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How to cope with grief and find wonder as Earth's climate changes
00:17:39
This week, large parts of the country are experiencing extreme heat and humidity. Alaska issued its first-ever heat advisory. Climate scientist Kate Marvel tells us how to fight climate fatalism and feel empowered in the face of an uncertain future.
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- [00:01]
Kate Marvel
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Maggie Penman
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Kate Marvel
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Maggie Penman
Oh, sorry.
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Unknown
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.
- [00:20]
Maggie Penman
The discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
Kate Marvel
1-800-Contacts.
- [00:33]
Maggie Penman
Kate Marvel has watched the world end many times. She's a physicist who works with climate models.
- [00:43]
Kate Marvel
You can do terrible things to the planet in a climate model. You can set off a volcano. You can remove all the land, you can remove all the water. You can make the Earth spin backward. You can do any experiment you want within these climate models. But climate change isn't just happening in the computer models. It's happening here.
- [01:03]
Maggie Penman
Kate has watched sea levels rise and temperatures climb. She's watched weather become more and more extreme. And she started to realize that it was affecting her to see this happening to our planet, both in her climate models and in real life.
- [01:20]
Kate Marvel
I was struggling a little bit at first because I had these feelings. But at the same time, I was a scientist and I thought, oh, aren't science scientists supposed to be cold and objective and neutral? And I felt bad that I was feeling things when I was watching the climate change around me. And then, you know, I kind of realized, like, I can't be objective because I live on Earth and everybody and everything that I love is here. And then thinking about it a little bit harder, I realized, you know what, when scientists say we don't have feelings, that doesn't make us more credible. That makes us liars. And who's going to believe scientists if we lie about how we feel?
- [02:04]
Maggie Penman
From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports Weekend. I'm Maggie Penman. I'm the executive producer of the show and I'm your guest host. It's Saturday, June 21st. This weekend, large parts of the country are experiencing extreme heat and humidity. Around 170 million people in the US are experiencing temperatures above 90 degrees. Alaska issued its first ever heat advisory this week. So today I wanted to share a conversation I had recently that made me feel surprisingly hopeful. It's with this climate scientist, Kate Marvell. She has a new book out this week called Human 9 Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet. It's about how humans can process climate change, and it's organized around emotions, there's anger, grief, and fear. But there's also wonder, surprise, and love. I started by asking her about that. I think if I imagined a book about feelings related to climate change, I would definitely guess anger, grief, you know, fear. I don't think I would have guessed wonder, love, pride. So, yeah, like, I wonder for you, was it harder to write those chapters or did you feel sort of, you were feeling this, like, soup of different emotions?
- [03:39]
Kate Marvel
I'm not gonna lie to you, Anger was a very easy chapter for me to write. I feel that very often. And, you know, I do feel all of these other things. I feel guilt, I feel sadness, I feel fear. But I think it's really important. And the reason I wanted Wonder to be the first chapter is that climate science is science, and that means it's this way of looking at the world that really leaves you open to learning beautiful things. The fact that we know that the Earth is changing, that comes from the fact that we know how the Earth works. And to me, there's something so spectacular and so wonderful about that. Climate change is happening because we've changed the composition of the atmosphere, and heat trapping gases are trapping more heat that's coming from the planet. But where does that energy come from in the first place? All of our energy is coming from the sun. And when you think about that, the sun is eight light minutes away. So it takes eight minutes for light to get from the sun's surface to us. But for that light to get out from the center of the sun where it's made, to the surface, that takes 100,000 years. And so just thinking about, you walk outside on a summer's day and the light that you're feeling was born 100,000 years ago, that is something that makes me feel just a sense of awe and connectedness with this whole universe almost. I wanted to give everybody a chance to feel that way, to feel an understanding of the world that we live in and an appreciation of how we know why it's changing.
- [05:16]
Maggie Penman
That makes a lot of sense. And I did, I did get that appreciation from reading that. And a lot of it feels a little bit miraculous when you really stop and think about it. Like, even the fact that the Earth is, you know, the correct distance from the sun and has the right amount of water in the atmosphere, like all of those things are sort of just like a coincidence, right?
