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Four questions about our predicament – two psychologists write about the C02 Newsletter Vol. 2, no 1

The first duo-written commentary on an issue of the CO2 Newsletter! Annie Mitchell and Tony Wainwright, both Chartered Psychologists take a deep dive into why we are where we are..

Annie Mitchell and Tony Wainwright

As Ana Unruh Cohen said in her contribution to this series on people’s responses to William Barbat’s “message in a bottle” CO2 Newsletter, “looking back at the history of climate science and policy can trigger wistful thoughts of “what if?”  And relatable feelings of sadness about what we have lost and anger at fossil fuel and other vested interests that have fought to prevent climate and action”. Reading the well-informed 1980s (and earlier) warnings also triggers in us, as psychologists, curiosity. First, why did vested interests prevail in the 80s and why do they still, despite incontrovertible evidence of the damage caused by fossil fuels, and despite decades of efforts to raise the alarm and mitigate the harm befalling us all? Second, why do not more of our fellow citizens and scientists join in with activists’ efforts to wake us up and bring about urgent change?  Third, what is it in the histories and experience of some of us that draw us, apparently against the tide, to persist in actively demanding change? Fourth, what could lead now to the positive social tipping point we so urgently need?

We’re commenting on CO2 Newsletter Vol 2, No 1, October -November 1980.  Reading it now feels extraordinary because pretty much everything that Barbat notes in his commentary remains the case: both the scientific evidence that global heating is caused by CO2 emissions, and the realisation of the appalling human cost and social injustice of inaction. It is hard not to be moved by reading this newsletter: a voice from over 40 years ago, hoping people would heed his call. It is salutary to realise that atmospheric carbon concentrations since he was writing have gone up by about one third, and the trajectory has been steady, in spite of all the agreements and conferences. Infuriatingly also, as of 2025, global emissions of greenhouse gases have never been higher. Perhaps if these agreements and conferences hadn’t happened it may have been even worse. One sentence jumps out: “Adapting to a highly different climate may be inappropriate to apply to future victims of malnutrition or storm-driven high tides of an elevated ocean. ‘Sacrificed’ may be appropriate if immediate counter measures to the CO2 buildup could [as we now know they could] actually prevent such problems.”.  We, like Barbat, watched the United States’ “me” decade to shift to the “we” decade: but we see, terribly, that decade is now closer to a century and escalating with Make America Great Again ferocity. We believe, along with grass roots organisations like Hope Not Hate, and Common Ground, that we humans (and indeed beings beyond human) have much more in common than that which divides us. We need to have the conversations, share the evidence, and generate the shared social narratives that prove it.

  1. Why do vested interests prevail?

There is no doubt that where there is wealth there is power, and fossil fuels have created more wealth than anything else we can think of. They have also brought enormous benefits to humanity, but at a terrible cost. The cost is not born by the fossil fuel companies; it is, in the woefully inadequate term, an ‘externality’ where the planet pays the price. Even now, there seems to be evidence that these malign forces have undermined the United Nations COP (Conference of the Parties) process so that binding commitments are avoided https://www.transparency.org/en/press/fossil-fuel-interests-are-undermining-un-climate-negotiations-new-transparency-international-report-warns.

Stoddart and colleagues asked in 2021 why haven’t we bent the emissions curve despite 3 decades of climate mitigation?  A common thread across the literature they reviewed was the central role of power, “from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control.” These narrow mindsets serve to perpetuate the very conditions that hold us still now in the worsening climate catastrophe.  And we urgently need, as Stoddart et al put it, new forms of social imaginary for a better future.  Does modern technology’s hypnotic capacity to distract us from beauty, imagination and awe, and from our realisation of our bodily place in the world, account in part for the lethal stranglehold of ideologies of control?

2. Why do not more of our fellow citizens join in with demanding change?  It is understandable that our fellow citizens (and ourselves too because we are all only human) adopt cognitive and emotional defences – including denial, delay, disinterest – against unbearable truths. These psychological defences are hard to shift because they are bolstered by a barrage of misinformation and disinformation promulgated by the media outlets of those who believe their interests are protected by keeping the truth hidden. And who does not wish the truth to be other than it is, when we face existential horror? In his book ‘Don’t even think about it’ George Marshall, founder of Climate Outreach put his finger on it. We are not wired up to deal with climate change – it isn’t the weather, it is what you might call a derivative. It’s the system that controls the weather. In addition, George Marshall worked out that different audiences need to be addressed differently, and just producing lots of charts that predict the end of the world as we know it will just turn people off.

