October 11, 2024
The Tear-Stained Flogs of Climate Science
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If we’re into classical allusions, I’d go for the flagellants of Perugia, 1259 whipping themselves over drought and famine. The distinction today is that the tenured climate scientists want to whip us, not themselves. #
If we’re into classical allusions, I’d go for the flagellants of Perugia, 1259 whipping themselves over drought and famine. The distinction today is that the tenured climate scientists want to whip us, not themselves. #

Climate scientists of the apocalyptic persuasion are melting faster than Greenland ice sheets.  They sob, they rage, they suffer from what shrinks now call “environmental melancholia” or “pre-traumatic stress disorder” — mental anguish about stuff that hasn’t happened. They just can’t understand why the public – i.e. the befuddled Australian electorate – laughs off  computer-generated scenarios of the end of civilisation and, maybe, the end of the human species.

The doyen of Australia’s rising catastrophists, Dr Joelle Gergis, disclosed to August’s edition of The Monthly how she sobs about the climate peril during her kerosene-fuelled air travel.[1] Then she switches to “volcanically-explosive rage” because the hoi polloi don’t want to pay for windmill electricity fantasies.

Environmental scientist Dr Katharine Wilkinson is quoted by Mother Jones (circ. 200,000):  “For some, it’s anger or rage. For me, it’s deep grief… There is no way for me not to have a broken heart most days.”  At a recent panel discussion, she  blurted, “I have no child and I have one dog, and thank God he’ll be dead in 10 years.”

Senior weepniks include Yvo de Boer, former Executive Secretary of the UN group controlling the IPCC. Running the Bali UN climate summit, he had to be led off the podium in tears after losing a procedural motion  “as he worked round the clock to get a deal to protect the Earth from warming.”

The scientists’ pals in the media have got infected too: “Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist turned journalist, has written about his own efforts to contend with climate-change–induced depression:  ‘It’s only getting worse. I confess: I need help.”

Mother Jones featured interviews last month with top climate scientists about their mental well-being in the face of public indifference. In a piece headed,  It’s the End of the World as They Know It: The distinct burden of being a climate scientist, Washington oceanographer Sarah Myhre talks of her “profound daily grief”.  She doesn’t have clinical depression, she explains, just “anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science”. She asked a senior climate scientist how he communicated to ordinary folk about the “frightening scenarios” of CO2 emissions. “I don’t talk to those people anymore,” she remembers him replying. “F*** those people.” After that, Myhre went to her hotel room and wept.

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