Many titles on the lists I get from Medium grab attention, and some grab better than others. Unfortunately, the doomer-inflected article titles seem better suited as flags for my attention, despite my being neither a doomer nor someone who thinks the arguments about doomerism have much value. My best guess is that I’m psychologically prone to such titles due to some as-yet undiagnosed childhood trauma.
I have no interest in voting for or against the so-called doomer articles in general, but I wish to note how awful some of these are. Take “We Were Promised Cataclysmic Crises. Where Are They?” by Aure’s Notes, in Medium, on April 2, 2023, and running the snarking tagline for the piece, “Missing person description: big green lizard answering the name of Godzilla.”
Here is the start of this article:
We’ve been told for years to prepare for “devastating” financial, economic, demographic, sanitary, and even solar crises.
Reading the newspapers from the early 2000s, you’d think civilization “should” have collapsed for a few years already.
Yet here we are. None of the crises we were told about ended up happening.
Unfortunately, the crisis narrative hasn’t stopped. In fact, it got worse.
What is interesting about this article is that it is a climate denier critiquing doomers, by which the author means pretty much anyone who acknowledges the likelihood of climate crisis, or, as he puts it, “The doomsdayers are people who live off scaring others with gross oversimplification and misinformation.”
I have no doubt that there are people whose perspectives on our present and future world are not only unhelpfully negative, but also uninformed (the example provided by Aure’s Notes: Robert Kiyosaki). I have no doubt that some doomers are cynically adopting this perspective because they’ve figured out a way of monetizing the doomsaying (the example provided: Al Gore), or at least are working hard at it. And then there are the nihilistic ones (the example provided: Greta Thunberg). I haven’t looked at any of Robert Kiyoski’s YouTube videos, but Al Gore running a long con? Really? As for Greta Thunberg, add, please, another Really?
The writing is amusing (snarky, but amusing), but the author’s main argument is that systems like finance and society and climate are complex, and that there are experts who tell us that there’s no need to panic, and he lists several books for further reading.
Of course, there are experts and books and scientists in number suggesting that indeed there is a climate crisis. Of course, we’ve seen financial systems blow out and capitalism with free rein being one such cause. We’ve seen longitudinal data on carbon dioxide levels and we’ve breathed tainted atmosphere with compelling causality to increased mortality, and, yes, the massive heatwaves in the headlines today may be coincidental to climate, but likely not. The most interesting point the author raises, I think, is that there are consequences to trying to avoid a collapse, and there are negative effects as the world shifts away from fossil fuels, but then again most reasonable people understand that any significant transition is hardly likely to be error- or pain-free. Aure’s Notes hardly offers a convincing argument that there is nothing much to do, unless, like him, you believe that all those who see problems on the scale of the existential really have nothing to worry about.
An interesting take, to do nothing, and largely, he explains, because of a psychological conclusion that “this obsession [with climate change] comes from the projection of our own mortality onto the world and society.” Move along. Nothing to see here.
And then there is the population of still active climate change deniers to be found in the digital halls of Medium. David Siegel asks “Hard Questions for those who believe CO2 is driving our climate #2: What Caused the Little Ice Age?” published in Medium’s Shortfall magazine, on February 1, 2023.
I certainly don’t know the answer to what caused the Little Ice Age, but then I don’t have to, because the argument supporting climate change has been vetted deeply and the author can’t claim to apply uncertainty in the exact causes for climate change without considering the same uncertainty for his argument. He hopes to avoid this charge by ending his piece this way: “Remember, I’m not trying to prove a theory. I’m trying to disprove one,” which, of course, makes no sense. It seems to me that he has a theory for which he should show proof before claiming it overturns or effectively undermines the scientific consensus on climate change and the effect of greenhouse gases, but, again, the article presents one heck of an attention-grabbing title.
“There’s Nothing You Can Do About Climate Change,” by Theo Priestley, on July 23, 2023, is also a rather provoking title. I love his argument, which is a close cousin to the argument that there’s nothing to be done about anything, really, because the sun will go supernova some day, so why make your bed. Here are his own words:
The chances are that every species that has lived or will ever live on Earth has and will be a part of this cycle and we’re just one of them with the capacity to grasp what is happening and the audacity to believe we can stop it.
In a million years the surface of the Earth could be an arid wasteland with oceans choked with plastic and an atmosphere that isn’t breathable. It could take another hundred million years to become habitable again with new life that might not be human anymore.
Who knows?
No-one does.
The point is, what we think we can do now with all our fancy promises about carbon emissions in 2050 and technologies we can chat to will have absolutely no effect on a chain of events that takes thousands upon thousands of years to unfold.
He admits to climate change, but wants to put this in perspective, as follows:
There is climate change. It’s coming. It’s happening and will continue to happen over millennia. The real ‘scam’ is the narrative that any human impact can be mitigated with political will and increased taxation to slow/ reverse/ halt/ alter the trajectory of something this big. It’s sheer nonsense. As is the Stop Oil bullshit performance art.
Oh well, good to know. I was getting all worried about my children’s world and the state of existence ahead for my grandkids, not to mention, in a less personal ways, about 8 billion other humans, but since they—and the entire human species, too—will be gone in some period of eon-level time to be determined, now what me worry?
“One or Two Things I Know About Doomers,” by Michael Campi, and appearing on Medium on April 12, 2023, is another odd take. The big news here is that doomers aren’t miserable (he know this through personal experience), even as we non-doomers insist they should be. He makes clear he understands the situation and the best thing to do while understanding it. Campi writes (emphasis his):
We know we’re at the end and we help out anyway.
I don’t quite understand how, despite their ostentatiously green lives, they [non-doomers] think they are going to be able to explain to their children, who are dying in a heatwave, how solar panels will make the world a better place.
There is a thread running in this article about climate change activists not knowing that they are going to die, or, at least, likely to not like the line Campi quotes by Lenny Bruce, uttered in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard while looking out at the audience: “We’re all going to die.”
Call me a nut, but unlike Campi’s assumptions about people who aren’t doomers, I think this Lenny Bruce utterance sounds like a great bit. If you can’t laugh at death—as well as rail against it, and grieve, and puzzle it—you might be a Vulcan.
Before ending the article with the statement that “I [Campi] feel bad for them [the so-called blue skies, a.k.a. non-doomers],” he finishes with the following:
A change is coming and the sooner that realization sets in the sooner the blue skies can step out of the cocoon of their comfortable delusions and begin to face and tell the truth to the people around them.
Campi describes himself as “Gadfly and neer-do-well” and he also publishes on Substack. I’m thinking of changing my own tagline after seeing his, but I’ll refrain.