Not all in your head: New answers on the chemistry of mental fatigue

I’ve always found it irritating that mental effort can be so exhausting. As someone whose work has revolved around reading, thinking, and writing for over a decade now, it never ceases to annoy me the way my brain will sometimes just shut down when I try to do work. I’ve found it to be a major obstacle k for as long as I can remember. I’ll try to re-focus on something that I want to get done, and my I’ll suddenly have a hard time even staying awake. It’s not every time, of course, but it’s often enough to be annoying, and it does tend to happen more when I’ve been working hard for a few days.

I’ve never really thought much to the brain chemistry behind this problem, but now that I’ve seen this research, it makes sense that there would be chemical reactions going on there that are causing the mental fatigue:

“Influential theories suggested that fatigue is a sort of illusion cooked up by the brain to make us stop whatever we are doing and turn to a more gratifying activity,” says Mathias Pessiglione of Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, France. “But our findings show that cognitive work results in a true functional alteration — accumulation of noxious substances — so fatigue would indeed be a signal that makes us stop working but for a different purpose: to preserve the integrity of brain functioning.”

Pessiglione and colleagues including first author of the study Antonius Wiehler wanted to understand what mental fatigue really is. While machines can compute continuously, the brain can’t. They wanted to find out why. They suspected the reason had to do with the need to recycle potentially toxic substances that arise from neural activity.

To look for evidence of this, they used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to monitor brain chemistry over the course of a workday. They looked at two groups of people: those who needed to think hard and those who had relatively easier cognitive tasks.

They saw signs of fatigue, including reduced pupil dilation, only in the group doing hard work. Those in that group also showed in their choices a shift toward options proposing rewards at short delay with little effort. Critically, they also had higher levels of glutamate in synapses of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Together with earlier evidence, the authors say it supports the notion that glutamate accumulation makes further activation of the prefrontal cortex more costly, such that cognitive control is more difficult after a mentally tough workday.

So, is there some way around this limitation of our brain’s ability to think hard?

“Not really, I’m afraid,” Pessiglione said. “I would employ good old recipes: rest and sleep! There is good evidence that glutamate is eliminated from synapses during sleep.”

There may be other practical implications. For example, the researchers say, monitoring of prefrontal metabolites could help to detect severe mental fatigue. Such an ability may help adjust work agendas to avoid burnout. He also advises people to avoid making important decisions when they’re tired.

Since I’ve come to accept that my brain is “disordered”, I’ve had a much easier time turning a desire to act into actual action. It helps to be able to recognize what my brain is doing, and then shift to working out how to dismantle that mental block, rather than trying to just push my way through it.

But knowing that I can do that doesn’t mean the mental blocks aren’t there anymore. The problem is that my primary tool for detecting those mental blocks is the same lump of meat that’s experiencing them. When I’m in the middle of a problem, I often don’t notice what’s happening – all I have is the experience of my brain resisting me. I’ve also had to accept that that’s going to keep being an issue, at least until I can afford diagnosis and treatment. At the root of it, there are times when my brain has a “knot” like you might get in your neck or back. You can’t brain your way out of a brain problem.

From what I can tell, this research shows that that’s true for everyone some degree, but I’d guess that it’s more so for certain people under certain conditions. I think that the panoply of neurotypes and mental problems is largely due to the complexity and plasticity of the brain. Muscles can be trained, and there’s a great deal of flexibility and diversity when it comes to what you can train them to do. Brains seem to go way, way beyond that, so it’s frankly not shocking that they can turn out so many different ways of processing, interpreting, and interacting with the world.

My worst period of mental burnout was a few years back, and I did not notice it coming. I’d been working hard, but I was feeling good about working hard. I was getting good feedback, and respect from people, and I was feeling good about my life.

And then I started sleeping through all my alarms. I just couldn’t wake up when I wanted to. I wasn’t just late for work, I’d sleep through half the day, and wake up to realize I’d missed a meeting, even if I’d gone to sleep at a reasonable hour. My brain just stopped cooperating. It didn’t matter how many alarms I had, or where I put them – I could either shut them off without ever gaining full consciousness, or sleep through them.

I was lucky to be in a forgiving work environment when that happened. I know a lot of other jobs would have just fired me, even though it wasn’t under my control. As a rule, people only matter in our society for the work they can do for someone up the ladder. I think it’s very telling that despite that rule, so many put so much of their time and energy into making life better for other people.

