I am a climate scientist. I can’t take it anymore.
I am a climate scientist, and I cannot take it anymore.
I am cursed with knowledge and it sucks the will to live out of me.
I finished my PhD 1 month before my 30th birthday, and got diagnosed with ADHD 6 months after it.
I am old enough to know what I know, young enough to lament the loss of my own future, and have a brain that is over-tuned toward pattern recognition.
The facts are that the climate is changing, it is changing more aggressively, our best efforts have not worked, we do not have the political will to make the changes needed, and we are out of time. (Not almost. It’s done)
There are things to be hopeful for. There is a bright future somewhere. But it is on the other side of human beings arbitrarily dying in their millions (or more). Just biblical-scale death.
I go to work every day and slowly watch the smiles melt off of 20 year old faces over the course of a semester. While I sit there and can’t honestly reassure them about the future when I’m wondering if it’s worth procreating myself, (and on increasingly limited time).
Trying to slow the wheels of the most powerful and profitable energy paradigm in world history is not lucrative.
I don’t get paid all summer, so for 1/4 of the year I can barely afford to smoke a joint so I can get out of bed. I can’t even get a job at Home Depot, they think I’ll unionize the store (I will).
The changes are so obvious and all encompassing and yet confident people constantly laugh in your face or devalue your career, or tell you that you should have done something different.
The poor fools haven’t seen what I’ve seen.
I did this because I care. I did this because I love earth, and all the earthlings.
I do this for the children of people who don’t believe me. When I don’t have any of my own.
It has turned me bitter. My only purpose for continued existence is the tantric release of getting to say “I told you so” some day, increasingly soon.
I wish so badly that the science was wrong. If I met a genie, I’d ask him to make CO2 absorb the same amount of heat as normal air, and maybe a Diet Coke.
The perpetrators have the power. The victims defend the perpetrators because they are afraid of living a little less comfortably (maybe?)
I can’t take it anymore. I am a hostage on the only planet we know about by 8 billion people with eyes and ears and skin who can see the videos of disasters getting closer, and closer, and closer, they can hear us screaming warnings, and they can feel it getting hotter.
But they look at you and call you a fool.
No amount of therapy can fix this. Until there is a therapist that can make it not be too hot for sweat to evaporate in the most populated place in Asia, I’ll continue to eat therapists.
I’m not gunna give you the facts. I don’t have it in me today. Read the IPCC AR6. I worked on it. It’s fine.
I have come to terms with the fact that my life will not end peacefully. I wasn’t born at the right time for that.
I watch old war movies and don’t even pity them anymore. They had a future to fight for, clear steps to achieve it, and they earned their hard won future.
We won’t even have the opportunity.
Edit: I keep being warned of horrifying comments. Haven’t got there yet. Will stop.
Didn’t stop.
EDIT: CHECK MY BANNER YOU ASSHOLES. Bots don’t write on their fucking diplomas