard for a very long time to maintain my baseline “retro-futuristic”
optimism for progress and a Jetson's Future but about a couple of years ago,
probably owing to stress in my life (family business difficulties caused by my
father with evident narcissism but that I cannot break away from) I basically
‘crumbled’ to your realisation: that all this unhappiness and anxiety I see
everywhere around me is not some local bubble of despair but the actual
preamble to dire things to come, the growing awareness, the creeping alarm as
the effects start to ripple through. I think the last time humanity really had
much of a chance to pull through with a close scrape (in economic, financial,
social, and environmental terms) was somewhere back in 2010 or thereabouts. We
collectively missed that turning and we've stuck to the road to perdition ever
since.

~~~
benj111
"probably owing to stress in my life" Sounds more like depression, hope you're
in a better place now.

To more directly answer your point. Things always seem to be bad until they're
not. And we are on virtually any measure you'd care to look at, better off
than we were a century ago. The temperature may rise x celcius, empires may
fall, there may be wars, but this has been an unusually peaceful period of
history, wars happen anyway, and people probably wont mourn the non existent
ice caps that they heard used to exist, just like we don't mourn the dodo.

If we say went back to something equivalent to 1918 Europe. Yes we would have
lost a lot, both life and infrastructure, with Spanish flu still on the
horizon, but we will rebuild and get on with life, would you expect climate
change to be worse than that? And look where we are, a century later.

~~~
qubex
I know it’s not garden-variety depression because I’ve been treated for that.
There’s several people around me that are subject to the same influence that
are in remarkably similar emotional states, including my sister and some
senior executives in the firm. Unfortunately, no, I am not in a “better
place”. But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding.

Turing to your comparison between 1918 and now, I daresay global climate
change will be a great deal more severe than the cumulative effects of both
the First World War and the Spanish Influenza combined. The magnitude of
geopolitical strife we have set ourselves up for is of an almost unimaginable
scale.

~~~
benj111
"But I really appreciate the effort to be understanding"

The worst thing about depression is that you can't see a way out, until you
are out, and then the path is astoundingly obvious, and the journey so easy. I
could say it will get better, but you probably wouldn't believe me. Please do
believe me when I say it doesn't take effort to be understanding though.

On to a sunnier subject. I can't see us going mad max, I think worst case
doesnt interrupt civilization, which implies keeping at least our current
know-how. Could there be a lower standard of living, yes. Lower than a century
ago? (while keeping antibiotics, computers etc) Maybe. But that would still be
a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.

------
alanfranz
Direct links to the paper:

[http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf](http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf)

(audio version)
[http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3](http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3)

------
huffmsa
> _How near? About a decade._

Okay Al. Still waiting on that dramatic increase in frequency and ferocity of
hurricanes, but I guess I'll add this one to my calendar.

> _ou only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last
> year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have
> occurred since 2000._

Wildly untrue. Perhaps if you add "since records began in 1850" it could maybe
be valid.

~~~
Djvacto
Note that I haven't really researched this past personal perception, but:

This year NC was hit by a couple of hurricanes, both more severe (and to be
honest, 2 more in frequency) than I ever remember growing up here, and for
sure more than in the last 5-6 years.

Also, does your second comment imply that one of the 18 hottest years was in
1843, or like, well before humans were practicing agriculture?

~~~
huffmsa
I'm not implying anything. The Cretaceous was 10-15°F warmer than current
temperatures. There was lots of life.

~1000BC was 2-4°F warmer than today, and there were plenty of humans doing
just fine.

~~~
basch
I dont think youre really factoring in natural disasters, displacement,
refugees. 4 out of 5 people displaced are in Asia right now.

Even right now, Miami is underwater, and we are pumping it back out. Florida,
New York, and California will become economic disasters far before 10 degrees.

Of course we could build new spare cities inland now, for much cheaper, but of
course we will wait for destruction before people will move.

