Robert Schribbler: Shift in the Wind May Push Gargantuan Fort McMurray Fire Toward Tar Sands Facilities on Saturday

by Robert Schribbler, robertschribbler blog, May 6, 2016

The Fort McMurray Fire is now so vast that it has both burned through and completely surrounded the city, its airport, and the neighboring community of Anzac 31 miles to the south. Spinning out blazes in a long tail across the green forested land of Canada, the fire now appears to cover about 40 miles of distance and 10 miles of width at its longest and widest points. A secondary fire to the northeast of the main blaze also appears to have lit off. And by the end of Saturday officials now believe the fire could cover an area the size of Rhode Island.

Fort McMurray Fire as seen from above in the May 6, 2016, NASA/LANCE MODIS satellite shot. This huge fire now covers an approximate 10×40 mile swath of land, is throwing off numerous pyrocumulous clouds, and has spawned a secondary large fire to the northeast. In the upper left hand corner of the image above we see the bald landscapes of tar sands facilities. Smoke plume analysis indicates that the northern extent of this monstrous fire is just 3 miles to the south of the nearest tar sands facility in this shot. For purposes of scale, bottom edge of frame is 60 miles. Image source: LANCE-MODIS.

Viewing the massive scope and extent of the blaze, one can see why an evacuation convoy of 1,500 vehicles — composed of members of the fire response team and a number of stranded evacuees from the tar sands industrial zone — was unable to flee the region earlier on Friday. BBC News reports indicated that the convoy encountered walls of flames 200 feet high and was forced to turn back to a city that finds itself surrounded with walls of flame on every side. This was the second time in two days that the evacuation convoy attempted to leave the fire zone and the second time that all ways out were found to be blocked by the fires. Thousands of people remain stranded in the fire zone to the north of the blaze and officials say it will take four days to move them once a clear pathway out is found

RCMP reported that by late Friday a third attempt from the convoy, now swelling to 2,500 vehicles, finally made its way south away from the fire zone. This attempt succeeded after encountering very dense smoke and making multiple stops through the burn scar region. Emergency evacuation leaders were concerned about fires encircling the evacuation convoy as it progressed. But fortune prevailed and the train of cars, trucks, and emergency response vehicles made it through. About three more days will be required to move the rest of the evacuees if a clear path out can be found, according to RCMP statements. (For more information on how to help those displaced by the fire look here.).

Hot Winds to Drive Fire Toward Tar Sands Saturday

GFS model forecasts indicate that temperatures will rise into the mid 80s Saturday. Yet another day of record hot readings for a climate change baked Canada. Winds are shifting toward the south. And very dry conditions will continue to worsen the already extreme levels of fire danger. With the fire now burning very close to the Athabasca oil production facility — a section of the tar sands that was evacuated yesterday due to fire encroachment — it appears that these winds will likely drive the fire toward and, possibly, into that industrial section.

Fort McMurray fire expansion map produced by the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo and the Natural Resources Center of Canada shows the freakish rapidity with which the Fort McMurray Fire has expanded. Today, a similar northward expansion toward the tar sands industrial zone is possible.

Over the past few days, this fire has shown an ability to move very rapidly — covering many miles of ground in just a short period. And officials estimate that the blaze could expand to an enormous 300,000 hectares (750,000 acres or nearly 1,200 square miles or an area roughly the size of Rhode Island) on Saturday. Trees surrounding the barren strip mines of the tar sands facilities provide abundant fuel for these fires and volatile chemicals produced in the facilities add an additional severe hazard. The tar sands soil is laced with bitumen — which is not typically concentrated enough to burn. However, the extreme heat of these fires may cause some of the more concentrated zones to smolder — adding to potential fuels and fire hotspots.

