Climate Change Deniers Are Certifiable

We realized that deniers have something wrong in their heads a long time ago. Now, a respected psychologist, Doug Craig, agrees: As a psychologist for nearly 30 years, it has been my experience that not everyone understands mental illness. People who have had direct experience with severe anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, suicide, bipolar illness, schizophrenia or extreme despair and hopelessness get it. They understand because of their own life experience or from their connection with a loved one who has suffered significant pain as a result of their mental or emotional difficulties. On the other hand, there are many who mistake their good luck or positive genetics as a message that mental illness is a myth. Just because they are not depressed or anxious, they cannot relate to those who struggle with these serious disorders on a daily basis. We have all seen or heard from these individuals. Contemptuous, condemnatory judgements drip from them like toxic sludge. They have no compassion or understanding as they spew their hateful views on people they do not know or care to know. How quickly this changes, of course, when the course of their own life turns. The good fortune they enjoyed shifts for some reason and they find themselves suddenly down, out or disabled by inner demons they never knew were there. When life kicks us from the inside, we become humble, open and receptive to help wherever we can find it. We no longer have the luxury of our ignorance and prejudice. Our survival depends on facing our truth and discovering the right combination of medicine and therapy that enable us to regain our balance, peace and joy. Similarly, it is hard to deny the climate is changing when the evidence of your lived experience says otherwise. If you live on an island or in a coastal community, for example, you are more likely to have personally felt the cold, wet hand of climate change. It is both comic and tragic that so many believe that the Earth’s rising temperature cannot be described as global warming. What is it then? It is laughable and cruel how our conservative friends buy the lie that billions of tons of human-generated, heat-trapping gases are somehow not responsible for our steadily warming planet, even though this is the consensus view of nearly every climate science study and scientist on Earth in the last 25 years. It is odd and sad that they cannot connect a hotter world with melting glaciers and melting glaciers with rising seas and rising seas with devastated communities in all nations where land meets sea, including our own. Like someone who must confront the truth of their mental illness as they fight suicidal thoughts; severe, chronic pain or crippling panic attacks, the island nations are forced to face a reality that will inevitably and permanently remove their nations from the maps of the world. They cannot play denier games. They cannot pretend the cruel lies of the contrarians contain any credibility worth their children’s futures or their precious, diminishing time. Instead, they must speak out as you would if you stood in their wet shoes, their eyes trained on the rising seas threatening their homes and all they hold dear. There's a part of the United States which will sink beneath the seas in a relatively short period of time. Did you know that South Miami, Florida is doomed by rising seas? That's why they are petitioning for secession from the climate change deniers of Florida. Read on....

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