Researchers have been using all this fancy science jargon like "human influence," "observed warming" and "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts" to describe the devastating effects of global warming on the Earth, making it that much easier for big corporations, government officials and other naysayers to deny that the planet is indeed warming. So, in hopes of bringing this climate change crisis down to the rest of humankind's level, a group of scientists penned letters describing how global warming and efforts to ignore or deny it makes them feel—and, well, they're feeling it.
Australian climate scientists shared their feelings about the rapidly warming planet with Joe Duggan, a master's student at the Australian National University's Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Duggan told Mother Jones he "wanted to give scientists the chance to step away from the dry data and clinical prose that laypeople find so hard to engage with," noting on his site that he's "here to show that these scientists aren’t nameless, faceless boffins. They’re real people. They get it. And they want us to act."
From Dr Ailie Gallant of Monash University:
I feel nervous. I get worried and anxious, but also a little curious. The curiosity is a strange, paradoxical feeling that I sometimes feel guilty about. After all, this is the future of the people I love.
I get frustrated a lot; by the knowns, the unknowns, and the lack of action. I get angry at the invalid opinions that are all-pervasive in this age of indiscriminant information, where evidence seems to play second fiddle to whomever can shout the loudest. I often feel like shouting…
But would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years.
I hate feeling helpless. I’m ashamed to say that, sometimes, my frustration leads to apathy. I hate feeling apathetic.
From Alex Sen Gupta of the University of South Wales:
I feel betrayed by our leaders who show no leadership and who place ideology above evidence, willing to say anything to peddle their agendas - leaders who are at best negligent and at worst complicit in allowing this to happen with full knowledge of likely consequences. I feel bemused. That scientists who have spent years or decades dedicated to understanding how it all works are given the same credibility as poleticians, [sic] media commentators and industry spokes people with obvious vested interests and whose only credential is their ability to read discredited blogs.
From Katrin Meissner of the Australian Research Council:
It scares me more than anything else. I see a group of people sitting in a boat, happily waving, taking pictures on the way, not knowing that this boat is floating right into a powerful and deadly waterfall. It is still time to pull out of the stream. We might lose some boat equipment but we might be able to save the people in the boat. But no one acts.
And in a letter to Earth, from Professor Brendan G. Mackey, PhD:
I’m really sorry about the last couple of 100 years - we’ve really stuffed things up haven’t we! I though we climate scientist might be able to save the day but alas no one really took as seriously. Everyone wants to keep opening new coal mines and for some reason that escapes me are happy to ignore the fact that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Well, no one can say we didn’t try!
You can find all the letters on Duggan's website, and if these #ClimateSads aren't enough to convince you that we're just a few outsourced factories away from our own doom, familiarize yourself with studies released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of which point to a terrifying future should humans fail to drastically reduce their carbon footprint, which we seem alarmingly incapable of doing.
[h/t Mother Jones]