To this point, the biggest concern is over what may happen if the fires do get into the oil facilities. The chemical and gas facilities in the tar sands are among the largest and most volatile in the world. Many single storage units contain enough explosive compounds to generate multi-kiloton scale blasts if their container vessels are breached. And a few facilities are capable of generating enormous explosions. The Nexen Long Lake oil extraction site is one of these. And officials note that, if this particular site were to explode, it could produce a devastating blast capable of leveling trees and structures in a 14 kilometer radius. If this understanding of the officially stated estimate is correct, then it would roughly be equivalent to 30-40 million tons of TNT going off.

“We’re looking at a blast area of about 14 kilometres if that plant were to go,” said Sgt Jack Poitras in an interview with BBC at about 7:00 AM Saturday.

Southwest winds and temperatures in the 80s will worsen fire conditions on Saturday — creating a risk that the Fort McMurray fire will sweep into the tar sands production facilities. By Sunday, another front brings with it the potential for rain — which may help firefighters contain the blaze. Image source: Earth Nullschool.

Given the predicted weather conditions, the available fuels, and the extraordinary scope and force of the ongoing conflagration around Fort McMurray there is risk that fires will invade the tar sands production zone on Saturday. It’s also worth noting that Arctic and Northern Latitude wildfires like the Fort McMurray Fire have had a tendency to burn for a long time during recent years — lasting for many days and sometimes weeks. Adding to the tree fuels, the ground provides its own set of ignitable materials in fires so large and so hot as this one. The top layer of soil contains old leaf litter, organic material and deadfall — a layer about three feet thick that will burn in the most extreme blazes. This region of Alberta also contains deposits of discontinuous permafrost. During recent years, these permafrost zones have thawed more and more with the advance of global warming. Permafrost is carbon rich and produces its own peat-like fuel which can burn and smolder over very long periods. And there is concern that the new fires produced by climate change over Canada may serve as a mechanism for permafrost carbon release.

Record heat and climate change, therefore, provide an explosive combination of new fuels and added ignition sources for fires like the one that is now engulfing so much of this tar sands production zone. And as bad as these fires have been over the past week, Saturday may see the situation again worsen.

After the heat and dangerous wind shift on Saturday, Sunday brings with it cooler conditions and a return of northwesterly winds. Earlier forecasts had indicated a possibility of rain as well. But very dry air in the region is suppressing cloud formation and chances of precipitation are now near zero for Sunday and on through at least the next week. With such a large and hot-burning fire — rain is really the best hope that firefighters have of getting this enormous blaze under control anytime soon.

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/05/06/shift-in-the-wind-may-push-gargantuan-fort-mcmurray-fire-toward-tar-sands-facilities-on-saturday/

Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist

by Madeleine Thomas, Grist, October 28, 2014

Two years ago, Camille Parmesan, a professor at Plymouth University and the University of Texas at Austin, became so “professionally depressed” that she questioned abandoning her research in climate change entirely.

Parmesan has a pretty serious stake in the field. In 2007, she shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for her work as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2009, The Atlantic named her one of 27 “Brave Thinkers” for her work on the impacts of climate change on species around the globe. Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg were also on the list.

Despite the accolades, she was fed up. “I felt like here was this huge signal I was finding and no one was paying attention to it,” Parmesan says. “I was really thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’” She ultimately packed up her life here in the States and moved to her husband’s native United Kingdom.

“In the U.S., [climate change] isn’t well-supported by the funding system, and when I give public talks in the U.S., I have to devote the first half of the talk to [the topic] that climate change is really happening,” says Parmesan, now a professor at Plymouth University in England.

Parmesan certainly isn’t the first to experience some sort of climate-change blues. From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged. For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.

For scientists like Parmesan on the front lines of trying to save the planet, the stakes can be that much higher. The ability to process and understand dense climatic data doesn’t necessarily translate to coping with that data’s emotional ramifications. Turns out scientists are people, too.

Climate scientists not only wade knee-deep through doomsday research day in and day out, but given the importance of their work, many also find themselves thrust into a maelstrom of political, ideological, and social debate with increasing frequency.

