Some of the revelations in this “Pandora’s box of horrors” raise practical questions. If students are 10 percent more likely to fail an exam taken on a 90-degree day, should the test scores of children in southern climates be rounded up accordingly? If higher temperatures lead to outbursts of violence, should a hot day be considered a mitigating factor when determining the guilt of a defendant? Should parents be warned against raising children in tropical zones?
Like any kind of intoxication, indulgence in worst-case scenarios can leave a hangover. Since many of these findings are predicated on extrapolations, Aldern, the former scientist, is careful to include qualifications. “It’s important not to overreach here,” he writes, directly after quoting “Crime and Punishment” to demonstrate the influence of heat on murderous rage. “Don’t pay attention to the actual values,” he writes, after relaying an economist’s prediction that, between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 2.2 million cases of larceny and 180,000 cases of rape. Brain-eating amoeba infections will “continue to remain relatively rare,” he writes, shortly after cautioning readers who might want to jump into a warm lake next summer to wear nose plugs. In summary: “I know doomsday alarmism is tiresome. But you should still be concerned.”
It is impossible to submit to this barrage and not be concerned. Then again one doesn’t need the threat of airborne A.L.S. to be concerned about the effect of climate change on our minds, our moods, our souls. Any person who dares to stare down the behemoth of climate change cannot escape its mind-altering influence. How does one respond, intellectually or emotionally, to an unraveling that seems both unobservably slow and teeth-chatteringly rapid; to the unthinking and indiscriminate slaughter of billions of creatures; to the ineptitude of our politics and the psychopathic venality of our industries; to the assignation of the most vulnerable among us to the gravest suffering; to the willful destruction of a civilization? The scale of the physical transformation alone overwhelms the mind.
Aldern asserts that he has not written a book about climate anxiety — or climate communication or neurophilosophy or politics — but one about “direct interventions of environmental change on the brain.” Nevertheless, as he puts it elsewhere, “bank shots still count in billiards.” Regardless of whether you live in a wildfire zone or a hurricane alley, or swim in warm ponds, his central insights hold, and deserve emphasis. Aldern is the rare writer who dares to ask how climate change has already changed us.
“It is the job of your brain to model the world as it is,” writes Aldern. “And the world is mutating.” We are mutating with it. We are becoming more suspicious, paranoid, anxious, depressive, distracted, nihilistic, angry. Not all of us, and not all the time. Some respond, as Aldern instructs his readers to do, with greater empathy, resilience, collective action and pipeline sabotage.
But that is just another kind of mutation: an antibody response. This great transformation is already deforming our inner lives in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. Climate change isn’t only here, writes Aldern. It is inside us. And it is spreading.
THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains | By Clayton Page Aldern | Dutton | 320 pp. | $30