[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-
interactive/2017/nov/0...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-
interactive/2017/nov/03/three-degree-world-cities-drowned-global-warming)

~~~
LyndsySimon
> 4 out of 5 people displaced are in Asia right now.

Your link does not support this assertion. Instead, it says that 80% of Asian
people would be displaced in the next eight decade given a 3ºC rise in global
temperature.

> Even right now, Miami is underwater, and we are pumping it back out.

Miami was built on a sandbar. A good portion of the west side of the city is
built atop the Everglades - it was never exactly a safe place to build.

Also, Miami is not "under water". You article refers to "king tides" \- caused
by the alignment of Earth, Luna, and Sol - which are exactly the same as they
were at any point in human history, as measured against the mean tide. They're
astronomical events, and are unrelated to climate. Unless you can show that
"king tides" are objectively higher today than they were in the past, I don't
see what they have to do with anything whatsoever. Measuring the height of
king tides is exactly equivalent to measuring the mean sea level.

> Of course we could build new spare cities inland now, for much cheaper, but
> of course we will wait for destruction before people will move.

This doesn't even make sense to me. Why would building spare cities be cheaper
now than in twenty years, or fifty? Remember the time scale we're talking
about here; your article is projecting out eighty years. If you built these
cities today, they'd be fifty to eighty years old before people needed them.
How many urban dwellers live in fifty to eighty year old houses, especially
without updates?

Further, if we take for granted that there will be a need for spare cities in
the future, it would make much more sense to build them as needed. That would
spur growth in the construction industry, which in turn would lead to
economies of scale. Construction technology would have additional time to
improve as well, which means fewer resources used in building and more
sustainable design to boot.

In short... if this is going to be an issue, from a public policy perspective
reaction to it should be just that - reaction. Have resources on hand, sure,
but trying to move the populations of entire cities two generations ahead of
an anticipated issue is folly.

~~~
basch
The subtitle of one of the sections is "The regional impact of these changes
is highly uneven, with four out of five people affected living in Asia."

------
ringaroll
Just my two cents: Climate change threats are being over-hyped by those
people/companies who stand to benefit from "green" energy/society.

These orgs are spreading propaganda to high-school teens by telling them lies
sprinkled with a bit of truth and causing them to protest because the teens on
average cannot make a better judgment then people with decades of experience.

Nothing is going to happen. I for one wont hold my breath.

~~~
Djvacto
For what it's worth, it seems the companies that have been benefiting from the
not "green" tech and society have been and still are spreading propaganda to
minimize the fear/awareness/etc of climate change.

I mean, look at Trump and this coal stuff. Look at how much money Oil
companies spend on this. One large difference, I think, is that the money
being spent by the oil giants is influencing the opinions of fewer, but more
powerful, people, such as congress-persons and other political figures.

I guess technically your guess about nothing happening is as good as anyone's,
but it really doesn't seem like that is the case. I'd love for climate change
theorists to be wrong and actually it turns out that the Earth is fine and we
haven't caused irreversible effects to the climate and planet, but wouldn't
you rather we work on cleaner energy and be wrong, than do nothing and be
wrong?

------
andyjohnson0
I'm currently about half-way through "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David
Wallace-Wells [1] and it comes to similar conclusions: its too late to stop
this thing, it's going to be very bad, and it's going to happen sooner than
you think. Its a very hard thing to honestly face, and I'm not entirely sure I
have yet.

[1] [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-
uninhabi...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-
uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/9780525576709/)

