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Climate Change is making us mental — fear of “storms” undoing evolution!

These days people are practically getting post traumatic climate disorder after bouts of extreme weather. More pointlessly, some are getting pre-traumatic stress from events that haven’t even happened.

Makes you wonder how humanity survived the ice ages every time a storm hit — no fire department, no Hurricane-Relief funds, no phones, no food stores, no doctors. Electricity out for 90,000 years.

Americans’ Mental Health is Latest Victim of Changing Climate (Op-Ed)

For months after Hurricane Sandy sent nearly six feet of water surging into her home in Long Beach, N.Y. — an oceanfront city along Long Island’ s south shore — retired art teacher Marcia Bard Isman woke up many mornings feeling anxious and nauseated. She had headaches, and inexplicable bouts of sadness. She found herself crying for no apparent reason.

“I would feel really sad, and that’s just not me,” she said. “I felt like the joy was out of my life. I still haven’t recaptured it.”

What Isman is experiencing is one of the little-recognized consequences of climate change, the mental anguish experienced by survivors in the aftermath of extreme and sometimes violent weather and other natural disasters. The emotional toll of global warming is expected to become a national — and potentially global — crisis that many mental health experts warn could prove far more serious than its physical and environmental effects.

There goes evolution…

It’s hard to get more over the top that Lise Van Susteren a forensic psychiatrist and one of the report’s authors:

“We are undoing millions of years of evolution, and the situation is a catastrophe,” she said. “Climate activists on the front lines are desperate to convey this to the public, but are told to be wary of paralyzing people with fear. Compounding the issue is that people often generally are not ‘good’ at knowing they are anxious, or, if they do, often don’t know why.

So humans survived in drippy caves through ice-age winters, super volcanoes, asteroid strikes, without antibiotics, and to top it off, a sea-level rise, not of 20cm but of 125 meters.  For 99% of human evolution their children regularly died horrible deaths from diarrhea, septicemia and pneumonia. Genghis Khan came and went. The Black Plague raged. But now we’re falling apart because of fear of bad storms that might hit our 3 bedroom air-conditioned homes?

There is some real pain in this story, and real deaths, and far be it from me to belittle that. What I mock is the idea that these storms never happened before, that we are sure they are getting worse, and that we could prevent all the natural disasters in the world by putting up windmills, paying more tax and stressing about our carbon footprint.

I note that globally hurricanes are no worse than they were 30 years ago. All that CO2, and nothing much to show for it?

Graph of Global Hurricane Frequency since 1976 from Policlimate

I’m not suggesting that a major catastrophe is not awful and can’t wreak havoc on a persons life. But let’s get a grip. Even the IPCC doesn’t have much confidence it can predict extreme event trends. Articles like this are milking a baseless panic, making things worse.

The alarmists are the ones causing alarm

Even the shrinks admit that:

And the psychological damage is not only over what is happening now, but what is likely going to happen in the future.

“This kind of anticipatory anxiety is especially crippling and is increasingly being seen among climate activists — in some cases rising to the level of a kind of ‘pre-traumatic’ stress disorder,” she added.

So climate activists are working themselves into a state. For their own health they need an emergency course in Aristotelian logic.

“Because of the magnitude of the problem, and the fact that our leaders are not responding commensurate with the threat, feelings of vulnerability are repressed and cause unseen psychological damage,” she added.

So there’s the real culprit. A bunch of alarmists have whipped up a fear campaign where the only solution is to savage our economy and lifestyle. Not surprisingly, most politicians and voters don’t think it’s worth the price, so the 30% of the population that believes the witchdoctors are suffering from genuine fear and cognitive dissonance.

Spare us. The answer is not to trash the economy, but to stop the fear campaign and get back to real concerns. The way to reduce the damage from ghastly natural events is to do better science, stop the name-calling, and cancel the government committees that can’t list the observations to support their claims. We need to actually figure out the climate. Then we need to stop people building in flood zones, stop filling up dams as cyclical rain returns, and start getting practical.

Full raving story here.

 Thanks to Marc Morano of Climate Depot

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