This also underscores the degree to which our current political and economic system is both unjust, and unsustainable. It turns out that the culture of pushing people to work past their limit never went away. The kinds of jobs changed (in the U.S.) as manufacturing and resource extraction was increasingly done overseas, but the same fundamental demand – that you work as hard as you possibly can – has never gone anywhere. Ever hear the phrase “mind over matter”? Ever hear someone be told they’re just lazy, or they just don’t want the job badly enough?

We’ve created a world in which it’s expected for everyone to push at least some part of their body to the limit on a daily basis, and if we don’t – or if our limit manifests in the wrong way – we deserve all the bad that comes to us. There is no way that this system is ever going to lead to a society that values human life or flourishing. There is no way that this is the best that we can do as a species.

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Man the tredges! We must protect children from air pollution!

Every once in a while, I like to talk about the benefits of incorporating plant life in and our buildings and cities. In addition to the mental health benefits, which I think are reason enough, there’s ample evidence that more plant life can reduce the harmful effects of air pollution. This is another one of those times when it’s so obvious something’s a good idea, I find it perplexing that more cities aren’t investing more heavily in urban vegetation. I know a great many cities around the world have been doing just that, but as ever, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

So, here’s some more evidence that we should have more plants around us:

A team of researchers led by Barbara Maher, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University, and supported by Groundwork Greater Manchester, installed ‘tredges’ (trees managed as a head-high hedge) at three Manchester primary schools during the summer school holidays of 2019.

One school had an ivy screen installed, another had western red cedar and the third school had a mixture of western red cedar, Swedish birch and an inner juniper hedge. A fourth school, with no planting, was used as a control.

The school with the ivy screen saw a substantial reduction in playground particulate matter concentrations, but an increase in black carbon. The playground with the mixture of planting saw lower reductions in air pollution to that of the western red cedar.

The biggest overall reductions in particulate matter and black carbon were shown at the school with western red cedar planted. The results showed almost half (49%) of black carbon and around 46% and 26% of the fine particulates, PM2.5 and PM1 emitted by passing traffic were captured by the western red cedar tredges.

The tredges also significantly reduced the magnitude and frequency of acute ‘spikes’ in air pollution reaching the playgrounds.

Professor Maher said: “Our findings show that we can protect school playgrounds, with carefully chosen and managed tredges, which capture air pollution particulates on their leaves. This helps to prevent at least some of the health hazards imposed on young children at schools next to busy roads where the localised air quality is damagingly poor, and it can be done quickly and cost-effectively.”

I could never have predicted that becoming a writer would one day lead me to learning the word, “tredges”. That said, I’m not surprised that I’m learning about this from researchers in England.

It seems pretty clear that this is a good investment. It also seems like the kind of thing that parents interested in direct action could band together to demand, or even just do. I’m not speaking from experience, but I expect this would be hard for local politicians to oppose, and easy to unite parents around, regardless of ideology. There may be parents out there who wouldn’t support better health for their children, but I doubt there are many.

There are a lot of small things that most communities are capable of doing for themselves, but that don’t get done. I think at least some of that is people just not realizing that they have the resources they need, but a lot of it is the likelihood that any good will be undone by the system that’s supposed to be working for us. Where that system is working against us, it may be worth doing something like – in this case – putting up a hedge, without waiting for permission. If one were to do that, I imagine it would be best to have signs attached to it, explaining what it’s for, and encouraging people to fight to keep it. Even if one lost such a fight in the short term – if the hedge (or tredge) is destroyed because the right paperwork wasn’t filled out, then that would become something around which you could rally support.

There are a lot of problems in the United States caused by activist parents making noise at school board meetings and other such local political events. This seems like a way to activate people in a more constructive direction by using similar tactics (assuming that getting your tredges isn’t as easy as I think it ought to be). Getting a hedge put between a play area and a road is a small enough change that I think most people will believe that it’s within reach, which will make them more likely to put in the effort to make it happen. I also believe it that the conversation about the benefits of greenery for children could fairly easily be turned to conversations about air pollution and greenery in general, waging a campaign like that could well make people think about what other things they could accomplish by working together. I don’t know whether good fences really make good neighbors, but good tredges definitely make better neighborhoods.

