Plotting a graph through danger
DO you yearn for the simple life? Not up for any stress? Good news! Any number of easy jobs are available.
There’s wind chime tuning, for example, and horoscope writing, and whoever’s task it is at the ABC to vet Q&A audience questions in between drawing up that week’s yoga roster.
And then there are the more stressful but ultimately more rewarding jobs that typically attract hardier types. A policewoman once told me of the time she was called to the docks where a Chinese labourer had been squashed. Standing next to a row of shipping containers, she asked the ship’s captain where the body was. “Under that one,” he said.
The container in question was perhaps a centimetre higher than all the others.
Near the end of her late-night shift, a doctor friend was suddenly swamped with dozens of young patients so drunk they could barely speak. In between stomach pump deployments, she tried to find out how much they’d consumed. One or two managed to reply: “Just ten bucks.”
On the way home hours later, she drove past one of those outer-suburban beer barns. This one featured a sign: “All You Can Drink! $10.”
Even some animals have challenging jobs. Search and rescue dogs at Ground Zero following the September 11 World Trade Center attacks became distressed because there were simply no bodies to be found — just parts of them. One of them located a spine.
But all of these people (and dogs) are just coasting when compared to society’s boldest individuals. I’m talking about those brave men and women who fearlessly analyse graphs, who without heed of any dangers study carbon dioxide concentrations and who risk their very lives attending international seminars and receiving research grants.
“Existential dread is fairly common among those who work on climate change on a daily basis,” US meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote last week.
“Being a climate scientist is probably one of the most psychologically challenging jobs of the 21st century.”
Even the pronounced lack of climate change in recent years hasn’t reduced the pain for these heroes, many of whom now suffer “pre-traumatic stress disorder”, a term coined by Washington-based forensic psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren to describe the anguish that results from preparing for horrific outcomes before they actually happen.
This month’s Esquire magazine has a brilliantly funny piece listing all of these pre-traumatised global warming wimps. “Among climate activists, gloom is building,” reports John H. Richardson. “Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger.”
Ask normal people how they feel about climate activists and you’ll probably receive similar answers. University of Texas climate scientist Camille Parmesan told the magazine: “To be honest, I panicked fifteen years ago — that was when the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were shifting from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2.
“That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifted its entire range across half a continent — I said this is big, this is big.”
Presumably terrified by the idea of moving butterflies, Parmesan — declaring herself “professionally depressed” – up and fled to England, where insects know their place.
“There’s a growing, ever-stronger anti-science sentiment in the USA. People get really angry and nasty. It was a relief not to have to deal with it,” crumbly Parmesan told Esquire.
Senior alarmist Michael Mann, who helped devise the hockey stick graph that is part of climate science religious iconography, also feels the awesome pressure of occasional criticism. “You find yourself in the centre of this political theatre, in this chess match being played out by very powerful figures — you feel befuddlement, disillusionment, disgust.”
“Some of his colleagues were so demoralised by the accusations and investigations that they withdrew from public life,” Richardson writes. “One came close to suicide.” Mann discovered that “contact with other concerned people always cheered him up.” That’d be a happy crowd.
Fear breeds paranoia, as we saw in Australia a few years back when Will Steffen reported: “Looks like we’ve had our first serious threat of physical violence.”
The former Climate Commission member was moved to announce his concern following an alleged threat during an Australian National University climate seminar. According to climate activists, a global warming sceptic at the event had told people he had a gun licence and was a “good shot”. But it emerged that the fellow in question was retired public servant John Coochey, whose comments about firearms were in relation to the ACT’s upcoming kangaroo cull.
As usual with climate scientists, that ANU mob was suffering pre-traumatic stress disorder. They were scared by something that was never going to happen. I wonder how these trembling doomsayers are coping with Australia’s current cold snap.
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