3. What is in the histories and experience of some of us who do persist in demanding change?

Tony: engagement with environmental issues flowed from growing up in a family where the natural world was something to be enjoyed and studied in equal measure. At school, my teacher, Brian Brookes showed me on field trips to Skokholm and Handa Islands how interconnected the web of life was. He also introduced me to the Shanny a rocky shore fish, when he was warden at Slapton Ley, and the hours spent in rock pools led me to study for my doctoral thesis in experimental psychology, the way the visual systems of fishes and other creatures are adapted to their light environment (see https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-0241-5_54#citeas). My broader research work included a strong interest in marine and freshwater environments, and how we should protect them. The issue of climate change only came to my attention some 20 years later when I was by then a clinical psychologist, and when I became involved with the Friends of the Earth 2005 campaign, The Big Ask, which was successful in getting legislation through the UK parliament, the first in the world, with statutory carbon limits and an annual carbon accounting. My interests had been in ecological systems and how they were being impacted by human activity, but it was only after this campaign that my attention was on the effect of CO2 emissions. The way CO2 made the oceans more acidic was quite an eye opener, particularly given my previous work on freshwater and marine animals. 

Annie: my sense of being part of the natural world grew from a childhood in County Durham in an era (the 50s and 60s) in which girls growing up could roam pretty freely: helping on the local farm, climbing trees, wandering across footpaths and fields, camping under the stars, first with the Girl Guides, and later tramping the Lake District with boyfriends and girlfriends, exploring the ways our bodies and minds fitted into the natural world. Perhaps it is hard to fight for the health of the planet and nature unless we have first grown to love it.  And in my story too, it was a school teacher who inspired intellectual curiosity about ecology. Dorrit Smith, a newly qualified biology teacher, was a breath of fresh air in our old-fashioned ex-grammar school that had just turned comprehensive but in which many teachers still wore dusty caps and gowns. She encouraged us to think for ourselves and to question authority, and in doing so set us a project – at a time and place when self-directed projects were an unheard-of educational approach. This project was transformational: we had to research the contribution of Rachel Carson through her newly published book, Silent Spring. From then on, I understood that ecological balance was the basis of flourishing, that corporations could mess up through corporate greed, and, vitally, that women could challenge the established order of things.  These were tremendous lessons for a restless adolescent to take as a basis for life and learning, and I remain grateful for Dorrit’s then-youthful devotion to her pupils.

Everyone who comes to climate and nature activism will have their foundational stories, and we both believe that sharing and honouring these, as XR Scientists have done in their book Scientists on Survival, is a critical part of inspiring ourselves and others to persist with demanding change. 

4. What could lead now to the positive tipping point we so urgently need?  

Here we might take issue with some content in the newsletter:

“Q. Should the public be allowed to help decide what projects are pursued or not pursued?

“A. Generally no, if what you mean is basic scientific research…. 

“Most members of the public usually don’t know enough about any given complicated matter to make meaningful informal judgments. And that includes scientists and engineers who work in unrelated areas…

“… I don’t think John Doe will ever have enough information to justify technological public policymaking by public referenda.

“To make intelligent decisions about science-based technology, we will have to rely on analyses and advice from institutions that the polity trusts.”

We rather believe, along with Rebecca Willis in her book Too hot to handle: the democratic challenge of climate change, that trust requires more democracy and participation, not less. We’re unlikely to reach a positive social tipping point without much greater public knowledge, awareness and engagement. With a strong public mandate for positive progressive change, politicians and businesses would be much more likely to act against the vested interests of money and entrenched power. And on this, it is extremely inspiring in the UK to be part of the momentum movement in support of the Climate Emergency Briefing. A 50 minute film has been created, featuring 10 of the UKs most highly respected climate scientists and security experts, first shown in Westminster to parliamentarians, policy makers and leaders at the end of 2025, and now being screened in hundreds of community and professional venues across the UK, with facilitated post-show conversations to generate deeper engagement and future action.  I , Annie, along with friends and neighbours, have hosted and facilitated screenings in my own community, with more still planned. This is how change can happen: hearing the truth from trusted experts, being held in community with others to process and digest what we hear, and then acting in solidarity with those others to demand the political change that survival in the face of reality requires.  If only this strong public engagement had happened back in the 1980s or earlier: might we have bent the emissions curve by now?  It is too hypothetical to contemplate.