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Video: What Siberia’s sinkholes mean for the climate

This week has been hectic and exhausting for a number of largely unrelated reasons. I’ll have something more substantial up tomorrow, but in the meantime, this video is a good look at something worrisome that’s been happening in the Arctic. Some of you may remember hearing about a number of larger, bizarre craters appearing in Siberia. As I followed the story, it became pretty clear that the culprit was the explosive release of a gas buildup under the permafrost. I had assumed that the gas buildup was from microbial activity in newly thawed organic matter, but it turns out they’re actually from a different scary problem.

Apparently, the permafrost has been acting as a lid on oil and gas deposits for the last few hundred thousands years, and now that it’s thawing, the methane from those deposits is finding its way to the surface. This isn’t methane from rotting permafrost, it’s climate change just releasing natural gas into the atmosphere. It’s currently not certain that these are a new phenomenon. It seems likely that they are, but all we can currently say is that this is new to science. The best-case scenario is that this has been happening all along. Given how rapidly these craters turn into lakes that look the same as other permafrost lakes, it is possible that even prior to the recent warming, this is just one way in which the permafrost has always “bubbled”.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that these are either a new thing, or an old thing that is becoming much more common. As ever, bad news doesn’t much change what needs to be done. Do what you can to build collective power, and community resilience. Do what you can to move politics and political discourse leftwards, and in keeping with those ideals, do what you can to take care of yourselves.

Farmer: It looks like we’re avoiding mass famine this year.

The Majority Report has a farmer who calls in regularly from Nebraska, mostly to talk about the state of grain production both in the US, and globally. I’ve posted some of his calls before, because I find them useful. Longtime readers will know that I’ve been worried about the state of global food production for a while now, and that worry was increased by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus the many, record-breaking droughts that have been happening around the world this past year. As with a lot of good news relating to the climate, this is good because it means we’ve probably got a bit more time before catastrophe becomes unavoidable. That means more time for countries to try to change how they grow food.

I’ll be going more into this soon, but when it comes to food shortages, the middle and upper classes of rich, mostly white nations will see prices rise, but we are unlikely to actually starve at this stage. What will happen instead, is that food that would normally go to countries in Africa, in particular, will be diverted to places like the United States, Western Europe, and so on. It’s good that we’re probably not there yet, but make no mistake – that will come if we don’t change things. I’ve included a partial transcript of the video below, to cover Kowalski’s reasoning for this sort-of-rosy prediction.

[…]
It is looking like the U.S. is going to be producing very similar to last year. Not exactly a record, [but] mildly above average, which is good. Commodity prices have been coming down lately. There’s some good signs out of China that [their] summer crop was a bit better than they were expecting, but I personally won’t believe that until about December, when we know that definitively. They’ve done this before in order to drive down prices to buy South American grain cheap, but it looks like they probably are doing all right.

But aside from that. just there’s been too much heat in Europe. but they’re probably going to be okay. The U.S., the droughts in the southwest are still not great but there’s enough irrigation for now, so probably no major famine, but food prices will probably be up, especially in places like the Middle East and East Africa.

A lot of this is not good long term. If the fertilizer situation is not resolved… Basically, the ground can store nitrogen for a while, but from what I’ve been reading, a lot of places especially with marginal ground (particularly in like Africa and South America; [tropical soil is not as good as temperate soil, so] they rely more heavily on artificial fertilizers in order to have […] a crop that would be considered pretty poor in the States, and if they don’t get more fertilizer. they’re just there there isn’t going to be any left in the soil to use next year.

I know this might feel bleak for “good news”, but it’s important to remember that the fact that we know this stuff, means we have the ability to do something about it as a society. As ever, the goal is to build up our ability to wield collective power, so that we have the leverage to create change even if those at the top don’t want it.

Cleaning water with wetlands

I think a lot of people have trouble imagining a  technological society that doesn’t decimate the environment. That’s pretty understandable, given that it’s not something we’ve seen, thus far. One trick I find helpful, is to think about how we might deal with problems that will still exist, even if we end all fossil fuel use. One of those is the presence of sundry chemical pollutants in the planet’s water. The first thing to note is that a lot of this problem will be solved by ending our societal dependence on endless growth, and endless consumerism. Leaving aside the obvious examples of industrial pollution, it’s pretty widely known by now that there are elevated levels of estrogen in the water supply. What’s less well-known is that that’s mostly from livestock, not pills. So, given that shifting to a more plant-based diet in general is a good idea for the environment, there will be less estrogen in the water even before we reach the point of trying to remove it.

