February 3, 2022
This week, the New York Times published a powerful article written by journalist Amanda Hess, entitled “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll.” Hess describes the counterintuitively negative effect that a barrage of upsetting facts can have on people’s willingness to combat climate change. She discusses the emotional and psychological toll that this “doomsday” mentality can have, paralyzing people with distress rather than motivating them to act.
Global warming, she writes, “represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity.” I found this article particularly compelling because it highlights a major shortcoming of anti-climate-change messaging in the media, explaining a reason so few people have made significant lifestyle changes to fight it: beyond climate deniers, there is a large demographic that views it as a problem too grievous to tackle. People have trouble staying motivated when they are presented with no hopeful outlook for the foreseeable future.
