The Case Against Climate Doomism
What happens when climate despair sets in?
Welcome to the Climate Conscious Parent.
This newsletter sets out to help readers who are concerned about the climate crisis (you!) understand, cope with, and address the challenges which plague the climate conscious parent.
The most fundamental of these challenges — the one that is, perhaps, the most insidious — is the rising threat of climate despair, also sometimes called futilitarianism, climate nihilism, climate fatalism, climate alarmism, or simply doomism.
In my own wild and precious life, I’ve seen how having a child can sharpen and magnify fears about the future — to the point of creating real mental health challenges for many parents (myself included). My academic and professional relationship with the climate crisis became intensely personal upon the birth of my daughter, Adelaide, back in 2018. I found myself with an acute case of what is often called climate anxiety.
As a professional climate communicator, I already knew that my feelings of rage, grief, sadness, and fear were a natural reaction to the ongoing crisis. What else makes sense in the face of a threat so vast, so potentially catastrophic? The crisis has a way of settling on you with the slow inevitably of an advancing glacier.
But I also knew a lot about the climate solutions which are underway all over the world. There are still plenty of reasons to be hopeful about our children’s future, and on those hopes we can build a ladder out of despair.
The doomism idea — that climate change is far too vast and complex a problem, that the future has already been lost, and that the apocalypse is inevitable — is a short train to Apathyville, and the best thing to happen to fossil fuels since climate denial.
And yet, anyone who closely follows the climate crisis knows that doomism’s broad appeal lies partly in its proximity to reality. While doomism is not based on what the actual science is telling us, the real facts are still fairly terrifying — and for those who’ve only ever read the headlines, or who are cynical by nature, it would be easy to assume that our fate is already sealed.
At the same time that I was coping with my own bout of climate despair, doomism was gaining more mainstream traction. Widely circulated articles by Jem Bendell, Jonathan Franzen, and others were amplifying the natural fears of the climate conscious set. The “Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells was one of these, and was the most read article in the history of New York Magazine.
Everywhere I look these days, I see young people and left-leaning adults succumbing to a debilitating apathy toward climate action. My own feed is peppered with friends and acquaintances lamenting the death of our livable future. The comedian Bo Burnham, an icon for both Gen Z and millennials and arguably one of the most evocative young voices in America today, sang these sad lines in his recent Netflix special Inside:
“You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit.
You say the whole world’s ending – honey, it already did.
You’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried.
Got it? Good. Now get inside.”
The spread of doomism is a boon to the status quo, the fossil fuel companies, and everyone else with an entrenched interest in avoiding climate action. Climate communication research has shown, and most people understand instinctively, that there is no action in the face of apathy . . . if we are to take collective action, we must have hope. And make no mistake about it: collective action is what we need.
So let’s kick off this brand new newsletter with a brief look at why the ideas of the doomsayers are patently false.
The case against climate doomism
Michael E. Mann, renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War, said this in a recent interview:
“What is so pernicious about [doom-mongering] is that it seeks to weaponize environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But ‘too late’ narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of the science...If the science objectively demonstrated it was too late to limit warming below catastrophic levels, that would be one thing and we scientists would be faithful to that. But science doesn’t say that.”
The truth, based on the best available science, is that there is still so much that we can do to reduce the impacts of climate change on our planet and on our families. The most critical of these steps is to call for a just and swift transition to a clean energy economy.
And if you doubt that the movement for a clean energy future can make a difference, look no further than the news this week about the final death of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project once deemed “inevitable” by pundits and politicians alike, and now finally put to rest by the collective work of activists.
But for now, back to the issue at hand — the false fundamentals of doomism.
Let’s start with credibility. The viral doomists and their vivid case for fatalism has been thoroughly debunked by entire teams of climate scientists and related experts. Climate Feedback — a fantastic resource if you need a credible, fact-based analysis of a climate article — took a thorough look at the aforementioned David Wallace-Wells article from New York Magazine, and found its “overall scientific credibility” to be “low.” Three scientific researchers and Extinction Rebellion activists analyzed Jem Bendell’s self-published paper “Deep Adaptation” and also found its basic assertions to be out of alignment with the latest science.
As an example of how they get the science wrong, the doomists love to cite a few stray sources indicating that a “methane bomb” is waiting for us under the melting Arctic ice, and will result in a devastating feedback loop and runaway warming scenario. However, those sources have been debunked many times over, and a comprehensive review of the science concluded that the scenario is still far from likely.
As Mann explains in The New Climate Wars, the most state-of-the-art climate models provide “no support at all” for runaway warming scenarios, even if we continue on “business as usual” (an oft-used term in the field that refers to a scenario where we do nothing beyond our current practices to lower greenhouse gas emissions).
While I was reading through the various expert rebuttals to the viral doomists, a single theme kept shining through. While the doomsayers herald a total collapse as inevitable and declare there is nothing left we can do about it, the actual science says that the degree to which climate change further disrupts our planet is still up to us.
In other words, every incremental step we take toward decarbonization can result in incrementally better outcomes, and the more we decarbonize and the faster we do it, the better off our children and future generations will be.
Many of those incremental steps are underway even as I write this (more on this in future posts). And several experts and institutions have released roadmaps that detail exactly how we can quickly reduce carbon pollution — including this recent groundbreaking Net Zero by 2050 roadmap from the International Energy Agency.
So there is no valid reason to believe that catastrophe is inevitable. There is still so much we can yet do to protect and improve the world our children and grandchildren will grow up in.
Talk to you next time,
Jessica
TL;DR
Climate doomism only serves the fossil fuel industry. It is scientifically unsound, breeds apathy and fatalism, and prevents otherwise intelligent and caring people from taking action to create a better future. In other words: it’s bullshit.
Hopey Changey News
In each issue of the Climate Conscious Parent, I’ll share one piece of “hopey changey” news (remember Sarah Palin, or are you much younger and cooler than I am?).
This week I’m thrilled and relieved to share that the Keystone XL pipeline is finally well and truly dead, after the climate movement waged a 10+ year fight to keep it from transporting dangerous tar sands oil. As activist Matt Leonard says in this retrospective on the fight and its final victory, “its defeat is a testament to what movement building and direct action can accomplish.” And if you’re worried about the jobs that were lost, look out for an upcoming post about the future of the fossil fuel workforce.
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Thanks! Well done, and necessary. Not a parent, but someone who thinks a good deal about responsibility to the future, and this is a very encouraging post.