Even so, it seems like it would be a good idea to have the ability to remove such things from the water supply, even if there weren’t a whole raft of other chemicals in play. There are a lot of ways one could go about this sort of thing. The “engineering solution” would probably be forms of filtration and distillation. For some chemicals, that is absolutely the best way to do things, because the less of them there is in the environment, the better. For others, however, we can turn to my favorite category of solutions: ecosystem services!

Near the end of its 96-mile course, the Santa Ana comes to a seeming standstill in the Prado Wetlands. Covering 425 acres, the wetlands site — designed by engineers — consists of a series of rectangular ponds, through which the river’s gentle flow is controlled by dam-like weir boxes. It takes about a week for water to traverse the wetlands, during which time cattails and other vegetation help remove nitrogen, phosphorous, and other contaminants.

Today, the Prado Wetlands, which are operated by the Orange County Water District, are part of a new project to remove a different kind of pollution: the residues of medical drugs and synthetic organic compounds, such as herbicides, that are found in small concentrations in rivers but that may affect endocrine activity, metabolism, and development in humans. A year-old pilot project at the Prado Wetlands channels river water through three ponds, each about the length of five Olympic swimming pools. Sunlight and bacteria degrade residues of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, sex hormones, and other drugs and man-made chemicals before the Santa Ana reaches Anaheim, 20 miles downstream. There the river provides the drinking water for 2.5 million people in northern Orange County.

[…]

One of the early indications that constructed wetlands could help treat pharmaceuticals and other synthetic contaminants came from a study of nonylphenol, which is widely present in laundry detergents. Nonylphenol is an endocrine disruptor and has been shown to have potent toxicity in fish. When a research team led by the USGS was testing the ability of a small-scale wetlands system outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to diminish nitrogen levels in the wastewater treatment effluent, they noticed that nonylphenol and its breakdown products were also reduced, some by 90 percent.

Since those tests, the team has built a full-scale, 380-acre constructed wetlands at the site, called the Tres Rios Wetlands. It is one of the largest in the U.S. and provides water for irrigation and wildlife habitat. It also has three main ponds that remove chlorine, heavy metals, herbicides, nitrogen, and nonylphenol.

Numerous studies have shown the effectiveness of constructed wetlands in removing such contaminants. A 2004 study of the Prado Wetlands found that the site helped reduce levels of ibuprofen and organic chemicals found in pesticides and flame retardants. Scientists in Spain have reported that natural systems efficiently removed a number of anti-inflammatory drugs and pesticides.

Still, many compounds, including some estradiols and antibacterials, are more resistant to treatment in constructed wetlands, with their levels dropping by only about half. “In my mind you definitely want more than 50 percent removal, or why bother?” says David Sedlak, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sedlak and his collaborators are behind the pilot project at the Prado Wetlands. Inspired by experiments showing that drugs are degraded by sunlight as they move down a river, they worked on developing a new type of constructed wetland design specifically to remove these compounds.

In typical constructed wetland designs, weedy aquatic plants are the focal point, because of the myriad ways they break down contaminants. But they also overshadow, literally, the contribution of sunlight. So about a year ago, Sedlak’s team started testing what they call open-water units at the Prado Wetlands. Now, before wastewater enters the series of cattail-filled ponds, it drifts through one of three large ponds over the course of a day or two. To prevent plant growth, engineers used a simple approach: They put down a tarp along the bottom of the ponds.

Although the researchers are still in the first phase of data collection, the new ponds at the Prado Wetlands seem to work as well as a similar pilot-scale system in Discovery Bay near San Francisco that has been operating for about seven years. Early data suggest that open-water units at Discovery Bay remove 90 percent of sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic often resistant to removal in waste treatment plants. An unexpected benefit is that a layer of algae and bacteria that grows on the tarp-covered pond bottoms appears to bind and degrade compounds.

Ponds similar to open-water units will also be incorporated into the Brazos River Demonstration Wetland, a 12-acre site that engineers started building in January in Waco, Texas. Construction should finish later this year. The project marks the first constructed wetlands designed to optimize the breakdown of drugs while also removing traditional contaminants found in wastewater treatment plant discharge. Brazos will not rely solely on photodegradation to remove compounds. Water will travel through weedy ponds to remove nitrogen and then through subsurface wetlands with very low oxygen levels to help strip out chemicals.

