What do you say NOW, Climate Deniers?

The NYT magazine's tour de force proving climate change is incinerating our planet

The New York Times proves global warming is real!!!

1. What about the Canadian Wildfires???

It was, all told, an ecologically unprecedented event. By the end of September, more than half of the world’s countries could fit inside the land burned this year in the Canadian wilderness. 

In fact, The Canadian National Fire Database shows that forest fires have been declining in the last 20 years (despite Canada’s piss-poor fire management).

Up north, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t speaking the language of climate alarm, or who had passed through the crucible of the fire season without seeming hardened or darkened by it. 

That’s what we scientists call “evidence.”

Prophecies of the climate future often appear like a nightmare wave crashing over the sand castles of civilization and leaving behind an utterly new landscape in its wake. Wildfire looks like a similar portent: awesome horizons literally set ablaze. 

The fewer the facts, the more hyperbolic the language.

2. Neurotics can’t sleep at night for fear of climate change.

Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.

They ought to tell their patients about “long haul covid,” so they could replace one fear of a non-existent threat with another!

In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes. All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”

Many of these predictions have since been borne out. 

They took as their model some intriguing studies from the 1690s done in Salem, MA.