As Naomi Klein writes in her most recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, “We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they were ‘unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.’ ” Talk about a lot of pressure.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Parmesan is quoted saying in the National Wildlife Federation’s 2012 report, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the U.S. Mental Health Care System is Not Adequately Prepared.” “It’s gotten to be so depressing that I’m not sure I’m going to go back to this particular site again,” she says, referring to an ocean reef she has studied since 2002, “because I just know I’m going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae.”

Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. — and co-author of the National Wildlife Federation’s report — calls this emotional reaction “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” a term she coined to describe the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens.

“It’s an intense preoccupation with thoughts we cannot get out of our minds,” Van Susteren says. And for some, it’s a preoccupation that extends well outside of the office. “Everyday irritations as parents and spouses have their place, they’re legitimate,” she says. “But when you’re talking about thousands of years of impacts and species, giving a shit about whether you’re going to get the right soccer equipment or whether you forgot something at school is pretty tough.”

What’s even more deflating for a climate scientist is when sounding the alarm on climatic catastrophes seems to fall on deaf ears. “How would that make you feel? You take this information to someone and they say they don’t believe you, as if it’s a question of beliefs,” says Jeffrey Kiehl, senior scientist for climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. “I’m not talking about religion here, I’m talking about facts. It’s equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, ‘I don’t believe you.’ How would a doctor feel in that moment, not think, but feel in that moment?”

Even if scientists did bring a little emotion to their findings — which raises questions about the importance of objectivity in the sciences — Kiehl worries that such honesty would just provide even more fodder for climate deniers.

“I could imagine that if scientists start to talk about how they’re feeling about the issue and how emotional they’re feeling about the issue, those who are critical about climate change would seize that information and use it in any way they could to say that we should reject their science,” he says.

It’s only natural then that many climate scientists and activists often feel an extreme pressure to keep their emotions in check, even when out of the spotlight. For activists like Mike Tidwell — founder of the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network and author of The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Race to Save America’s Coastal Cities — part of being on the front lines means being outspoken and passionate about the cause. But while activism may be a more forgiving platform to express emotional stresses than within the scientific community, the personal toll of the work goes largely undiscussed.

“You don’t just start talking about unbelievably fast sea-level rise at a cocktail party at a friend’s house,” Tidwell says. “So having to deny the emotional need to talk about what’s on your mind all the time … those are some of the burdens that climate aware scientists and activists have to endure. People talk about climate change, openly talk about activism, and people even talk about how scary it is, and about how screwed we are and unbelievable it is that sea level is rising, and world governments still aren’t doing shit. But nobody talks about how it makes them feel personally.”

So how does a climate scientist handle the stress? Van Susteren offers several “climate trauma survival tips” for those in the field. Meditation and therapy are two, as are taking particular care to reinforce boundaries between work and one’s personal life. But she also says being honest is just as important. “[Don’t] believe that you are invulnerable,” she writes. “In fact, admitting what you are going through makes you more resilient.”

And a dose of honesty may be more than just therapeutic. Some real talk about how we’re all screwed may be just what the climate movement needs. Back in March, Grist’s Brentin Mock wrote that in order to really drive home the urgency of global warming and not just view “climate change only as that thing that happened one year on television to those poor communities in Brooklyn,” maybe it’s OK, when appropriate, to ditch a very limited “just the facts” vocabulary in favor of more emotional language. In other words, he argues that scientists should start dropping F bombs. “Forgive my language here, but if scientists are looking for a clearer language to express the urgency of climate change, there’s no clearer word that expresses that urgency than FUCK,” Mock writes. “We need scientists to speak more of these non-hard science truths, no matter how inconvenient or how dirty.”

Climate deniers aren’t going away anytime soon. But with global organizations like the IPCC reinforcing facts like the 95% certainty that humans are driving global warming, the research is sticking. Perhaps it’s time for those deeply involved in climate science to come forward about the emotional struggle, or at the very least, for those in mental health research and support to start exploring climate change psychology with more fervor. And reaching out to scientists in particular could be a huge opportunity to better explore the world of climate psych, says psychologist psychosocial researcher and consultant Renee Lertzman, a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.

