Climate scare machine — happy to use people with a mental illness as a promotional tool:

So some people have a mental illness. Unbridled, baseless Climate-Panic makes that worse. Now those victims are advertising material:

Mike Pearl, Vice.

There’s nothing like a bit of unprecedented misery made possible by unprecedented history denial:

“This is painful,” [Renee] Lertzman said. “It’s super painful to be a human being right now at this point in history.”

We live longer than ever, are richer than ever, fly all over the world, and one of our biggest fears is losing our mobile phone. This article is wholly so far gone past the Rubicon that it makes Michael Mann look sensible. Seriously, by reviewing apocalyptic books and stories from mental health wards, the man who brought hockey-stick hype to the world appears to be the most normal person in the room.

This article is doing its best to normalize climate-depressive-obsession.

Step 1: pick one graphic tale

Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. “Though I don’t think I would have hurt myself, I didn’t know how to live with the fear of… the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn’t even look at him without breaking down,” Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility.

Step 2: do a sweeping generalization

Her case is extreme, but many people are suffering from what could be called “climate despair,” a sense that climate change is an unstoppable force that will render humanity extinct…

People are suffering from climate despair. Journalists are suffering from a lack of any supporting data, too. Coincidence?

Total supporting observations here: one group letter from Swedish psychologists, a teenage girl, plus a grab bag of anecdotes with no evidence to suggest that their mental illness was due to “climate” change.

Most of the article is just mere speculation, the rest is worse:

This despair could be a consequence of climate change being on more people’s minds than ever before.

No kidding. Probably due to stories like this one.

The article helps readers find the most bleak of bleak books, like The Uninhabitable Earth, or worse:

But nothing compares to the intense viral bleakness of Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, by Cumbria University professor Jem Bendell, a 2018 paper that Bendell self-published after an academic journal declined to publish it. The paper argues that total societal collapse is on its way, and describes life in the midst of that collapse with vivid sentences like, “You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.” The paper was so powerful that people have credited it for sending them to therapy or quitting their jobs to live closer to nature.

Then author MikePearl manages the impossible — makes Michael Mann look sensible

Nice advertising for Michael Mann as well as the Religion.:

These feelings can be powerful, but they aren’t grounded in hard science. [You mean like Michael Mann is?]

Michael Mann, the Penn State climatologist often credited for helping bring the public’s attention to the historical trends that are central to our understanding of climate change, calls this perspective “doomism,” and he wanted to make it clear the evidence doesn’t support it. “Unfortunately there’s some bad science behind much of the ‘doomism,’” he said. “There is no need to exaggerate or misstate what the science has to say.”

No need indeed, except when you need to hide a decline and bury the last 40 years of tree ring data.

When you need a heart surgeon get a heart surgeon, but when you need a therapist, find a believer:

For these patients, one important first step seems to be simply finding a therapist who acknowledges upfront that climate change isn’t a manifestation of mental illness.

According to Ruttan Walker, the activist who had the crisis in 2015, the perfect therapist would recognize that yes, mental illness is the problem at hand, but would simultaneously recognize the “enormity of the climate crisis.”

They might give you handy clues like this:

… there’s another, much older and simpler way to process despair. Give into it for a moment. Cry it out. Let yourself acknowledge how fucking bad it all is, and how a lot of it is never, ever getting better. In short: grieve.

If they asked people with a proven track record of being immune from climate despair — they’d ask a skeptic. Jo Nova recommends reading real history books as a way of feeling jubilantly thrilled for being born during a non-event non-crisis with decades of what was actually pretty good weather.

Failing that, read a skeptic blog!

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