In conclusion, we wonder what Barbat would have thought about the word today? The breakdown of the international consensus – the so-called “World Order” – is so far leading us down a path of might is right and further conflict, and the warning bells are ringing louder than ever before. The urgent need for “a new we order” is very much on the agenda https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/global-justice-report/

In a book chapter entitled ‘Who are we? Social identity and sustainable healthcare in the Anthropocene’ we tackled this issue of a new ‘we’ order in the context of healthcare, in which both of us have spent our careers. We say: “How can we join together in learning and solidarity with others in protecting all that we love and care for, when people’s lives and conditions are so separate and varied, and political and nationalist forces increasingly work to divide us from one another, under conditions of threat? How can we value and celebrate the varied contributions that we bring from our different perspectives of gender, ethnic background, culture, class, and ability, while also being sensitive to the ways in which the unequal distribution of power and influence shapes whose voices are heard and unheard? How can we do this at the same time as working to halt the retreat to personal identities that divide and polarise us? As the Black critical journalist Gary Younge put it, in his 2011 book Who are we – and should it matter in the 21st century?

“Identity is not seeking a role in politics. It is already there. For better, for worse, and usually for both, it is an integral part of how we relate to people as individuals and as groups. The choice is whether we want to succumb to its perils among moral panic and division or leverage its potential though solidarity in search of common, and higher, ground.”(Younge, 2011, p. 231)

Finally, in a recent paper, Tony wrote about the implications of the polycrisis for psychologists, entitled ‘A Warning’. Which sums up in some ways the main message of our reflections: “We are at a critical juncture for the future of humanity. I don’t use these words lightly, but they echo the various presentations at the Emergency Briefing for Parliamentarians (National Emergency Briefing on the Climate and Nature Crisis, 2025) last year on the climate crisis. We cannot continue business as usual when there are such clear indications of a catastrophic future. As psychologists we need to work out what ‘not business as usual’ looks like.”

Wainwright, T. and Mitchell. A. (2024) Who are we? Sustainable Healthcare in the Anthropocene. Chapter 5. In J. Braithwaite, Y. Zurynski, & C. K-Lynn Smith (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Health System Sustainability Routledge.

Biographies

Annie Mitchell is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and former clinical psychologist born in 1953. She teaches, mentors and facilitates trainee clinical psychologists and medical students in the Southwest of England. She’s active with Psychologists for Social Change and has campaigned for climate and nature action.

Tony Wainwright is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and former clinical psychologist born in 1946. He has been a teacher and supervisor of trainee clinical psychologists over many years in the Southwest of England. He has had a long-standing interest in the natural world, and has campaigned for human rights and planetary health.

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“Potential impacts of the CO2 buildup appear to represent by far the largest, most serious, man caused environmental problem that the world will face in the not-too-distant future.” William Barbat, in 1980…

Here is the editorial geologist William Barbat wrote to accompany the first issue of Volume 2 of his CO2 Newsletter.

Whether the divisiveness of the previous decade will end with the November 4 elections in the US. remains to be seen. Some express hope the ‘me’ decade is ending and the ‘we’ decade is beginning, which would help greatly is combating the CO2 problem.

Potential impacts of the CO2 buildup appear to represent by far the largest, most serious, man caused environmental problem that the world will face in the not-too-distant future. Because the threat of famines from climate change and of mass migrations due both to hunger and the potential sea level rise will impact almost everybody, the CO2 problem should be expected to bring together opposing factions on environmental and energy problems. Any delay in closing ranks to halt the CO2 buildup is seen by some knowledgeable workers as leading to more human grief.

