Tag Archives: climate grief

Embracing your Inner Communist Can Help with Climate Grief?

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… I get them to envision a world that is fair; where everyone has enough resources to meet their needs. I ask them what they can do now to contribute to this world, and ask them to move towards this. …”

As a psychologist I have witnessed a surge in climate grief. This is what I tell my clients

Carly Dober
Sat 13 Jan 2024 01.00 AEDTLast modified on Sat 13 Jan 2024 11.35 AEDT

…

“It sucks… and it’s only going to get worse,” my client says, disbelief colouring their facial expression.

I’m inclined to agree, it does suck.

I can feel my hands starting to get clammy as my memory flashes back to the catastrophic climate events I’ve watched unfold recently.

Bearing witness to the climate crisis can feel surreal at times, yet I do not mention this to my client. I have a job to do, and it is not to escalate their rational anxieties and fears, it is to manage what is manageable; to teach coping strategies, to encourage connection to nature and social relationships, to channel their grief into sustainable action that feels meaningful.

…

I work within an eco-psychological framework, in which humans’ psychological interdependence with the rest of nature is a focus, along with the implications for identity, health and well-being. What these young people deeply grasp is that humans are not separate from nature – we are nature.

…

I constantly return to the message that there is so much beauty and life in the world that can be saved – and is absolutely worth fighting for. I encourage people to curate their social media feeds and to seek out good news stories about the climate action around the world. I get them to envision a world that is fair; where everyone has enough resources to meet their needs. I ask them what they can do now to contribute to this world, and ask them to move towards this.

I talk to them about connection with like minded peers, and joining a local climate action group. I talk to them about nature based therapies- hiking, swimming, listening and watching wildlife, attending beach clean ups and tree planting days. I talk to them about choosing financial institutions to bank with that rule out funding fossil fuel projects. I encourage mindfulness, enjoying the present moment, working through their grief through art, and working through their stress, rage and anxiety with movement.

…

Carly Dober is a psychologist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. You can see more of her work here IG @enrichinglivespsychologyRead more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/13/climate-change-crisis-fears-despair-younger-generations-impact

What a sad bunch of fantasists. The only problem with global warming in Melbourne where psychologist Carly Dober is based, is Melbourne is not getting enough.

Melbourne, perched on the cold South Eastern edge of the Australian mainland, is one of the coldest and wettest major cities in Australia. I visited Victoria and Melbourne a few weeks ago, just before Christmas. At the time I visited there was no sign of the Southern Hemisphere Summer, we were wearing sweaters and long sleeve light overcoats, especially in the evening. I had to buy some winter woolies, we forgot to pack warm enough clothes for Melbourne Summer.

It wasn’t until we’d travelled over 700 miles north of Melbourne, towards the equator, that we finally switched back to Summer clothes.

Looking at the weather report it looks like Summer finally arrived after we left – but Melbourne’s famously variable weather means even on hot days, you should keep a warm coat handy, just in case.

In the highlands just to the North West of Melbourne, it’s entirely possible to experience snow in the first month of Summer. A few years ago, we had a Summer holiday near Daylesford, about 1.5 hours drive North West of Melbourne, elevation around 2000ft. Don’t get me wrong, we had a lovely time, but those two weeks we spent in Summer in the Victorian highlands, we burned an entire large trailer load of wood trying to stay warm, especially on nights it snowed.

If there is one part of Australia which could really use a little global warming, that would be Melbourne and the rest of Victoria.

More Nauseating Climate Grief from the Guardian

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t strativarius; Another moan for a dying planet…

Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet

David Shearman
Wed 5 Jul 2023 01.00 AESTO

Our leaders’ addiction to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources has me paralysed with fear and solastalgia

…

In some, like Queen Victoria, the loss of a partner may cause lifelong grief with self-imposed withdrawal and solitude.

I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged.

My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Winton’s series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earth’s last truly wild and intact places. I use the word “tried” because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon.

Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner.

I suspect that this grief had probably festered in my brain since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 in South Australia and Victoria, which caused 75 deaths and enormous structural and environmental damage. I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation. The 2019-20 bushfires overwhelmed me when at least 33 people died, with smoke pollution killing many more, and more than 3 billion native animals died or were displaced.

…

We are slowly coming to realise that grieving for country is always with Aboriginal people and probably increasingly as the encroachment on their environment has advanced over the 200 years since our invasion. It must be aggravated by their realisation that their 60,000 years of sustaining an environment is mostly dismissed by a so-called advanced civilisation which takes little notice of their experience and knowledge.

…

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet

The part which really got me is the inference that the Ash Wednesday bushfire was bad, that it was somehow an encroachment on the land custodianship of traditional owners.

The Ash Wednesday fire was bad, around 75 people lost their lives.

But the truth is Aboriginals before white men arrived lit more fires than anyone.

… Saw several smooks along shore before dark and two or 3 times afire in the night. we lay becalm’d driving in before the Sea untill 1 oClock AM at which time we got a breeze from the land with which we steer’d NE being then in 38 fathom water – At Noon it fell little wind and Veerd to NEBN, we being than in the Latitude of 34°..10’ and Longitude 208°.27’ Wt and about 5 Leags from the land which extended from S-37° Wt to N1/2E. In this Latitude are some white clifts which rise perpendicularly from the sea to a moderate height …

Source: The Journal of Captain Cook, 26 April, 1770

Aboriginals claim they set lots of fires because of their cultural land management wisdom, though all the free BBQ food left behind by the fire might have been an additional bonus.

To be fair, the fires lit by Aboriginals were likely a lot less damaging than the Ash Wednesday fire, because they lit fires so frequently. Frequent fires reduced the fuel load, which reduces the intensity of fires. So maybe there was some wisdom involved.

So why expose you, the WUWT audience, to yet more public climate grief?

Because I believe a response has to be made. A very experienced politician once explained to me that you have to challenge every point, otherwise that point stands. Because such pieces sometimes reach people.

None of us will ever be free, if we completely ignore such appeals, if we always let such appeals to public sympathy go unanswered and unchallenged.

Your Taxes at Work: ‘Eco-Anxiety’ Counseling

From Watts Up With That?

Climate doomsayers and cancel culture work to justify counseling for bureaucrats’ climate grief

Paul Driessen

US Fish and Wildlife Service employees are struggling to cope with feelings of trauma and loss over the world’s changing climates and imperiled environments. Their work repeatedly confronts them with ecological changes, but even a sense of “anticipated loss” perhaps decades from now requires compassionate help. Or so the FWS and American Psychological Association tell us.

The FWS is thus offering paid leave to employees who attend “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” training. When the House Natural Resources Committee called the sessions a colossal waste of money, the agency downplayed their cost and scope. But naturally the “woke” programs don’t end there.

FWS Director Martha Williams is also pushing diversity-equity-inclusion-LBGTQ programs as the agency’s “number one priority” (or perhaps number two, after climate change). Employees can take as much paid time off as needed for DEI and “gay pride” programs and eco-anguish counseling.

There’s no word about programs to help employees deal with widespread habitat and wildlife destruction that will result from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, due to “net zero” policies implemented in the name of averting the “climate crisis.” Apparently no programs offer paid leave to participate in “conservative pride” campaigns or study Earth’s historic ice ages, warm periods, little ice ages and decades-long droughts.

That’s hardly surprising. The FWS and Interior Department were getting eco-centric and anti-fossil-fuel when I worked there 35 years ago. Like American and Western society in general, their culture has simply gotten more noticeably and intolerantly devoted to extreme environmentalist agendas since then.

