Anger, Fear, Guilt, Shame: "We Come Back From Our Field Seasons Increasingly Broken"

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Sleeper issue of the century might be the overwhelming emotional shock as whole populations grasp the scale of changes that are already locked in as climate change gathers momentum. The heart ripping images of scorched animals in the Australian bush fires are yet the latest reminder.

I have had several discussions with Jeffrey Kiehl on this topic. Dr. Keihl is a well known paleo-climatologist who, in his public outreach on climate, found himself at a loss to guide audiences who were having difficulty coping with the information presented to them.
More on this coming soon, but I did do a piece with Dr. Kiehl and Dr. Sarah Myhre reacting to this problem. (above)

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Steve Simpson

Professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Exeter

What changes have you personally seen that have affected you?
I studied marine biology 20 years ago, when it was a celebration of natural history. In the period of my career, it’s changed in front of our eyes. Every year, we went to Lizard Island, Australia, to a protected marine reserve in the Great Barrier Reef, and that was our reference for what coral reefs should be like: dazzling places, full of life. A quarter of all marine species live on coral reefs, which only make up about 0.1% of the ocean surface. They’re rainforests of the sea. When we went back to the Great Barrier Reef after a major bleaching event in 2006, it had turned into a graveyard. It looked weird, because the fish were still brightly coloured, like someone had gone in and painted them on an otherwise black-and-white photograph. It was completely devastating to see individual corals that we knew and loved and had spent so long studying, now dead.

I’d just recruited a PhD student to study fish behaviour, and between the time of recruiting him and getting out for the first field season, the Great Barrier Reef died – 80% of the corals where we work were gone, and most of the fish that lived there also moved on. I told him in the interview that his visit was going to be this most wonderful experience, and it was just a tragic graveyard of historic coral reef life.

How have you been dealing with it?
We come back from our field seasons increasingly broken. You can either think: I can’t do this, I’m going to have to change the science I do; or you might try to internalise all of that pain that you feel. Lots of scientists do the latter – they feel we should be objective and robust, not at the mercy of our emotions.

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https://climatecrocks.com/2020/02/03/how-scientists-deal-with-ecological-grief/#more-58683