“There’s a taboo talking about it,” Lertzman says, adding that the tight-lipped culture of the scientific community can be difficult to bridge. “We’re just starting to piece that together. The field of the psychology of climate change is still very, very young … I believe there are profound and not well-recognized or understood psychological implications of what I would call being a frontliner. There needs to be a lot more attention given to frontliners and where they’re given support.”

http://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-depression-is-for-real-just-ask-a-scientist/

The Climate Swerve

Credit Robert Frank Hunter        

by Robert Jay Lifton, The New York Times, August 23, 2014

AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly.

The first thing to say about this swerve is that we are far from clear about just what it is and how it might work. But we can make some beginning observations which suggest, in Bob Dylan’s words, that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.” Experience, economics and ethics are coalescing in new and important ways. Each can be examined as a continuation of my work comparing nuclear and climate threats.

The experiential part has to do with a drumbeat of climate-related disasters around the world, all actively reported by the news media: hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and wildfires, extreme heat waves and equally extreme cold, rising sea levels and floods. Even when people have doubts about the causal relationship of global warming to these episodes, they cannot help being psychologically affected. Of great importance is the growing recognition that the danger encompasses the entire earth and its inhabitants. We are all vulnerable.

This sense of the climate threat is represented in public opinion polls and attitude studies. A recent Yale survey, for instance, concluded that “Americans’ certainty that the earth is warming has increased over the past three years,” and “those who think global warming is not happening have become substantially less sure of their position.”

Falsification and denial, while still all too extensive, have come to require more defensive psychic energy and political chicanery.

But polls don’t fully capture the complex collective process occurring.

The most important experiential change has to do with global warming and time. Responding to the climate threat — in contrast to the nuclear threat, whose immediate and grotesque destructiveness was recorded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — has been inhibited by the difficulty of imagining catastrophic future events. But climate-related disasters and intense media images are hitting us now, and providing partial models for a devastating climate future.

At the same time, economic concerns about fossil fuels have raised the issue of value. There is a wonderfully evocative term, “stranded assets,” to characterize the oil, coal and gas reserves that are still in the ground. Trillions of dollars in assets could remain “stranded” there. If we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sustaining the human habitat, between 60 and 80 percent of those assets must remain in the ground, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative, an organization that analyzes carbon investment risk. In contrast, renewable energy sources, which only recently have achieved the status of big business, are taking on increasing value, in terms of returns for investors, long-term energy savings and relative harmlessness to surrounding communities.

Pragmatic institutions like insurance companies and the American military have been confronting the consequences of climate change for some time. But now, a number of leading financial authorities are raising questions about the viability of the holdings of giant carbon-based fuel corporations. In a world fueled by oil and coal, it is a truly stunning event when investors are warned that the market may end up devaluing those assets. We are beginning to see a bandwagon effect in which the overall viability of fossil-fuel economics is being questioned.

Can we continue to value, and thereby make use of, the very materials most deeply implicated in what could be the demise of the human habitat? It is a bit like the old Jack Benny joke, in which an armed robber offers a choice, “Your money or your life!” And Benny responds, “I’m thinking it over.” We are beginning to “think over” such choices on a larger scale.

This takes us to the swerve-related significance of ethics. Our reflections on stranded assets reveal our deepest contradictions. Oil and coal company executives focus on the maximum use of their product in order to serve the interests of shareholders, rather than the humane, universal ethics we require to protect the earth. We may well speak of those shareholder-dominated principles as “stranded ethics,” which are better left buried but at present are all too active above ground.

Such ethical contradictions are by no means entirely new in historical experience. Consider the scientists, engineers and strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union who understood their duty as creating, and possibly using, nuclear weapons that could destroy much of the earth. Their conscience could be bound up with a frequently amorphous ethic of “national security.” Over the course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue.

The climate swerve is mostly a matter of deepening awareness. When exploring the nuclear threat I distinguished between fragmentary awareness, consisting of images that come and go but remain tangential, and formed awareness, which is more structured, part of a narrative that can be the basis for individual and collective action.

