July 11, 2015

I SENSE A PATTERN HERE: New York magazine notes that “Climate scientists are dealing with psychological problems,” though I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect:

One psychologist who works with climate scientists told Richardson they suffer from “pre-traumatic stress,” the overwhelming sense of anger, panic, and “obsessive-intrusive thoughts” that results when your work every day is to chart a planetary future that looks increasingly apocalyptic. Some climatologists merely report depression and feelings of hopelessness. Others, resigned to our shared fate, have written what amount to survival guides for a sort of Mad Max dystopian future where civilization has broken down under the pressures of resource scarcity and habitat erosion.

This kind of doom and gloom is not shared across the board, but nearly all climate scientists harbor serious doubts about the industrialized (and industrializing) world’s willingness to meet the challenges we face, which of course compounds their trauma. And perhaps the biggest indicator of that unwillingness is the constant attacks climate scientists endure at the hands of climate-change deniers — attacks that leave their own psychological bruises.

Meanwhile, another religion plots violent jihad against the infidels:

A few years ago at City Journal, Fred Siegel explored the last half century of “Progressives Against Progress:”

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

And just imagine what they’re telling their children about how awful the future will be.

 

Posted at 7:15 am by Ed Driscoll