- [05:36]
Kate Marvel
Absolutely. I mean, I originally trained as an astrophysics. My, my field was cosmology, which is the study of the entire univers. And it was really, while I was doing my PhD and looking at everything in the universe that I kind of realized that, well, this is the only good part. You know, the Earth is really the only good planet that we know about. And, you know, I fully, fully support my colleagues who study other planets because if they didn't study Mars, how would we know how terrible it was? But, you know, this notion that we're all going to pack up and move to another planet or we're going to terraform Mars, you know, well, let's. Let's try to keep Earth habitable first. Right. Because it's just. It's the best.
- [06:22]
Maggie Penman
Yeah.
- [06:22]
Kate Marvel
I'm an Earth supremacist, and I'm not. Sorry.
- [06:25]
Maggie Penman
No, but I mean, for real, when you read about, like, all the things that make Earth so perfectly habitable for us, it does really make you think, like, yeah, like, why would we go anywhere else? Like, just because we have to kind of tweak this one a little bit, we're just gonna give up. But, like, I think, honestly, there is a little bit of climate fatalism. Like, I think that is where some of those ideas come from of, like, yeah, well, like, let's just give up on Earth and go to Mars. Or, like, you know, like, climate change is so far gone and so inevitable that, like, there's no point in even trying to, you know, do better. And so what would you say to people who feel that way right now?
- [07:10]
Kate Marvel
I mean, for sure, when my house gets messy, I definitely think I'm just going to sell this house and move to a new one. No, I don't think that. Because that's ridiculous. That's not what you do. And, you know, this kind of gets to the thing that physicists like me are kind of reluctant to admit, that we understand things in the physical world pretty well. We understand air molecules, we understand water droplets. And the reason we understand these things is they always do what they're supposed to do. But people aren't lost like that. People are really, really hard to fit into equations. People don't always act in predictable ways. And that's something that's really scary, but it's also something that is incredibly kind of, for lack of a better word, empowering. The number one reason we don't know what the future Earth is going to look like is we don't know what human beings are going to do. And the future is very much still in our hands. So I think, personally, how much scarier this would all be if we didn't understand what was happening. If this just an asteroid or something heading toward us that we were completely powerless to prevent. That for me would be cause to just give up and try to find some other planet. But that's not what's happening. We know exactly what is causing the global temperature to rise. And we also know exactly how we might go about stopping that. We're pretty certain scientifically that the global warming will stop. The rise in the Earth's temperature will cease to rise when we stop emitting greenhouse gas. Now that doesn't mean that there's other changes that aren't already locked in. But basically when we stop doing this, the warming is going to stop.
- [08:54]
Maggie Penman
I mean, that is something that's really hopeful. Right. And you point out in your book like human beings have done really incredible things before. But I guess how do we get there? I think that we've known about this problem for a while now and it does feel like there is an inaction. I mean, there's something you wrote in your book about sea level rise and how it's sort of this slow moving zombie and it's hard for people to get really worked up about it. Cause it's like, yeah, okay, the sea is rising a little, I guess. But I think that's actually maybe also the problem with climate change. Right. Is it's like this real slow moving disaster and we all see it and feel it and we know it's hotter than it used to be and that weather patterns are weird and storms are more extreme. But it's kind of like we're all like, you know, the frog being boiled. So I guess do you think some of this is just like a psychological problem of like, how do you get people to understand what climate change actually is as a problem and how we can begin to solve it, or like how to get it to sink in for people?
- [10:06]
Kate Marvel
Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but what I do know is that a lot more people are concerned about this than you might think. And people who are concerned or alarmed about climate change consistently underestimate the number of other people who are concerned or alarmed. People who are taking action consistently underestimate the number of other people who are taking action. We live right now in a real confusing world where the problems are getting worse, but the solutions are getting better. Right. We have increasing and more frequent and more extreme, extreme events now. We see the weather patterns getting weird. We see the sea levels rising. 2023 was the hottest year on record and that record lasted one year until 2024. So we know that the climate emergency, the climate crisis, is arguably shifting into a new phase. But we also know that we have so many tools that we didn't have before. Wind and solar are the cheapest ways of generating electricity in all of human history. We have a lot of really smart engineers and scientists all over the world looking at ways to do things differently and to do things better. So I think it's really important that we talk to each other about this. Also think that it's important that we don't see this as just a scientific problem. Right. I think I complained a little bit in the book that I get really annoyed when people say, oh, scientists concerned about rising sea levels or scientists concerned about emissions. And I always think, like, what planet do the rest of you live on? Everybody should be concerned about this because this is not just a problem for scientists and this is not a problem that's going to be solved by scientists.
