And here’s what you can do about it
Climate Change Despair Is Real. This Is How You Fight It
In 2015, Bay Area lawyer and activist Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg found herself in Paris representing island nations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. She was thrilled to be there.
As the event progressed, however, “it was really clear that we were not going to achieve what we’d hoped,” she said.
I’m glad she took a long fossil fueled flight there.
What she and her colleagues had hoped for was a deal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century and a binding mechanism to enforce that. What they got was the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” — and which countries have signed on to through voluntary pledges.
Instead of celebrating in the streets, she found herself curled up in her hostel bed, crying.
The depression that struck Jornsay-Silverberg, 34, in 2015 still comes and goes today. She worries about ecosystems, native people and their habitats, the Amazon. She is also grieving a vision of her future that may no longer become a reality.
“People like myself are deciding whether [we] even want to have children,” she said. When she was younger, she always assumed that she would.
Is this the very definition of 1st World Problems? And probably mostly 1st World White Leftist problems?
Environmental activists like Jornsay-Silverberg are not the only ones feeling overwhelmed with despair as the climate changes. While “eco-anxiety” is most commonly used to describe these feelings, therapists and others have bandied about different labels, too: climate anxiety, climate despair, eco-despair and eco-grief.
The American Psychological Association even published a guide for therapists to help them assist their patients. In it, they wrote, “the psychological responses to climate change, such as conflict avoidance, fatalism, fear, helplessness and resignation are growing. These responses are keeping us, and our nation, from properly addressing the core causes of and solutions for our changing climate, and from building and supporting psychological resiliency.”
In reality, this is real. But, it’s not from a minor 1.5F increase in global temperatures since 1850, but because other people are teaching people to be unhinged. Have you ever worked yourself up into a lather over something minor or non-existent? We’ve all done that, right? These people have created this for themselves on a daily basis.
Experts seem to agree on a three-part strategy:
- Come together in community. “Find allies who understand what [you’re] feeling… and get together with them,” said Craig Chalquist, a psychologist and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He said it can even be something informal. Often, people struggle with these feelings in isolation, since bringing up climate change is taboo in many social situations.
- Process your feelings. This can happen through talking, grief groups and spending time in nature. Really? Just talk about such a huge issue? Chalquist said yes, adding that people with eco-anxiety then “quickly move from that phase into, ‘What can I do?'”
- Identify what specific problems speak to you, and get to work. Interested in oceans? Food systems? Reforestation? Chalquist said because all these aspects of the environment are connected, “to work on one is actually to bring some healing to the whole thing.”
I would think that joining with other people who have the same crazy climate beliefs and anxiety would be the worst thing, since they aren’t coming together to support each other, like with AA, but to reinforce their climate cultist beliefs.
What to do about it?
Grow up.
I would love to ask them why they think their “despair†is warranted. I’m sure the answer would be along the lines of “well, everybody says so…â€. Very scientific….
People are starting to believe their “lying eyes” instead of right-wing deniers.
Houstonians despair over the 5th “500 yr” flood in the past few years.
The SC corn farmer was despaired over his failed corn crop caused by drought.
Ireland (Ireland!!) despairs over tropical storm Lorenzo headed their way. The storm hit the Azores with 80 ft waves.
No sources for anything.
You want us to believe you?
And there are weather anomalies.
As you can see, J, nothing new. But I’m sure the S.C. farmer losing his crops to drought has never happened before in human history….
Cape Verde Islands, Azores, Ireland, Britain, Norway, Soviet Union Part of the 1961 Atlantic hurricane season Hurricane Debbie is the most powerful cyclone on record to strike Ireland in September, and possibly the only tropical cyclone on record to ever strike Britain and Ireland while still tropical.
The Night of the Big Wind – 1839 The Night of the Big Wind was a massive hurricane that swept over Ireland on the night of January 6, 1839. Up to 300 people died, tens of thousands were left…
Hurricane Charley – 1986 Hurricane Charley arrived over Ireland at the end of August 1986 and was one of the worst storms to ever hit Ireland. Charley was downgraded to a tropical cyclone and was…
A category 2 hurricane hit Spain in 1842,
ON AND ON IT GOES Elwood. The despair is real. I will grant you that a billion MSM fanatics constantly with their doom and gloom predictions of the end of the world will in fact drive unsuspecting people to despair.
Your grandchildren are probably building bunkers as we speak if you speak about the world like you do on these forums.
It’s your choice. I actually welcome your dissenting opinion just as many times I give my own. I am not lockstep with the GOP because I believe both parites suck. I watch many right wing pundits and MANY left wingers as well.
But the gloom constantly forcast is not based in reality:
HEADLINE FROM FORBES: You Are Not Hallucinating — A Hurricane Is Headed To Ireland
When we are scaremongered to death we start to believe things differently. I am sure you remember having drills in elementary school in which you hid under your desk in Nuclear attack drills. Forever it was the world is going to nuke itself into oblivion. When that didnt happen it then became Food shortages. When that didnt happen it is now CLIMATE CHANGE.
Gotta control the sheep somehow.
.
FYI a flash drought has hit the southeast for the past month causing this man’s corn to dry up and die because he depends on rains for his crop.
The reality is this: U.S. drought breaks for the first time in 20 years, United States Drought Monitor reports. It sounds rather odd. But if they record a drought anywhere in the lower 48 they consider the US to be in a drought. Yet for the year 2018, there was not a single drought in the lower 48 for the first time in 20 years. they leave this out of the headlines.
buried in their article: “Of course, here in Arizona, we had all the rain from the remains of Hurricane Rosa and Sergio, and decently wet winter,” he said.
Hurricanes and Cyclones are actually an integral part of the weather on this planet and redistribute waters all around the world that would ordinarily not receive any moisture at all.
In SC the farmer losing his corn does not irrigate. He relies on water from heaven, yet all across the south and midwest farmers rely on irrigation because droughts are a fact of life. Going back to the dust bowl of the ’30s when it was realized that land conservation was needed so at that time we learned to rotate crops, leave field fallow and irrigate rather than rely on water from the heavens.
As for Houston. During a classic El Nino year in 1913, heavy rains drenched Texas. In this photo, taken during the December 1913 floods, kids wade in feet-high water on St. Mary’s Street at Houston Streets. The last tens day
I wont list all 70 MAJOR FLOODING IN HOUSTON AND SURROUNDING COUNTIES most of which date well before co2 was even an issue for you. There have been 70 catastrophic floods and 100’s of severe floods in texas in the last 150 years.
What we are seeing in Houston is a result of poor engineering by the city fathers. Many cities that have had a major flood in the last 50 years have brought in specialists and the cities have reengineered their towns to deal with large flooding by creating run-off zones to getting rid of millions of gallons of water in minutes all over the city. Houston has not had this luxury and will continue to battle flooding because of its location and the failure of city engineers to plan for catastrophic flooding.