With the population of developing countries doubling every 20 years and with the world’s food reserves actually shrinking at a disturbing rate, the threat to agricultural productivity posed by a continuing CO2 buildup translates into potential large scale, long term famine. Some climatologists have speculated that food productivity may actually increase in Russia, China and Canada with global warming. Warming would lengthen the growing season at high latitudes and possibly increase monsoonal and sub Arctic rainfall, but the continental interior portions of these countries may simultaneously dry up. Moreover, the decline in world grain production just in the last year (due in large part to the heat wave in the US) is equivalent to the entire wheat production of two Canadas, as an article in the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out. If the political leaders of any nation choose to ignore the CO2 buildup because they perceive benefits accruing to them from global warming, a distressing surprise may await their people

What factors allowed the CO2 problem to be ignored over the last decade when most other environmental problems received much attention and massive funding? And what factors led to the present de facto moratorium on nuclear reactor orders in the US. when this appears to be the only feasible large-scale substitute for fossil energy available for some time? Some answers might be:

Firstly, the earth was then experiencing a cooling trend that began in the 1940s. Also, quantification of the CO2 greenhouse effect and the effect of dust and smoke were being contested, and some workers strongly asserted that deforestation was possibly as great a villain as fossil-fuel combustion, which would imply that a CO2 perturbation would not be expected to last long after the CO2 outpourings ended.

Secondly, the environmental ‘crusade’ was largely directed against the business community, which had embraced nuclear fission for its perceived economic and environmental benefits. Environmental discussions often became sociopolitical monologues. Formal scientific training and disciplined scientific investigation were not always regarded as necessary basis for technical expertise. Environmental priorities tended to be ranked more by immediate visibility, symbolism, or emotional response rather than measurable impacts on people’s lives. Anti-civil acts were supposed to represent the suppressed will of the public, even if the acts were contrary to the public’s will as expressed by election results.

Most indicators now show that the post-1940 cooling trend was a cyclical swing which ended on schedule and that this bottoming out occurred about 0.2°C higher than the last such bottoming out of global temperatures in 1880-90.

The general consensus now seems to be that deforestation is nowhere near as great a source of CO2 as fossil fuel combustion at present, if it is a net source at all. The general expectation, then, is for a CO2 perturbation to last for many centuries.

From more than a decade of intensive studies and model analyses, the thermal sensitivity of the earth to CO2 doubling had been narrowed generally to about 2 to 3 warming. In recent months, new participants in the debates proposed a sensitivity of about one tenth that. It is difficult to imagine how 19th century scientists as Fourier, Tyndall, Ångström, and Arrhenius could have been so cognizant of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect if a CO2 doubling would cause only 0.26°C average global surface warming. Even if true, such warming would reproduce temperatures of the 1930s, a warmth level which is credited with causing widespread drought in the U.S. and southern Eurasia. To halt the CO2 buildup before such a doubling occurs is seen as requiring a very rapid conversion to non fossil energy sources starting now. The current debate over the 0.26 figure might be resolved if the heretofore unpublished supporting material would be published for all to see.

Possibly a different choice of descriptive terms in many cases would help unify the scientific community and permit clearer communications with the public. If atmospheric heat absorption would be referred to as the ‘hothouse’ effect, as Fourier introduced it, rather than ‘greenhouse’ effect, any misunderstandings about impacts on agricultural productivity might be avoided.

‘Adapting’ to a highly different climate may be inappropriate to apply to future victims of malnutrition or storm-driven high tides of an elevated ocean. ‘Sacrificed’ may be appropriate if immediate counter measures to the CO2 buildup could actually prevent such problems.

The cost of instituting countermeasures may not refer to excess overall expenditures but to initial investments. In some cases, merely terminating subsidies and eliminating income tax credits, tax exempt bonds, and energy-investment tax credits for CO2 producing systems and reducing the regulatory cost and punitive restraints on nuclear energy would produce savings to the public while allowing fossil energy to be phased out as a natural industrial phenomenon, just as wood energy was supplanted by fossil fuels.

A bright side of the scientific political scene is provided by the newly started evaluation of the policy-related issues of the CO2 problem under the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), as organized by William Nierenberg, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. At long last, a systematic analysis of the policy options and tradeoffs has been started, including the options of deferral and inaction. Ironically, the birth of this study derives from the Synfuels Act, which also provides massive subsidies for the most CO2 productive energy system available.

