Let's go cuh-ray-zee!

Ultra-long read. I have no regrets.

When I was little, I cried a lot. I cried about everything that upset me even a little. So one day, Dad sat me down and told me this needed to change. From today’s dominant parenting perspective, he wasn’t following best practices but he was concerned that I was too easily overwhelmed by my feelings and emotions, and that was not good for me.

I have no clear memory of his exact words but I do remember the conversation and am grateful for it, so let’s hear it for the Silent Generation. They didn’t cry, they sucked it up. Of course, I grew out of crying, as most of us do. I learned not to just gush emotions but process them, as it were, deal with them, and try and turn them into constructive action.

Parenting has evolved since then, of course. Now, I understand, children are encouraged to express every emotion they have freely, without fear of judgment, and that’s not an entirely bad thing. What’s not so good, to my mind, is encouraging feelings and emotions in areas where this is, to put it mildly, inadvisable.

Science is one such area. In the bad old times, feelings and emotions had no place in scientific work. Scientists, like all people, had them, probably struggled with some of them in the course of their work, but were careful to not let these feelings and emotions affect said work. The bad old times are over now and, like everyone else, scientists appear to be encouraged to express their emotions — by other scientists. Because this is the Upside Down world and emotions can help science get better.

This from The Guardian: “Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work.” Also, “They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial.” I had to read this, so now so do you.

What we have here is a bunch of people who don’t really seem to know what science is all about, so they’re making it about emotions, whose interesting defining characteristic as opposed to feelings, is that they can be experienced both consciously and unconsciously. Feelings are the conscious stuff of dreams and nightmares. Emotions, we have little control over. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Because it is so difficult for these people to manage their destructive emotions, they are trying to turn them into something desirable and even productive, and I am lost for words trying to express the emotions that this pile of mental crap evokes in me. Well, polite words, anyway. Because these people, who are a total of three, went and published an actual paper about their having emotions.

In that paper, the Traumatised Trio wrote that “The dominant scientific perspective dictates that science is separate from society, and that science is, and always should be, objective. In this spirit, scientists’ emotions in the face of climate change and their own fears are seen as irrelevant.”

I’d say this is spot on and keep up the good observation work but of course that’s not all they said. Here’s a gem: “This [the discouragement of expressing emotions] forces climate scientists to ignore innate aspects of their humanity such as vulnerability, which is often a catalyst for not only courage and strength but critically for increasingly needed innovation that can improve, strengthen and transform research and methodologies.” Also, it’s normal to feel distress because they’re trying to solve “problems with serious consequences over which you have inadequate control.”

I can totally see what they mean because I’ve been there. I once opened the door to my teen room to find it full of firebugs and felt such distress and vulnerability that I grabbed the first thing I could think of, which happened to be my dad’s hammer, and started, yes, hammering the bugs into the floorboards. Yes, my distress and my feeling of vulnerability gave me courage and strength, and also innovation in the form of a hammer, as well as a methodology in the form of, well, using the hammer.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the best methodology for dealing with firebugs as evidenced by the fact that when my much saner mum entered the scene she went to fetch the bug spray, sharing none of my vulnerability and distress because she had no problem with bugs. I expect this would be considered a novel idea: instead of unleashing every single negative emotions maybe stop and invoke the powers of rationality occasionally, just to see how that works out.

Obviously, that’s not what the Traumatised Trio wants and at this point I feel like I’ve given them way too much attention but they would like it so just a few more words. What we have here are three people who have bought into their own propaganda to such an extent they cannot handle their emotions. What’s more, they feel they must insist that emotions are considered part of the scientific process.

As usual, it’s not their fault. It’s everyone else’s fault and anyway the traditional view of science as necessarily objective and unbiased is discriminatory, and poor marginalised communities (of emotional scientists), and something, and let us weep and do climate modelling at the same time, and don’t ask if our tears fell over the keyboard and caused a short circuit that bungled the data because it will spur more climate action. Emotions are science.

No, they really said it: “There is a need for a safe space to share feelings of anxiety, grief and burnout among climate scientists. It is likely that most scientists do not currently recognize how much they might need such an outlet. Let’s get started by talking to each other and acknowledging that science requires emotion too.” Evidence, you ask? Please.

Not only are emotions science but they are also instrumental for the abovementioned climate action, per another Guardian story and I don’t mind telling you I will need a full weekend of intellectual cleansing after this dangerous overdose on Guardian swill.

