Climate Grief: It’s All Just a State of Mind

by RJ Cohen

Last week, Maryland and Washington joined the growing wave of U.S. states unveiling tough strategies to tackle climate change in the face of continued federal inaction. But sometimes it feels like progress amounts to two steps forward, one step back.

Consider the small agricultural town of Choteau, Montana. Some folks who live in Choteau don’t want to hear any mention of climate change – and will go so far as to deny their schoolchildren the opportunity to meet a scientist with a share of the latest Nobel Peace Prize.

The New York Times reported that earlier this month, town residents pressured school authorities to cancel a talk on global warming that IPCC climate scientist Steven W. Running had been slated to give to around 130 high school students. The residents had griped that the presentation would be one-sided, given that no “opposing view” would be represented.

But the critics in Montana would be hard-pressed to find anyone among the mainstream scientific community espousing such a view – namely, one denying that climate change is real, and that human activity is the cause. The 2,500 scientists who comprise the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that they are “very certain” that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are warming the planet.

Unfortunately, in Montana, disbelief about the reality of global warming reaches all the way to the statehouse. Last week, Republican members of a state panel rejected much of the state Climate Change Advisory Committee’s recommendations calling on Montana to slash its greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. One lawmaker reportedly called the study “junk science.”

Dr. Running, who is the author of a presentation called “The Five Stages of Climate Grief,” understands that mindset well. The first two stages, after all, are denial and anger, he told the Times.

Given the recent, mounting evidence of Earth’s accelerating pace of warming, perhaps one can’t blame the residents of Montana, and elsewhere, who reject the unsettling scientific realities. There is indeed a lot to grieve over.

Last Wednesday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that 2007 tied with 1998 for the second warmest year in a century. Earlier in the week, researchers said climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates, according to The Washington Post. The new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice.

And just days earlier, the head of the IPCC said the group's next report should look at the "frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could melt rapidly at the same time.

Fortunately, forward-looking state officials across the country have been working hard to forge practical, down-to-Earth policies to tackle the challenges posed by runaway greenhouse-gas emissions before it is too late. These and other policymakers appear to have made it to “acceptance,” the last of the five stages of climate grief in Dr. Running’s presentation. They are people who “acknowledge the scientific facts calmly, and are now exploring solutions” to tackle the very real threats that confront our civilization.

For example, by encouraging energy conservation in homes and office buildings, Montana and other Western states could reduce the need for new power generation in the region by up to 75 percent, the equivalent of 100 large power plants, during the next 15 years, the Western Governor’s Association said in a study.

And in New Hampshire, officials considering involvement in a 10-state, regional cap-and-trade program for greenhouse-gas emissions from large power plants said the plan is expected to lead to lower energy use among participating states.

In fact, officials in more than half of all U.S. states have faced the reality that human actions are warming the planet at an unprecedented clip, and are moving fast to stop global warming before it is too late.But they need all the help they can get – from consumers, industry, and the federal government.

The problem, of course, is that the ideas expressed by the residents of Choteau are not unique to small-town Montana. President George W. Bush has consistently rejected any effort to cap U.S. carbon emissions. And while there is support for a carbon cap among Democratic Congressional leaders, passage of legislation during this frenetic election year is “going to verge on the impossible,” House Energy &
Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) told Environment & Energy Daily on Thursday.

Perhaps we’d all do well to enlist the services of a national climate grief counselor, before it’s too late.

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