There are always going to be downsides to a system like this. Spreading out a river could increase evaporation enough that it would cause problems downstream. Large wetlands are also great breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which in turn increases the risk of mosquito-born disease. I think these are valid concerns, but they’re also problems we can get around, especially in our hypothetical future society that values life.

Not to get all utopian, but I also know that indoor versions of this sort of thing are certainly possible, and if done well could make a building quite pleasant to live in. For example, say a public housing building had its own sewage treatment setup. A lot of the mass is converted into biogas, and the separated water is treated, filtered, and then fed into an indoor wetland system that runs through the common areas of the buildings – areas with natural or artificial light that act like indoor “parks”, and that can clean the water for re-use without becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes!

Beyond that, as the water is cleaned, it could also be used for things like communal gardens, raising fish for food, or other stuff, depending on the stage of cleaning. It could also be a great learning tool for the people who live there, and a chance for communities to experiment with how to use such a resource. I think that could end up being especially important with the rise in killer heatwaves. As always, the way we do things now is not how we have to do things.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

It’s getting hotter, faster, and that trend is going to continue. After a certain point, drastic action is all that is left.

Apparently I meant to write about this back in September, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, I wasn’t able to make myself post daily back then. It’s not anything particularly new, but it’s important to keep in mind when thinking about politics, and about any plans we might have for the future. A little over a decade ago, I was part of a “climate working group” organized by myself and fellow New England Quakers. At that point in time, it seemed pretty clear that the biggest obstacle to direct action within our religious community, was that people honestly did not grasp the severity of the problem. However bad you think public understanding of the issue is now, it was much, much worse back then. I remember people who considered themselves environmental activists talking about preventing it from warming, and going back to normal, at a time when I was reading regular reports about ecosystems shifting around us, and feedback loops starting up.

So, we put together a presentation. We talked about why climate change was important to us personally, because that kind of framing tends to get through to people. And we played this video:

And then we talked about solutions. My goal at the time was to the community to lead by example. To pool their resources, and get every member of the community off of fossil fuels one at a time. I still think it was something that could have been done (the money was there, had its owners cared to spend it), and I know many members of the community have put up solar panels, installed batteries, and so on since then. But the contents of this video – especially the feedback loops it discusses – were new to a lot of people, and I remember being told that if I talked about things like storing food for emergencies, it’d just sound over the top and turn people off. Maybe that was right, I don’t know, but it didn’t sit right then or now. In case I haven’t mentioned it recently, having a store of food for emergencies is more than just buying extra food. It is that, but you need to use that food at the same time, and cycle through it so none of it is on the verge of spoiling when a crisis hits. You also want to be able to cook with the food you’ve set aside, and live on it. If it’s rice and beans, learn how to make it enjoyable, and add those spices to your store of food. If there’s a crisis, you don’t want to be figuring out how to make your food edible on top of whatever else is going on. It’s an actual skill that most people – myself included – aren’t very good at these days. Practice it now, so you’ll have that resource when you actually need it.

Because for all things seem bad now, it is almost certain that the rate of warming is going to increase over the next couple decades, and that is not going to be a pleasant experience for us, because our rulers have thus far refused to prepare.

James Hansen, a climate scientist who shook Washington when he told Congress 33 years ago that human emissions of greenhouse gases were cooking the planet, is now warning that he expects the rate of global warming to double in the next 20 years.

While still warning that it is carbon dioxide and methane that are driving global warming, Hansen said that, in this case, warming is being accelerated by the decline of other industrial pollutants that they’ve cleaned from it.

Plunging sulfate aerosol emissions from industrial sources, particularly shipping, could lead global temperatures to surge well beyond the levels prescribed by the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as 2040 “unless appropriate countermeasures are taken,” Hansen wrote, together with Makiko Sato, in a monthly temperature analysis published in August by the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Declining sulfate aerosols makes some clouds less reflective, enabling more solar radiation to reach and warm land and ocean surfaces.

I’ve written about this before, and it’s important to keep in mind. It’s one of the reasons that I think we need to consider geoengineering, even though it’s an extreme and dangerous thing to do. I don’t know the exact accuracy of the forecasts of civilizational collapse within 30 years – I don’t think anyone can know that for sure, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility. If we don’t change direction, I fear it’s more likely than not.