- [11:55]
Maggie Penman
After the break, how caring about our friends and family can motivate us to care about the planet. And a radical idea why Kate Marvel doesn't think we need hope to combat climate change. We'll be right back.
- [12:22]
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- [13:24]
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- [14:33]
Maggie Penman
What would you say to people who feel a little helpless right now? Because I feel like we all know the little things we can do, right? Like we can, like, ride our bikes to work and not eat meat or whatever. But like, what about, like the feeling I know a lot of young people have where they say, but what about the big corporations? What about the governments? You know, I'm voting and I'm protesting, but like, it's not changing things fundamentally.
- [15:00]
Kate Marvel
I actually don't think it's true that the needle's not moving. I think that most people don't understand that in the United States, kind of almost regardless of politics, our emissions are falling. Our emissions are falling because we've figured out better ways to do things and the market has figured out cheaper ways to do things. That doesn't mean that there's not an enormous role for climate policy and there's not an enormous role for people to advocate for climate policy, not just at the federal level, but at the state level, at the local level, school boards, condo boards, housing associations, whatever. There's so many different policy levers that we have, and those are really, really important. But I just don't think it's true that nobody is paying attention and nothing is being done. There are, if you look globally, millions, probably tens or hundreds of millions of people who are actively engaged in doing things that will help. And so I think it's appropriate to feel horror and despair sometimes. I feel that too. But I don't think that that is the only defensible way that you can feel about climate change. I think that there is more empowering ways to feel. And if you embrace all of the negative feelings and say, these are part of me, these are part of how I am responding to the changing climate, then you can also become open to more Empowering positive things. I have a chapter on pride, where I start out talking about pride in terms of hubris, in terms of geoengineering and trying to hack the carbon cycle. But I do think that the solutions to climate change are a lot more prosaic and boring and ordinary than that. And if we all work together and do what we can, then I think that there's space for another type of pride. Right? Just like the simple pride. And, hey, we did a good job, we fixed this thing. And I think there's room for everybody there.
- [16:58]
Maggie Penman
You have a lot of personal stuff in the book, too, and the chapter on love in particular. You talk about some of the health struggles you've had and how you've grappled with those. Why did that feel important to include for you in a book that's mostly about climate change?
- [17:13]
Kate Marvel
I just felt like I wanted to talk a little bit about my love for my family and my community and the places that I've lived and the planet that I live on, you know, both. Because that sort of naturally, organically fell out while I was writing it. I didn't plan on writing it that way. I didn't have an outline that just split was what came to me as I was writing it and felt like it needed to be there. But I also think there's a reason that we should talk about love. There is some social science research that says that actually this is the most motivating emotion for us. We can talk about fear, we can talk about all of the terrible things that will happen if we don't get this under control. We can talk about grief, because we will lose things. But the number one motivating thing for people is love. Love for future generations, love for their community, love for where they live, love for the places that they feel at home in. And that's something that we all feel. And that, to me is a more organizing and. And kind of durable emotion than any of the other ones.
- [18:25]
Maggie Penman
I'm sure you get asked this question a lot in different ways, but what. How do you keep hope and, like, stay committed to this work in the face of so much that is challenging about it?
- [18:37]
Kate Marvel
I mean, I think the short answer is I don't. I don't really need hope. You know, I think do you have any hope? Is kind of the wrong question, because it's like saying, do you have any hope? You can clean the bathroom. Like, I don't know, just clean the bathroom. You know what to do. When I think about how we confront climate change, there's so much that we have to do. And so there's all these verbs that we have to do, right? And none of them is hope. And so for me, it's not that I don't have hope. It's not that I'm not optimistic about possible futures. It's not that I can't see a world where we fix problems and we live well. It's that that's not necessarily the most resonant and necessary emotion for me right now because we know what to do. So let's just get to work.
- [19:26]
Maggie Penman
I love that. That feels like a good place to end. Thank you so much, Kate Marvel. I really appreciate you taking the time.
- [19:31]
Kate Marvel
Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
- [19:40]
Maggie Penman
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and author of the new book Human 9 Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet. We'll include a link in our show notes if you'd like to learn more about it. That's it for Post reports. Thanks for listening. Today's show was edited by Ariel Plotnick and mixed by Shawn Carter. I'm Maggie Penman. We'll be back on Monday with more stories from the Washington Post. Have a great rest of your weekend.
- [20:19]
Unknown
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