Dealing with Apocalyptic thoughts: Depression and Climate Change

Trigger Warning: If you don't want to think about Climate Change and ruin your day, look away now.

Hey everyone,

I've had depression for almost a decade. I got diagnosed first in October 2008. I have had a great deal of experience dealing with this and have found ways to cope. A sense of humour helps. I listen to sad music as that gives me some mental space to relax and process all I'm feeling. I got my first job last year working at a charity shop and am very grateful for simply going out and having something else to do than let stuff go round in my head.

However, there is something which I am not able to shake off. I admittedly feel stupid even writing this, but I am really worried about climate change. And this is actually a "thing", especially for climate scientists. When Trump got elected in 2016, it really knocked me off balance. I wasn't alone in that but I guessed that Trump wasn't completely crazy as the media said but actually was willing to go through with some of the crazy stuff he said he would do: like pull out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.


This was not a small thing. The US is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China, and so if the US doesn't reduce its emissions it sabotages efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change. However Trump leaves office, after one term or two, the Republican Party has shown it is willing to continue sabotaging efforts to prevent climate change. The Democrats could win a landslide in 2018 or 2020, and the Republicans can come back and screw this one up again and again. That is the two party system and you can't change this without changing the Republican Party. That's not going to happen anytime soon.

But even if you take a step back even further, the Paris Climate Agreement was probably not enough to get the job done. Climate Change isn't a priority and our ruling elites are not going to disrupt their entire way of life to stop it because it will lose them votes, money and power. That greatly limits what people can and are willing to do. We've known about this problem for decades and if we were serious about it, we would have sorted this out by now. Why would another twenty or thirty years suddenly be different?


This has long range historical consequences for generations to come. The closest thing we have to a miracle at this point would be inventing geoengineering technologies that reduce global temperatures (which basically consist of two options: pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere and reducing incoming solar radiation that heats the earth up in the first place). Even if we did, it would only start out small scale and get bigger over time. So its not a quick fix and its not like a light switch where you can turn climate change on or off. There will be "something" no matter what happens.

I get depressed because I know that basically I'm just one person and no matter what I do or say it won't really change anything. This is my lifetime and it makes wanting to get a job or have a normal life a fairly absurd thing to do because it could get swept away, even if the little things do matter and do make you happy. To give you an idea of what the nightmare scenario is that is playing out in my head, I'll take an example.


Above is a picture of the water systems in the Himalayas (the "Hindu-Kush-Himalaya" region in dark blue) and it all depends on melting snow and glaciers so that the water runs down in to connected river systems. If the snow/glaciers melt completely, then there is no water. The River Basins (in light blue) serve about 1.3 billion people. That map covers the space for about half the world's population- about 3 to 4 billion people. India and China have 1 billion each. It doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to grasp that 1.3 billion people running out of water is bad. We are on course to have maybe three or four degrees of global warming in the course of the century, and that's "bad" news really. (click here if you want to enjoy some simulated horror ) Then throw in the fact human beings are going to react to diminishing food and water supplies and we may not approach this in an entirely calm, level-headed and rational way- but perhaps just try to kill each other because it makes us feel better about the situation. It's what we do when we panic and want to feel in control.

This- or something very similar to it- will probably happen in my life time. And yeah, the science is debatable; it is often misrepresented in the media to give the most spectacular headlines. There is a lot of debate about how political and economic systems should respond to it too. And that's fair. I don't know all the facts, and there is room to be sceptical how the media presents this stuff (even if the science is relatively sound) but I know enough to grasp this is very screwed up and I may live to see it.

But these are massive global events that will fundamentally alter the course of human history. Its not something a guy sitting in his bedroom typing on a laptop is going to change. And given the degree of daily"[bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] is going on?" that we have right now, it doesn't seem likely that our "leaders" are going to anything about this. It is also possible that even if you had someone in office who was really aggressive in trying to reduce greenhouse emissions, they will have to deal with huge political and economic resistance because of the amount of money involved in keeping things the way they are.

I've put this in the Depression sub-forum because its depressing and ideally, I'd like people to give me some advice on how to cope with the knowledge that this is going on. Behind the science, there is basically still something from the book of revelations here and perhaps Christians can share their experience dealing with thoughts about the apocalypse.

We're all going to die basically. Although that was a reality that was always going to happen even without climate change. Its just now scientists made me think about it. Talking about it may even help just to get it out there. Any suggestions for how to cope with this?

Erik Nelson said:

whomsoever successfully markets desalination systems will benefit billions of people and presumably accrue impressive profits

considering as its pretty basic chemistry, and it's merely a matter a making the process cost effective, it's probably not all that difficult to do

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Yeah. you're right on that one. Making it cost effective is the breakthrough needed to do it on a mass scale and it would certainly help everyone out in the long-run.

Erik Nelson said:

When the cradles of human civilization first emerged on Earth (during the Holocene Climatic Optimum 8000-4000 BP uncalibrated), the world was warmer & wetter, sea levels were +1m higher. Evidently, when China & India first emerged as civilizations, they did so on a planet that looked similar to this:

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You might be right about that but I'd have to look it up. There has been climate change in the past (without human interference). The end of the last ice age led to lost of sea level rise so the map of Northern Europe looked very different. Britain and Ireland were connected to Europe at this time with a land bridge, but the melt water raised sea levels and cut us off: (really nice animated image here)


You also have the "Little ice age" so that between 1600 and 1814, the River Thames would freeze over and people would hold "Frost Fairs" on there. I think this is an etching from the last one in 1814 and you can see St. Paul Cathedral in the background:



Unfortunately, by comparison the climate change that is happening now is going outside of the "normal" ranges of temperature variation we've had in the past and is faster than previous periods in the geological record. Its therefore going to test the rate of our species (and every other species on the planet) to adapt to these changes.