No Obit For Earth As Savants Battle Climate Doom Chatter

It’s not the end of the world. It only seems that way. Climate change is going to get worse, but as gloomy as the latest scientific reports are, including today’s from the United Nations (UN), scientist after scientist stresses that curbing global warming is not hopeless, Seth Borenstein reported for Associated Press (AP) early on April 5, 2022.

Photo Insert: As far as Mother Earth goes, scientists refuse to plan the funeral before her body dies.

After decades of trying to get the public’s attention, spur action by governments and fight against organized movements denying the science, climate researchers say they have a new fight on their hands: doomism.

It’s the feeling that nothing can be done, so why bother. It’s young people publicly swearing off having children because of climate change. University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill noticed in 2018 fewer people telling her climate change isn’t real and more “people that we now call doomers that you know believe that nothing can be done.”

Gill says it is just not true. “I refuse to write off or write an obituary for something that’s still alive,” Gill told AP, referring to the Earth. “We are not through a threshold or past the threshold. There’s no such thing as pass-fail when it comes to the climate crisis. It’s really, really, really hard to walk people back from that ledge,” she said.

Doomism “is definitely a thing,” said Wooster College psychology professor Susan Clayton, who studies climate change anxiety and spoke at a conference in Norway last week that addressed the issue.

“It’s a way of saying ‘I don’t have to go to the effort of making changes because there’s nothing I can do anyway.’” Gill and six other scientists who talked with AP about doomism aren’t sugarcoating the escalating harm to the climate from accumulating emissions. But that doesn’t make it hopeless, they said.

“Everybody knows it’s going to get worse,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis. “We can do a lot to make it less bad than the worst case scenario.”

“It’s not that they’re saying you are condemned to a future of destruction and increasing misery,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate secretary who helped forge the 2015 Paris climate agreement and now runs an organization called Global Optimism.

“What they’re saying is ’the business-as-usual path ... is an atlas of misery’ or a future of increasing destruction. But we don’t have to choose that. And that’s the piece, the second piece, that sort of always gets dropped out of the conversation.”

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