Global warming freak out

Last week, I had a global warming freak-out.

So being trained in statistics, I went to find a bigger sample of people. First I tried a straw poll of other parents at the school pickup waiting area revealed that most of them have had one too in the last 12 months too. Emily’s mum confessed to a nightmare about post-apocalyptic life in a bunker in a verdant Antarctica. James’s dad freaked out after reading an article about brown coal, and promptly called a solar company to get a quote on a rooftop PV array. On the spot, Emily’s mum asked James’s dad for the solar company’s number. Perhaps having young kids makes parents feel like we are not individuals, instead our kids are the tip of a genetic tendril stretching into the future. And in a +5°C world, we fear there’s not much of a future for them.

And then Sam’s Mum told us about her freak-out: that the smart meter recently installed on the outside of her bedroom wall was giving her brain cancer.

Then Lachie’s mum started talking about her sister’s anxiety about being tailgated by taxis.

All of a sudden, the conversation shifted into a very typical school pickup set of topics: rotating and apparently disconnected anecdotes about other peoples’ wacky anxieties and the equally wacky measures they employ to cope with them.

So the next day, I tried another experiment: I asked about global warming fears at the lunch table at work. I sat with about 10 men, all employed as infrastructure engineers, ranging in age from 22 to 60+ (I’m too polite to ask).

Once again, two people started to talk about their genuine freak-outs and subsequent sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle measures, and then somebody shifted the pattern. This time, two programmers in their mid-30’s started joking about the potential threat to hops production and thus to the supply of BEER! Oh no save the BEER! they said, and led us onwards into stereotypical blokey alcohol and sport driven conversation.

On a data set of two, my working theory was this. Discussing global warming is like holding onto a wet eel - we can’t get a grip. Many people have a sense of unease, and will discuss fears and findings and scenarios one-to-one, but in a group there is always someone who will divert and unravel the conversation, and maybe the rest of us are all too happy to be released from thinking about it.

So I went looking for data point number three: A group of my old uni friends: several environmental science graduates now consulting to industries like mining or contaminated land, several doctors, a few engineers, a few biomedical scientists, a few others. All but two are parents of young kids. Once I told my freak-out story and opened the conversation, it was not derailed. They were all very sure that climate change is real, here now, and a big problem.  The enviro scientists kept producing stories about recent climate data, and how the models are surprisingly accurate. One of the doctors held our complete attention for 25 minutes talking on link between economic development, population health, and carbon output. We discussed drought and storms and the models for shifting weather patterns, food shortage, transport challenges, and the disproportionate political power of vested interests industries like mining and petrochemical energy. We shared what we knew about carbon capture and storage, energy generation and demand side management of fixed electricity loads, how cholera spreads after a natural disaster, and where our infrastructure and lifestyles are most vulnerable to gradual climate change, or larger more frequent catastropic weather events. Every one of us, in our professional life, had come across a reason to think very seriously about man-made climate change and what might be done, is being done, isn’t being done.

But in several hours of discussion we never touched on what all this might mean for our kids. It was just too scary, and too easy to give up hope.

In my view, the problem at the heart of the “climate debate” is this.

1. Climate scientists know that climate change is happening, due to human emissions of CO2. We know that the global climate system is a bit like a freight train: heavy and slow to start, but we’ve got the accelerator up full-bore, and just because we don’t know what the top line speed is or when it’s going to get there, we know that top line speed is
   a)    very bad for most life on this planet, and 
   b)   really very hard to slow down.
2. A small but increasing number of professionals are finding that their work touches on how climate change impacts on people. Actuaries calculating insurance risks need to take increased frequencies of ‘freak’ events. Botanists and zoologists are consistently discovering species shifting into new territories following climate change: Victorian alpine species are at risk from snow-less winters, and the ‘Cockroach Line’ has almost shifted from Canberra to as far south as Melbourne. A civil engineer spoke about how they’ve been redesigning our stormwater and sewerage systems for higher tides. and bigger floods from storms.
    
3. Psychologists have identified, and are starting to discuss, a new type of illness:
   Climate Anxiety.
   It’s particularly prevalent in certain demographics: late adolescents and young adults (whose brains, it turns out, are supremely adapted to thinking about ‘big picture’ issues like God and death and climate change); mothers of children under 5 (whose brains, it turns out, are triggered by pregnancy hormones to adapt to protecting their children and learning to manage daily life with the huge adjustment that the little one’s arrival entails); those with a history of anxiety issues (whose brains are flooded with anxiety neurotransmitters anyway!) and the very old (whose brains haven’t particularly been identified as changing, but whose thoughts are suddenly turning to God and death and the past that they’ve witnessed and the future of their bloodline and their loved ones).
4. Many of the rest of us don’t want to think about it. We just want to work, and get paid, and buy stuff hoping it will make us happy, and watch TV in the evenings so we don’t have to think. And we are the ones with jokes about beer, stories about taxis, thousands of ways of shutting down the conversation before that third tentative person can put their thoughts into words for the first time.

Here’s the thing. The freight train is getting faster. It’s about bloody time we start, and persist with, conversations about what to do next. Don't let others shut you down.