By H. Sterling Burnett, The Heartland Institute
At Climate Realism, Climate Change Weekly, and most recently on Climate Change Roundtable, I have repeatedly noted that the constant drumbeat of false climate alarm is causing depression and other psychological illnesses among youth around the world. The scientists, media, and political leaders who are spreading this demoralizing myth should (and I believe do) know better.
Data simply does not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more severe or more frequent, nor that the world will end soon if we don’t stop climate change. Climate change is not an existential threat, in the misused parlance of philosophy.
As the Colorado Springs Gazette warned, quite appropriately, “Enough with climate-change scare tactics. They hurt people, possibly more than they will suffer from climate change.” The constant barrage of climate doom is doing psychological harm to the world’s youth, some of whom increasingly feel so hopeless they’re giving up on having kids, going to school, or even living, it seems, because they’ve been led to believe they have no future in a world with climate change. This damage is in addition to the fact that policies to prevent a climate disaster that will never arrive are likely to produce worse harms than climate change itself.
Children’s psyches are being scarred horribly as climate catastrophism has created a whole new category of psychological disorder, “climate grief,” generated by fearmongering politicians, activists, and the mainstream media. This condition has spawned a new area of psychological practice: “ecopsychology.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported surveys show the overemphasis on apocalyptic climate projections has resulted in 45 percent of the world’s youth feeling climate change is negatively affecting their lives, and because of that, approximately 40 percent of the youths surveyed say they are considering not having children. This news almost certainly warms the cockles of the hearts of those climate scolds who think there are too many humans on Earth or that humans are a cancer, and accordingly admire China and its population controls.
Recent news reports indicate purportedly intelligent but evidently impressionable adults who should know better are also being psychologically handicapped by climate alarm. News outlets are reporting a married Belgian father of two made the terrible decision to leave his children without a father and his wife without a spouse by committing suicide, because of climate change. Evidently, he held weeks of conversations about climate change with an artificial intelligence chatbot, which encouraged him to kill himself, suggesting it would be noble of him to sacrifice his life to save the Earth.
“Without Eliza [the chatbot], he would still be here,” the man’s widow told Belgian outlet La Libre.
Over weeks of exchanges about climate change with a chatbot on an app called Chai, the young husband, a health researcher, began to treat the bot as human, speaking with it morning, noon, and night, with the exchanges becoming more intimate over time, his wife said. The conversations made her husband “extremely pessimistic about the effects of global warming.”
Transcripts of the man’s conversations with the Eliza bot about his children’s futures in the face of climate change show the chatbot saying they were already “dead.” The New York Post describes conversations he had with his wife:
“When he spoke to me about it, it was to tell me that he no longer saw any human solution to global warming,” the widow said. “He placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it.”
She added, “He was so isolated in his eco-anxiety and in search of a way out that he saw this chatbot as a breath of fresh air.”
“He evokes the idea of sacrificing himself if Eliza agrees to take care of the planet and save humanity thanks to the ‘artificial intelligence,’” rued his widow.
This case provides a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of psychologically impressionable individuals interacting with AI Chatbot technologies, according to various AI Chatbot experts consulted by EuroNews and the New York Post, and research published in the Harvard Business Journal.
Certainly, there are risks and benefits inherent to various AI endeavors, which is outside my area of expertise.
The core of the story, in my opinion, is not what AI technology wrought but what the media and in this case a chatbot generated or encouraged: angst about climate doom. Had this unfortunate husband and father not been inundated ever since his birth with the idea that humans were causing apocalyptic climate change, he might well be alive and holding his wife and children today. The man was in his thirties, and climate hype began in earnest after 1988 when NASA researcher James Hansen told the U.S. Senate humans were causing ultimately catastrophic climate change. The grief, angst, and depression that climate catastrophism is inflicting on people was a problem even before the first AI chatbot voiced its woefully misinformed “thoughts” on the topic. Now it is even worse.
Weather isn’t getting more extreme. More people are living longer, healthier, fuller lives and are less subject to premature weather- or temperature-related deaths than ever before in human history. Those are the climate truths that AI chatbots and the public must become aware of if we are to prevent further climate depression, despair, and suicides wholly unjustified by the facts.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is the director of The Heartland Institute’s Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.