Movies, television and news stories, constant instruction in what to think, rather than how to think, an absence of religion and ethics in many schools and homes, and incessant themes of inequality, victimhood and global doom foster widespread tension, anxiety and depression. They leave too many children, teens and adults unable to cope with life and setbacks, less respectful of authority and human life, inured to violence, and aggressively intolerant of opinions that differ from their own ideologies and agendas.

Even before they were forced to endure Covid-induced lockdowns, nearly 20% of Americans were taking antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, some linked to precipitating acts of violence; a third of high school students experienced prolonged anxiety, depression and hopelessness; and almost one in five teenagers had contemplated suicide.

Social isolation, minimal physical and outdoor activity, video games and reading self-selected online media have amplified depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness” in America and many Western countries. Also hardly surprising, the problems are increasingly blamed on climate change.

“Climate grief is real,” self-proclaimed experts insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people ages 16-25 from the USA and other countries told “climate anxiety” and “climate depression” investigators. Many children have climate nightmares.

“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” claims a NASA scientist and climate activist who’s certain we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.” He’s not alone in being convinced that every extreme weather event and ecological calamity today is due to or made worse by fossil fuel and agricultural emissions.

“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” wailed a four-year-old who’s clearly been indoctrinated already. “The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead.”

Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of a “climate-ravaged future.” Parents, teens and even children increasingly consider suicide.

At least one psychologist has based his entire practice on addressing climate psychoses. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.

There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, other “experts” insist: Governments must “take action now” to “end the climate crisis,” to eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos” that threatens us. Otherwise the epidemic of anxiety, depression, pills, climate grief and suicide will steadily worsen.

This is nonsense, insanity. We don’t have a climate crisis.We have a climate fear-mongering crisis.

We don’t need to “fix” exaggerated and over-hyped climate problems. We need to end the junk science, the indoctrination dominating news stories and classroom discussions about energy and climate change, the censorship that prevents alternative, reality-based facts and voices from being heard, the massive government funding of one side of this crucial debate.

Claims of “unprecedented” temperatures and extreme weather, floods and droughts have no basis in real-world evidence. The “climate crisis” exists in greenhouse-gas-focused computer models, headlines and hype, not in reality. There is no unprecedented upward trend in the frequency of violent US tornados, or US landfalling hurricanes, for example – though the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes hitting the United States between Wilma (October 2005) and Harvey (August 2017) is an all-time record.

Unfortunately, viewpoints, evidence and experts challenging climate crisis claims are too often banished from school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions.

President Biden’s “national climate advisor” worked closely with Big Tech and news organizations, to suppress facts about climate change, fossil fuels, and the acreage, raw materials and mining required for wind, solar and battery power. Meta (Facebook), YouTube, pre-Musk Twitter and other companies routinely help to deplatform, demonetize and censor anyone contesting crisis-promoting claims.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “summaries for policy makers” often misrepresent scientific findings and advance frightening but unsupported scenarios about Earth’s future climate. The IPCC also ignores studies that demonstrate how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide improves plant growth and wildlife habitats, how climate has changed repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, and that eliminating fossil fuels would result in extensive ecological damage from wind, solar, battery and transmission line mining and installations.

China, India and other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to improve their economies and lift billions out of poverty. China dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains, making the West increasingly reliant on China for energy, economy and national defense needs – via Chinese mines, processing plants and factories that operate under minimal standards for pollution control, habitat destruction, and slave and child labor. As a result:

* Nothing the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia do will have any effect on global fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.

* Western foreign and domestic policy options will be restricted by reliance on adversarial nations for pseudo-renewable energy materials and technologies.

* Prices for energy, goods and services will skyrocket, because every megawatt of wind and solar must be duplicated with backup batteries or generators.

* Politicians and bureaucrats – egged on by loud, often violent mobs – will increasingly dictate our energy consumption, living standards, home sizes, vacations, and what we can eat, drink, drive and buy.

These are the real existential threats to democracy, society, humanity and planet. Parents, voters, legislators and judges concerned about our future must take action now to stop this insanity.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.