Since his Congressional testimony rattled Washington, D.C. a generation ago, Hansen’s climate warnings have grown more urgent, but they are still mostly unheeded. In 2006, when he was head of NASA’s GoddardInstitute for Space Studies, George W. Bush’s administration tried to stop him from speaking out about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

After 46 years with NASA, Hansen left in 2013 to focus on political and legal efforts to limit warming. His granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is one of 21 young plaintiffs suing the U.S. government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to take adequate action to address the human causes of climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, industry and electricity generation.

In Hansen’s latest warning, he said scientists are dangerously underestimating the climate impact of reducing sulfate aerosol pollution.

“Something is going on in addition to greenhouse warming,” Hansen wrote, noting that July’s average global temperature soared to its second-highest reading on record even though the Pacific Ocean is in a cooling La Niña phase that temporarily dampens signs of warming. Between now and 2040, he wrote that he expects the climate’s rate of warming to double in an “acceleration that can be traced to aerosols.”

That acceleration could lead to total warming of 2 degrees Celsius by 2040, the upper limit of the temperature range that countries in the Paris accord agreed was needed to prevent disastrous impacts from climate change. What’s more, Hansen and other researchers said the processes leading to the acceleration are not adequately measured, and some of the tools needed to gauge them aren’t even in place.

The article goes on to talk about aerosols, and how we know what we know, but I want to shift focus to something else.

I think it is very important to understand that the warming between here and 2 degrees will likely do a lot more damage than did the warming that got us here. First off, as the video at the top mentioned, there are a number of feedback loops that are also accelerating the warming, even without the monkey’s-paw consequences of reducing pollution. The warming we see over the next couple decades will be piling on top of already-collapsing glaciers and already-burning ecosystems. I think that means that we’re in for a couple decades where it really does feel like every year gets worse. Historically, when climate scientists have talked about warming, they’ve predicted a mix of warm years and cool years, and maybe even a decade or two of no warming at all, but I am increasingly skeptical of that prediction. It wouldn’t shock me if there was one or two years in the next 20 that were cooler than the decadal average, or that didn’t have any record-breaking “natural” disasters, but those will be the rarity.

Zoonotic diseases will also almost certainly keep popping up as desperate people start eating whatever they can to survive, and desperate animals start leaving their historic seclusion because their ecosystems are collapsing, and they can’t find food. This is going to be even more of a problem because the people at point of contact are increasingly going to have weakened immune systems from starvation, overheating, and so on.

All of this, as it has throughout history, will fuel war. War, as it has throughout history will cause environmental destruction, which in turn will make it harder to grow food.

Again, as I keep saying, there are ways we could be preparing, and saving lives, and making this process far easier for everyone. Feeding everyone means nobody has to eat wild animals to survive, which means fewer chances for us to catch diseases from animals. That, and making sure everyone has adequate water would go a long way to preventing war, along with a myriad of other crimes. We can shift agriculture indoors, and invest in new kinds of food production. We can invest in cleaning up existing toxic waste, and containing new waste. We can make sure that everyone has access to air conditioning for heat emergencies, and we can ensure that that is powered by renewable energy or nuclear power. We can invest in global access to free vaccination, for any and all diseases. We can reduce childhood mortality, and guarantee quality care for elders, even if not a single person left alive knows who they are. With those two, and universal access to sex ed and contraception, population growth will likely stagnate or decrease, making that less of a problem without a need for mass death. We have the knowledge and resources to do all of that and more.

What we can’t do, is do that while also protecting the wealth and power of our current ruling classes. There is simply too much to be done, to allow for such reckless indulgence. The scale of change matches the scale of the problem, which means that if we want to avoid billions of deaths this century, we need to take coordinated, deliberate action on a scale that has never been achieved in human history, with zero regard for profit or the immature pettiness of that minority whose sole drive in life is the will to power.

As ever, I am aware of the scale and difficulty of what I’m proposing, but what alternate path is less extreme in its consequences?