In the 1980s, there was a profound worldwide shift from fragmentary awareness to formed awareness in response to the potential for a nuclear holocaust. Millions of people were affected by that “nuclear swerve.” And even if it is diminished today, the nuclear swerve could well have helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.

Social movements in general are energized by this kind of ethical passion, which enables people to experience the more active knowledge associated with formed awareness. That was the case in the movement against nuclear weapons. Emotions related to individual conscience were pooled into a shared narrative by enormous numbers of people.

In earlier movements there needed to be an overall theme, even a phrase, that could rally people of highly divergent political and intellectual backgrounds. The idea of a “nuclear freeze” mobilized millions of people with the simple and clear demand that the United States and the Soviet Union freeze the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons.

Could the climate swerve come to include a “climate freeze,” defined by a transnational demand for cutting back on carbon emissions in steps that could be systematically outlined?

With or without such a rallying phrase, the climate swerve provides no guarantees of more reasonable collective behavior. But with human energies that are experiential, economic and ethical it could at least provide — and may already be providing — the psychological substrate for action on behalf of our vulnerable habitat and the human future.

Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and the author of “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima,” and a memoir, “Witness to an Extreme Century.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/the-climate-swerve.html

What Climate Change Does to Our Minds

Surprising insights from studies on the experience of Canada's Inuit

by Geoff Dembicki, TheTyee.ca, December 9, 2013

Pioneering research out of Cape Breton University is measuring how rising global temperatures affect the mental well-being of Canada's Inuit. Sea ice photo via Shutterstock.

Sometimes the smell of Skidoo exhaust makes Melva Williams yearn for the winters of her childhood, when cross-country journeys began in the darkness of early morning, layers and layers of clothing kept the intense cold out, and the ice was so thick people rarely worried about plunging through it. A few years ago, Williams and her husband found themselves unable to traverse Labrador's frozen wilderness after an unusually warm winter left the ice too thin to support their snowmobile.

Now she wonders whether "there may be a time when the weather conditions change so drastically that we cannot safely travel on the ice" at all. Each mild winter Williams experiences -- and lately there have been a lot of them -- brings her closer to that "heartbreaking" reality. "To be a part of a culture and a people that has a necessary connection to nature and the outdoors and is used to living in a certain way -- to see that slipping away is scary," she lamented in a video posted to YouTube.

Her fears may seem anachronistic in a highly modern Western culture that's never felt so detached from the physical world. Our generation venerates the self-inventing tech entrepreneurs building a "new economy" unbound by traditional notions of place or time. We spawned a transglobal class of plutocrats that calls no country home. Yet an emerging body of mental health research suggests we may share more in common with people like Williams than most of us imagine.

"We've totally misunderstood our connection to the natural world," said Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, a Canada Research Chair at Cape Breton University who's helping lead first ever studies that measure how rising global temperatures affect the mental well-being of Canada's Inuit. One of her biggest takeaways: that human identity is inextricably tied to the natural world. As climate change alters that world in profound and unexpected ways, she told The Tyee, "very few people are going to be untouched."

'A caged in animal'

Few people know more about life on a warmer planet than the Inuit of Canada's Nunatsiavut region, a vast Arctic wilderness in northern Labrador. The five Inuit communities nestled into the region's coastal inlets can be reached only by snowmobile or floatplane during the winter. They're still far enough below tree line to be fringed by black spruce forest. "In many ways, they have also experienced warming and changes at a faster rate than Inuit communities higher in Canada's North," Cunsolo Willox said.

Four years ago, she joined a team of researchers working with the town of Rigolet, and first visited during the mildest winter any of its 310 residents could remember. The annual sea ice freeze-up came two months later than usual, and left about two months early. Even while it lasted, the sharp and choppy conditions made snowmobile travel riskier. "In the back of my mind I'm thinking 'I hope the ice is safe, I hope we're okay,'" one woman explained. "Which is something we never ever had to think about before."

