this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I've got a friend who's otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it's a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight ("It's been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!"), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that's just around the corner.
Also, he's incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.
I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I'm pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he'd self-harm out of fear of the future.
I honestly think he's just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It's scary, so it can't be true.
Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.
Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.
We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.
For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.