~~~
tim333
I haven't read it (though I saw his talk), but I'm sure there are arguments to
be optimistic as well. It can be a mistake just to focus on the negative
stuff.

~~~
SCHiM
This is addressed in the paper the article is about. One of the main points is
that the 'optimistic stuff' does not address the negative already baked into
the system right now.

The point is: too little, too late. If that's true I don't know, that's the
whole question I guess.

------
roenxi
It might be that big-picture thinking and the future, generally, is terrifying
rather than climate change in particular.

It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run scenario of a happy future
that is sophisticated and meaningful. And at the global scale even the recent
past sounds pretty horrific if you spell it out. The fact that the global
situation is improving rapidly doesn't balance out the fact that being
subjected to a 1950s standard of living would be potentially abusive today (no
mobile, no connection to the internet, questionable access to goods, etc,
better or worse depending on where you live).

Part of the trouble I have with climate change as an imminent emergency is
there are actually quite a few civilisation-level threats at the 200-500 year
timeframe. Resource depletion, progress in weapons research, fragility of
logistic chains to disruption, disease. The actual impacts of climate tend to
be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by
overpopulation.

~~~
michaelt

      It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run
      scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and
      meaningful.
    

It's simple enough: Pick a reference point in the past that makes most things
look pretty good, and extrapolate from there.

Compared to the 1800s, everything seems to be going in the right direction.
Medical technology? Much better! Childhood mortality? Lower than ever!
Science? Much more advanced - and much better funded! Democracy? Many fewer
limits on who can vote or serve in government! Women's rights? LGBT rights?
Much improved! War? Fewer and smaller wars than ever! Long distance
communication? Faster and cheaper than ever! Average education levels? Higher
than ever! Prices of books? Lower than they've ever been. Availability of
food? We literally have an obesity epidemic! Quality of food? More people have
access to salt and spices than ever! The average westerner today eats better
than a king would have in 1800! Access to education? More university lectures
than you could ever watch, on a screen in your pocket.

Then just gloss over any negative changes as temporary blips, and you've got a
pretty positive outlook!

~~~
roenxi
That type of extrapolation form the past is extremely simplistic though. And a
bit like saying that you feel pretty good at 50 years old so it'll be easy to
make it to 100. Everything winds down and dies eventually; we should resist
entropy as best we can but realistically one day humanity is going to fall
over and not get back up. The question is how long until then, and the order
of magnitude number of years probably doesn't have 5 zeros on the end.

And anyone who extrapolated 2019 from 1800 was correct but also undeniably
delusional; there was no evidence it would turn out as it has, and the journey
was largely uncontrolled. Anything could have happened.

------
sleepysysadmin
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

When the dinosaurs lived the world was 10 celcius warmer. ~200 million years
later the world was 14 celcius warmer than today. Life thrived worldwide.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene)

Global warming is good for the earth.

Every 200,000 years there's a huge spike in warming. Which if you look at:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Diox...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png)

Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the
entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't
possible be human activity.

It doesn't even appear like we are in control.

~~~
shawnb576
This is denialist propaganda. We are the cause of the current warming cycle
[1] and what this leaves out is timescales. The prior cycles took millennia,
this is decades, and natural systems can’t adapt that fast.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-02-25/study-
evidence-humans-are-causing-global-warming-reaches-gold-
standard%3Fcontext%3Damp)

~~~
sleepysysadmin
I provided sources and facts. If you refuse to look at scientific facts by
asserting I am denialist and/or propaganda. That's fine, keep your blinders
on.

For the record I'm not a denialist. I do believe global warming is happening.
I just think there's absolutely nothing wrong.

------
Shish2k
I used to get depressed thinking that I wouldn't live long enough to see the
sci-fi future where we're all immortal cyborgs with minds in the cloud.

So in a purely selfish sense, I guess "right now is the peak of human
civilisation, the future is all melting ice caps and resource wars until we
die off completely in 2500" is reassuring?

~~~
antisthenes
Keep in mind, that vast swathes of Earth were uninhabitable even before global
warming was even a concept.

To illustrate this - look at Egypt and the earliest civilizations. The only
place where life existed permanently was in a narrow band alongside a river.
Life will still exist after a 4C warming, but in much narrower bands than it
currently does.