Unable to hunt, fish, trap and forage, Rigolet's residents spent months indoors. They felt bored. Many became restless and depressed. "When I don't get out on the land," one resident explained to the researchers, "I'm like a caged in animal. I really can't relax properly." Cunsolo Willox's team had come to Rigolet to study how warmer weather affected the community's overall health. Researchers soon realized the biggest impacts were occurring inside people's heads. "I can't imagine how life would be if I couldn't travel in the winter," Williams lamented.

Others described the milder weather of recent years as "devastating," "depressing," "frustrating," "sad," "scary," "worrisome," and "extremely stressful," according to a summary of Cunsolo Willox's research published this fall. For some of Rigolet's seniors and elders, the mental impact was existential. "The place has changed so much around them," Cunsolo Willox said, "that they no longer feel at home."

A new type of sadness

Halfway across the planet, a similar type of mental anguish had been observed among people living in the drought-stricken Upper Hunter region of eastern Australia. For decades they had seen their landscape transformed by open-pit coal mines, power plant pollution and a drier, less predictable climate. Some suffered "from a form of chronic distress,"wrote Glenn Albrecht, a researcher who studied the region. "Their relationship to their home environment had turned bad."

Albrecht coined an influential new term to describe the particular type of sadness he witnessed in the Upper Hunter: "solastalgia." "The homesickness you have when you are still at home," is how he defined it. Researchers have since documented solastalgia among the older indigenous women known as "Aunties" on Australia's Erub Island, and most recently in the cold and isolated Nunatsiavut towns of northern Canada. "[Albrecht's] concept is very, very relevant," Cunsolo Willox said.

Her team found that solastalgia seemed to affect Rigolet's oldest residents most. Like Inuit all across Canada's north, they'd lived through six decades of traumatic change. They'd been forced off their traditional lands, sent away to residential boarding schools and assimilated into a Western culture bearing little resemblance to their own. Now they couldn't depend on an annual sea ice freeze-up to provide structure to their lives. "And that's almost worse," Cunsolo Willox said.

Denied the opportunity to hunt for caribou, to visit winter cabins in the woods, to leave town on Skidoos in the pitch black of early morning, Rigolet residents young and old found it harder to deal with traumatic events from the past. "When people are unable to spend time on the land," one local health worker explained to researchers, "they have more time to dwell on the negative, to remember things like residential schools experiences when they felt really trapped and unable to leave."

'It makes you, you'

Being trapped indoors made some people feel cut off from themselves and their identities. "It's like taking part of your arm away," one man said. "There is just really something missing." Cunsolo Willox's team heard variations of this statement over and over again: that people physically identified with the natural world surrounding them. They didn't so much consider themselves as being from Nunatsiavut, as literally of it.

Despite the changes brought by a warming climate, more than two-thirds of those interviewed for the studies said they still loved the land they'd grown up in, and would not choose to leave it. "The land... defines who we are," one young mother told researchers. "It makes you, you."

That feeling may be hard for many North Americans to relate to. "In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are," tech writer Clive Thompson has argued. "Only losers get attached to their hometowns." In many ways, any sense that our identities might be "directly related to the ground we stand on," Cunsolo Willox said, "that we can feel our ancestors and our history through it, has been lost in many urban settings."

But just because we don't feel that connection doesn't mean it's gone. Our psyches may in fact remain deeply vulnerable to environmental change. After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, Harvard researchers found the rate of "serious mental illness" among survivors to be double that of the general population. Still, the mental impact of a warmer climate will likely be felt gradually. Look to Australia, where 25% of kids "honestly believe [the world] will come to an end before they get older," one survey suggests.

These are glimpses into a disorienting future. "Although they cannot be described with certainty," the American Psychological Association predicts, global warming's effects on our emotional well-being "are likely to be profound." No need to explain that to Rigolet's Melva Williams, though, for whom Skidoo exhaust triggers memories of a simpler childhood. "Whenever the cold is just right, the wind is just right, I happen to smell that smell again, it brings me right back to those happy times," she said. 

http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/09/Climate-Change-Natural-Mind/