The author, who I understand is the thing’s environmental editor, begins with a standard enough gushing about bad weather, famine and drought, which I will spare you from because I’m not a total monster, only to continue with the following: “Yet, apparently we must still have hope. It is mandatory. Change is impossible, we are told, without positive thinking and a belief in a better future. That is the message of just about every politician and business leader I have interviewed in close to two decades on the environment beat.”

Sure thing, hope is sometimes the only feeling that keeps us going instead of sitting down in the middle of the road and refusing to make another step because we’ve grown brain blisters from the climate narrative. But, Jonathan Watts then goes on, “what if it is hope that is the problem? What if hope is the antidepressant that has been keeping us all comfortably numb when we have every right to be sad, worried, stirred to action or just plain angry?”

It’s easy to see where this story is going and Watts really doesn’t disappoint. He argues that negative feelings and emotions can be instrumental for dealing with climate change because “New research reveals that people who are experiencing climate-related distress are more likely to engage in collective action. History, by contrast, shows that manufactured optimism can lead to complacency and the shirking of responsibilities.”

The new research, in case you’re interested — and have a masochistic tendency — is this paper, authored by people from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the Center for Climate Change Communication, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Obviously, they are all accomplished scientists that follow the best practices as prescribed by the scientific method. (Note: the Nature page with the paper seems to have disappeared. Odd, that.)

I am not going to argue that negative emotions don’t spur people into action because I do my best to not be an idiot. We have seen plenty of examples of angry, distressed, and worried people taking action — interestingly enough against products of climate change-related policies and I’d love to see a paper on that.

Negative emotions — and feelings — totally spring us into action. But there is a nuance, as evil manipulative Russians say (more on them later). The nuance is between destructive action and constructive action. The farmers’ protests across Europe were constructive action in response to destructive energy policies. Anger and despair drove those protests but it was anger accompanied by a sharp sense of how the world works. If anyone has this sense sharpened properly, it’s the people tending the land, making our food. Also, real scientists.

The paint-throwing at art and buildings, and the road blockades are destructive action: all it does is increase general anger, emissions and the use of hydrocarbons, not that the people engaging in the action realise it. These people have those same feelings of anger and despair. What they lack is the awareness of how the world works. But they make up for it with heaps and heaps of feelings and emotions because as the Traumatised Trio tries to convince us, feelings and emotions are just as important as facts. It’s science.

Now, about those evil Russians. This from the FT: “Nato has warned that Russia is withholding vital data needed for scientists to model the scale and effects of climate change from the Arctic, a strategically important region that is the fastest warming part of the planet, as part of a wider misinformation campaign being waged against the west.”

I won’t lie, this sentence evoked certain emotions and feelings. Amusement was one of them. Incredulity was another. But let’s put these aside and look at the facts, as stated. NATO, a military alliance, is suddenly doing the climate change beat. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else. Ditto every other part of the world but who’s counting. And Russians are waging a misinformation campaign by pausing 21 out of 95 field bases set up to “gather statistics on the Arctic”. Pure evil.

“Without that information, the climate modelling isn’t going to be as effective as it can be and it is exactly [that] modelling that forms the basis for political decision makers when they are themselves working out how to sort out the problem and how to do the emission reduction,” some unnamed NATO official told the FT.

“It’s a quite nasty game where climate is now hostage also in this relationship.” After weaponising winter, dolphins, language and Russia’s economy, Putin is apparently also weaponising geography and holding the climate hostage. It’s also probably his fault that the official can’t string a dozen words together in a proper sentence.

Clearly, the official was under the influence of certain emotions and feelings, and his or her words will spark some in the reader, so much so that the reader may miss the important bit: climate modelling. Now, I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure 21 out of 95 sets of data cannot be that vital when you’re modelling the effects of climate change on the Arctic, assuming, of course, that Russia is not the only one with such bases in the region, not to mention all other regions that are warming faster than everywhere else around the world. What about their bases?

The story is, however, a very convenient excuse for the climate modelling data turning out to be inaccurate. It was those 21 paused Russian bases that turned the cart over, it’s not the inherent flaws and biases in the whole climate modelling scheme, featuring scientists’ feelings and emotions of looming doom that were so strong they forgot to account for petty details such as the heat island effect, incorrect measurements, and other irrelevant and unscientific stuff. That’s probably just another part of the disinformation campaign anyway.

This post is already obscenely long yet I can’t help but quickly address one final question. That question is: just how bad can the climate insanity crisis get? For the answer, I leave you in the capable hands of eugyppius for a chapter “In which a leading Green intellectual demands wide-scale deindustrialisation, permanent rationing, the prohibition of all new construction and the end of the banking system – all to save the climate.” Short version: It’s worse than some of you may have thought.