The global population of people will be reduced probably by a factor of 10,
eventually, settling on a sustainable level of around maybe 800-900 million.
This, in turn, should reduce the burn rate of unsustainable resources by a
lot, letting us coast for another couple of centuries.

The only question is - how violently will we go down from 8 billion to 800
million?

Disclaimer: this is all wild speculation and my personal opinion.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
How violently? Well, 7.2 billion people will die. Is that violent enough?

Then there's the _additional_ violence that all 8 billion will do, trying to
be one of the 800 million rather than one of the 7.2 billion.

My own gut feel is that we will muddle through much better than that, with
less than 500 million dead. On this subject, that seems to make me the crazy
optimist...

~~~
antisthenes
I strongly believe that every currently living person on this planet will die,
hopefully just because of old age.

Not sure why you assume there will be 7.2 billion violent deaths.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
If you're going to go from a planetary population of 8 billion to one of 800
million due to global warming, I'm pretty sure that there's going to be a lot
of "not because of old age".

~~~
antisthenes
I believe in the goodness of people and our ability to resolve things in a
less violent way, even during times of scarcity and global warming.

Maybe that's too optimistic.

------
bamboozled
I've been through similar bouts of lethargy and depression over climate change
as described in the article. It can really get overwhelming when thinking of
the future to come, what can we do but just try move forwards with our lives?

~~~
WilliamEdward
Why is it that only now you are depressed? Did you not know you were going to
die anyway and human beings as a whole were going to evolve into some species
completely different from us, even if there was no climate change? I believe
we have conjured up a depression about this topic because we believe that our
ability to stop climate change will be amplified by the pressure of sadness,
all the while not logically understanding that we are destined to be replaced
either way.

You should therefore have been depressed from the very beginning, but you
probably weren't. That proves that this idea of humanity being erased is not
inherently depressing, nor is moving on with our lives. It's simply the news
you are reading that is depressing, not the philosophy behind it.

~~~
bamboozled
I’m not really depressed now as I’ve kind of come to accept similar ideas to
what you’re getting at. However it took me a long time to reckon with it all,
and unfortunately many loved ones and younger people might not be able to just
accept the bad news as easy as you can.

------
ben_w
I’m relaxed about climate change. Photovoltaics have grown at a compounding
average rate of 40.5% over the last 20 years, going from 0.566 GW in 1998 to
~512 GW in 2018.

World power use (all forms, not just electricity) are currently around 18 TW.
At current trends, we exceed this in June 2029. By June 2034, we should be
overproducing by a factor of 5, which makes up for the difference between
nameplate capacity and actual average output. By 2037 you do that _and_ have
enough overproduction you don’t need batteries to store energy at night, just
make interconnections between existing power grids worldwide, because you can
afford 75% losses (if you want to, which you might not).

On the other hand, I am concerned with biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle
issues, antibiotics resistance, and non-renewable use of phosphorus.

------
sdwisely
It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to
protect themselves from the highly unlikely.

Yet we're having these debates about what to do about climate change which is
looking very likely.

We should be working on it, if we end up being wrong then the very worst case
is we've gotten ourselves off our dwindling fossil fuel supply a bit early.

~~~
huffmsa
> _protect themselves from the highly unlikely._

Tyrannical governments are unlikely?

~~~
sdwisely
Taking up arms against a government in your lifetime? Yes I'd call it
unlikely.

~~~
huffmsa
You assume my nationality? How do you know I'm not Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani,
Palestinian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Somali, Chechen, Georgian,
Venezuelan, or Mexican?

Get out of here with your racist assumptions that this forum is solely
populated by Silicon Valley residents.

~~~
sdwisely
I think you may have just done the same.

I'm Australian. You know, the place where gun control actually worked pretty
well.

~~~
timbit42
Does anyone outside of Australia believe that?

~~~
ben_w
Hi, I’m British, even our police don’t have — or want — guns. [1]

[1] not as standard, but there are some exceptions.

------
caseymarquis
Time to start terraforming with sulfur?

