Turning up the Heat on the Psychology of Climate Change

Fly on the Wall

Turning up the Heat on the Psychology of Climate Change

Like delicate bromeliads insufficiently misted in a dry climate, wilted and desolate and displeased as they gaze out from a sunny windowsill, we humans bear a suffering countenance on a warming planet.  Unlike flora and fauna in nature, however, heat impacts us in a psychological, as well as physiological, arena.  Contesting dire predictions about the future of our species and faced with myriad mental and digital images of a world on fire, requires that we press our academic emergency response abilities into purpose.  Critical thought must never be extinguished, if we are to make good on the promise of university studies.

Just as the phrase you kill me implies a disturbing or humorous statement made by an Other, the deathly impacts of a heat wave carry corollary complaints, griping and neurosis.  This is nothing new, but what has changed is the perception that something unnatural is at work anytime a day becomes sunny and hot.  Likewise, a summer rainstorm carries the sighing caveat that, like a forlorn, lovelorn teen receiving a hug from a bestie, we needed it.  After all, we collectively are told that “a 1 degree increase in temperature is associated with a 0.9% increase in mental health-related morbidity”.  By such a metric each moment of increasing warmth as the dawn sun bakes its way across the earth outside our door is not an invitation to frolic, but a warning of impending doom.  The clock seems to be ticking on our demise right where a sunny expanse of summer possibility held sway.

Reality, though it can feel like it bites, more reasonably can be seen as a consistent nibble—especially when every degree of heat counts as another footstep toward the swaying rope of the climate gallows.  An anxiety-ridden existence, if ever there was.  Yet, despite ongoing forest fire tragedies, comparatively few Canadians literally live within dog-walking distance of a forest that could burn down their homes.  Our ongoing sense of impending danger is more due to media scare tactics designed to increase viewership and thereby advertising profits than to warn of literal impending danger.

Even global heat records, though serious, are a bit tough to put in full perspective given the wavering fluctuations hard to quantify in the ice and sediment record.  While we may be in the hottest of possible times, scientists are at pains to point out that “there are no detailed temperature records extending back 100,000 years, so we don’t know for sure.” In many places temperature records only go back 50 years and, where studies occur, “bottom currents and burrowing organisms can mix the sediment, blurring any short-term temperature spikes.  For another, the timeline for each record is not known precisely, so when multiple records are averaged together to estimate past global temperature, fine-scale fluctuations can be cancelled out.  Because of this, paleoclimate scientists are reluctant to compare the long-term record of past temperature with short-term extremes.” In any case, the results of burning fossil fuels are basically permanent.  For centuries to come, what we’ve done will result in a warmer climate.  Yet the facts and data aren’t what causes such concern per se; our psychological state of climate anxiety taps into something deeper in the darkest recesses of our humanity

So, while the facts of fluctuations through the eons are hard to pin down, the consequences of climate anxiety are very real.  Even at the best of times we abide in a twitchy and nerve-wracked mammalian mental warzone, simply owing to the natural risk aversion baked into our brains.  But now, due to the many floods, typhoons, tornadoes, and hurricanes we see on our screens, we can’t easily parse out the reality of our individual lives from the collective royal we of our species as a whole.  Plus, we want to show we care and have normal empathy; only a sociopath would turn a blind eye to the climate misery of others, right?  So our best intentions and instinctual risk aversion leave us in an ironic fix in terms of mental health.  Just as we feel more and more emotionally bonded within a global village of bipeds is when we most need a healthy reality check about the relative affluence, comfort, and safety of our First World Problem-laced lives.  Empathy is not, after all, positive if it reduces us to a me-too sense of calamity and panic.

Seeing how we aren’t all equally affected in society and on the planet can be truly empowering.   The best we can do is to not join in the melee of climate fear and loathing.  Studies show that those dealing with real crises, rather than the larger existential fear about the future that has been part of modernity since the first nuclear bombs were dropped, have negative psychosocial outcomes that we mirror to our peril.  “The severity and duration of mental disorders following natural disasters may be increased by psychosocial stressors such as personal and financial loss and forced migration, by vulnerabilities such as pre-existing mental disorders and low social support, and by insufficient mental health care.”

Here at AU, we tend to live far from destitution, certainly removed from the literal homelessness of those we see if we help out at our local food bank.  In my time in such a role I was amazed at the caring and generous encounters I had and the way in which many food bank clients embraced the concept of university education.   For them the dream of a higher education, and life calling, was not so reducible to cynical and snide remarks about a diploma being merely a sheet of paper.  For the truly impoverished in our society education and betterment is a luxury worth hoping for, not one that comes a distant third behind take-home income and maintenance of social status.  If I’d just wallowed at home and made the problems of others my own, without realizing that their problems were different than mine, I’d have been no help at all.

To our underprivileged Canadian peers climate dangers are far more directly felt than by doom scrolling through a series of melodramatic memes about the end of the world: “individuals with lower socioeconomic status have a higher exposure to extreme heat and air pollution, are at increased risk of social isolation and discrimination, and have a higher risk of mental disorders, while individuals with higher socioeconomic status may be better protected against environmental stressors, experience less social adversity, and have lower barriers to access healthcare.”

Other calamities ensue as our climate warms:

“The prevalence of substance use may be higher among individuals experiencing forced migration in camp settings, which are characterized by significant psychosocial challenges, compared to community settings…the stress of social isolation and discrimination may be increased for migrants in neighbourhoods with a lower proportion of individuals of similar origin, which is associated with an increased risk of psychosis.”

Apparently, if we find ourselves a cultural, ethnic, or ideological minority in our given distance education setting, we may come to see ourselves as outsiders literally to the whole planet!  But how can it be that we denizens of planet earth see our world as so irremediably uncomfortable?  Is humanity going crazy while making the planet insane?  Perhaps something deeper is going on that reflects something in our human psyche, something that a social science education can uncover.  A positive assessment and review and personal action plan can only augment a better state of mental health as we move into the future.

References
Liu et al.  (2021).  ‘Is there an association between hot weather and poor mental health outcomes? A systematic review and meta-analysis’.  ScienceDirect.  Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021001586
Kaufman, D.  (2023).  ‘Is it really hotter now than anytime in 100 000 years?’.  The Conversation.  Retrieved from https://www.routledge.com/Madness-and-Civilization/Foucault/p/book/9780415253857
and https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/18/911/2022/
and https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-2021-the-physical-science-basis/technical-summary/C7CCEAD271B10F328C6E50C03A0F4F02