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Climate Change Is Making Natural Disasters Worse – Along with Our Mental Health

bko 5y ago
> As a result, many people are dealing with what's commonly referred to as "eco grief," a type of mental exhaustion that stems from accepting the harsh realities of climate change and feeling overwhelmed or hopeless. Added to that is "disaster fatigue," another type of emotional tiredness that comes from dealing with an abundance of bad news and steadily occurring crises — like near-constant headlines of devastating disasters. I don't understand this. If you look at global deaths from natural disasters, you'll see this has went down over the last 100 years with fewer large spikes. It makes sense considering modern buildings and cities are more resilient to climate events. [0] Global deaths from natural disasters, 1900 to 2019 year | deaths 1900 | 1,270,000 2009 | 11,142 2010 | 317,757 2011 | 30,969 2012 | 9,732 2013 | 21,696 2014 | 7,959 2015 | 22,861 2016 | 8,681 2017 | 7,341 2018 | 10,809 2019 | 11,719 To put that into comparison, mosquitos kill 725k people per year. Snakes kill 50k, dogs kill 25k and freshwater snails kill 10k people. [1] One number you often see thrown around is the number of climate events with $1 billion+ in damages, but that doesn't consider inflation and expanded development. For instance, if the same storm were to hit Florida today versus 20 years ago, you can bet the amount of damage that would be caused today would be much higher since there is so much more development there. I think the main difference is the media focus on these events and the hopeless tone. For instance New Orleans was woefully unprepared for Katrina. They didn't build for a 100 year storm. It was almost criminal negligence. Something can and should be done to ensure people and property are safe from climate events in addition to reduction of carbon emissions and removal of carbon from the environment [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/2203/the-worlds-deadliest-animals/ https://www.statista.com/chart/2203/the-worlds-deadliest-ani...
- 28492552 5y ago
  Unfortunately, human emotions don't work like that. It doesn't matter much to a person living in 2021 that the world was worse in 1900; what matters is that the world they thought they were going to live to see is not the world they will experience. You're on point with the media focus and the hopeless tone. If you want to understand the mental health aspect of this more, this quote from Mark Fisher might help. Sorry for the long block of text, but every word to me rings true: “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bko 5y ago

> As a result, many people are dealing with what's commonly referred to as "eco grief," a type of mental exhaustion that stems from accepting the harsh realities of climate change and feeling overwhelmed or hopeless. Added to that is "disaster fatigue," another type of emotional tiredness that comes from dealing with an abundance of bad news and steadily occurring crises — like near-constant headlines of devastating disasters. I don't understand this. If you look at global deaths from natural disasters, you'll see this has went down over the last 100 years with fewer large spikes. It makes sense considering modern buildings and cities are more resilient to climate events. [0] Global deaths from natural disasters, 1900 to 2019 year | deaths 1900 | 1,270,000 2009 | 11,142 2010 | 317,757 2011 | 30,969 2012 | 9,732 2013 | 21,696 2014 | 7,959 2015 | 22,861 2016 | 8,681 2017 | 7,341 2018 | 10,809 2019 | 11,719 To put that into comparison, mosquitos kill 725k people per year. Snakes kill 50k, dogs kill 25k and freshwater snails kill 10k people. [1] One number you often see thrown around is the number of climate events with $1 billion+ in damages, but that doesn't consider inflation and expanded development. For instance, if the same storm were to hit Florida today versus 20 years ago, you can bet the amount of damage that would be caused today would be much higher since there is so much more development there. I think the main difference is the media focus on these events and the hopeless tone. For instance New Orleans was woefully unprepared for Katrina. They didn't build for a 100 year storm. It was almost criminal negligence. Something can and should be done to ensure people and property are safe from climate events in addition to reduction of carbon emissions and removal of carbon from the environment [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/2203/the-worlds-deadliest-animals/ https://www.statista.com/chart/2203/the-worlds-deadliest-ani...

28492552 5y ago
Unfortunately, human emotions don't work like that. It doesn't matter much to a person living in 2021 that the world was worse in 1900; what matters is that the world they thought they were going to live to see is not the world they will experience. You're on point with the media focus and the hopeless tone. If you want to understand the mental health aspect of this more, this quote from Mark Fisher might help. Sorry for the long block of text, but every word to me rings true: “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]