What is still lacking is a specific plan to show how the energy substitution scenarios of F. Niehaus and David Rose could be translated into reality in order to halt the CO2 buildup at optional ceiling values. These are the only CO2 limiting scenarios advanced so far which do not call for a virtual cessation of energy use worldwide. It would be beneficial to have for comparison specific scenarios which call for large-scale reduction of energy use, showing who is expected to give up what. Also, a specific scenario of the supplanting of fossil fuels with energy sources other than nuclear (wind, solar, hydroelectric) would be helpful to the public. People could see just what substitutions and cutbacks would be required to them specifically. The people of the world should then be allowed to select the preferred course of action or adaption without intimidation, coercion, or obfuscation.

With a more unified scientific effort, with CO2 limiting scenarios clearly set out in comparison with any other possible courses, and with better means of passing this knowledge to the public, we might soon progress toward practical solutions.

Citation   Barbat, W. (1980) Editorial. CO2 Newsletter, Vol. 2, no.1, p.2

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CO2 Newsletter Editorial: “The new decade begins on an optimistic note”

Every issue of the CO2 Newsletter had an editorial. They are William Barbat’s attempt to share (and shape) situational awareness.

Here, in March 1980, he is breathing a sigh of relief because it seems the various elements of the state (the Department of Energy, the Council on Environmental Quality) is finally beginning to get its act together. Sadly, all that would be wrecked from November 1980, with the coming of the Reagan gang. (And yet, Barbat persisted. The man had brains and guts).

The new decade begins on an optimistic note as the CO2-greenhouse problem is beginning to receive deserved attention in scientific, political, and economic institutions. Also this particular environmental issue may unite former adversaries in a common effort. David Burns, head of the AAAS Climate Program, has noted a great increase in the number of major papers which are being prepared for publication on the CO2 problem. Also our growing readership indicates to us that the Newsletter is fulfilling its role of enlightenment. Soon a European distributorship for the Newsletter may be established. Most heartening though is the apparent absence of polarization toward the CO2 problem.

Still much skepticism remains concerning the seriousness and urgency of the CO2 problem. Although a rapidly growing number of scientists feel that we now have sufficient knowledge of impending CO2– induced impacts on which to base energy policies, others feel that much more concrete evidence must first be gained throughout the world to substantiate theories and models. Some non-technical people grossly misinterpret this skepticism as representing negative proof.

From the very beginning, much work on the CO2 problem has been performed under adverse conditions or severe financial restraints. Tyndall had to trouble-shoot his galvanometers and have them reconstructed in order to measure the absorption and radiation of heat by CO2. He found that the green dye used in the silk covering of the copper coils of the most delicate instruments of his day contained some iron compound which caused the needle to deviate. Arrhenius lacked laboratory determinations of the absorption coefficients for CO2 and water vapor at plus 15 degrees C, and he also lacked the laboratory equipment needed to make the determinations. “Such experiments . . . would require very expensive apparatus beyond that at my disposal.” Ingeniously, Arrhenius used the earth’s atmosphere instead as his laboratory. Ernest Rutherford described the challenges of those days clearly’ “We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.”

Modern workers on the CO2 problem seem to be little better off. The federal funding of Keeling‘s invaluable monitoring of atmospheric CO2 concentrations fell victim to the race to put a man on the moon for several months in 1963. The General Circulation Model of Manabe and Wetherald reportedly contained a programming error, which apparently could only be eliminated by a computer rerun which exceeded their resources. Glaciologists are asked to make predictions of future ice sheet behavior from very sparse data. As far as we can tell, the only available forecast of the warming threshold for West Antarctica Ice Sheet destruction relies solely on a temperature datum provided by a map made from Russian observations taken during the International Geophysical Year. Polar research has been funded meagerly by the U.S. in recent years.

Meetings which bring together atmospheric scientists, climate modelers, terrestrial and marine biologists, ocean geochemists, and other workers to analyze the CO2 problem collectively are greatly limited as to frequency and numbers of invited participants. Publications concerning such meetings are usually incomplete and much delayed. Some important results of the scientific analyses are not even available for purchase through normal channels because some agencies seem to act more as a sink than a source of information. Thus, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the relatively small number of scientists who have brought us so much understanding with so little.