All we can do is fight for a better world, and since that’s something few of us are accustomed to doing, I continue to believe that we have to start with the basics, even if it seems agonizingly slow and inadequate. We don’t have time to do it halfway.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The flawed “study” that says serotonin doesn’t cause depression

I have a problem with anxiety and depression. I think that’s pretty normal for anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about climate change, but a few years back it got to the point where I was worried about my heart. I ended up going on an SSRI(Strategic Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor). I’m not sure which, but I think it was Wellbutrin. The first couple weeks I was on it were great. For whatever reason, my brain suddenly worked! I had been expecting it to take the edge off my anxiety (which it did), but suddenly my problem with procrastination was just gone. It was like there had been a loose wire in my brain for my entire life, and someone had suddenly fixed the connection. That went away pretty quickly, and I was back to having to fight my brain to do just about anything, but my anxiety was under control, and that made a huge difference in my quality of life. Managing that didn’t fix my depression, but it made it a lot easier to handle.

Since then I’ve been taking them off and on. In the U.S. it was because of money. When I got to the UK, it just took my a while to get around to getting a prescription, because as I’ve mentioned, that part of my brain doesn’t seem to work quite right. I’ve been on fluoxetine (generic Prozac) since March of 2020, and while I did get a productivity kick when I went back on it, that faded as before. My own experience has been that SSRIs work.  That’s why it was odd to see headlines saying otherwise. I didn’t bother digging into it much because I’m aware of how inaccurate headlines can be, and I’ve had other things on my mind. I also knew that Rebecca Watson had looked at the issue in the past, and would likely do so again. I was not disappointed.

But before we even get to that, the title should also give away the fact that this was NOT a review to determine whether or not antidepressants work (which, again, they do). This was a review to determine HOW antidepressants work. Because in all fields of science, researchers accept that sometimes we know that something works but we’re not yet sure why, like when James Lind performed a randomized controlled trial that found that citrus fruit cured scurvy in 1753. Vitamin C wasn’t discovered for another 150 years.

The brain is a complicated lump of meat, so it makes sense that how it works remains a big question. In the late 1980s, doctors found that depressed patients could be helped by giving them fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac, which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. SSRIs, to put it very simply, change the way your brain processes serotonin, causing serotonin to stay for a longer period of time in your synapses.

This led some researchers to think, quite understandably, that maybe people are depressed because they need more serotonin. That hypothesis got popular in the years that followed the introduction of Prozac and it certainly became popular amongst the general public, but serious researchers knew that it was always going to be more complicated than that. They already knew that depression has many causes: yes, there’s an imbalance of chemicals in the brain which might include serotonin, but there’s also depression that comes from bad life events, or from physical ailments. Just because it helps a person when you adjust their serotonin levels, doesn’t mean the problem was the serotonin levels. I’ve heard several doctors recently explain it like this: taking Advil may help your headache but it doesn’t mean that your headache was caused by a lack of Advil in the brain.

I will probably die angry about “reporting” like this. While I think the sigma against people with mental health problems has decreased in my lifetime, it is far from gone, and that means there are a lot of people who still have to fight constantly just to get the people in their lives to treat them with respect. Stuff like this makes that a lot harder. It’s irresponsible reporting, and it can do real harm to people.

Watch the video or go to Skepchick for the transcript and sources, and if you see people saying that SSRIs don’t work, please push back, even if it’s just linking them to Watson’s breakdown.

 

The bigger the global temperature change, the biggest the mass extinction.

Who could possibly have seen this coming? Bigger temperature changes mean more ecological upheaval?

It seems pretty straightforward, but what I find interesting is that the authors frame it as a cause for some hope about our current situation:

“These findings indicate that the bigger the shifts in climate, the larger the mass extinction,” Kaiho said. “They also tell us that any prospective extinction related to human activity will not be of the same proportions when the extinction magnitude changes in conjunction with global surface temperature anomaly.”

Kaiho cites an earlier study, which claimed a 5.2°C temperature increase in average global temperature would result in a mass extinction event comparable to previous ones. Yet, based on this study’s analysis, the temperature will need to change by 9°C, and this will not appear until 2500 in a worst-case scenario.

“Although predicting the extent of future extinctions is difficult because causes will differ from preceding ones, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that any forthcoming extinction will not reach past magnitudes if global surface temperature anomalies and other environmental anomalies correspondingly change,” Kaiho said.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but I think it would be unwise to set your clock by this research. I can’t speak to the quality of the work, but while I find the research and conclusions interesting, it seems to leave out the rate of warming. While past temperature changes have occurred fairly abruptly, I’m not aware of a warming event that happened at this rate, even if the number at which it stops is lower than those worse extinctions.

In addition to only looking at the scale of change, they also only look at temperature. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t account for human habitat destruction, over-fishing, and chemical pollution, all of which have been taking their own toll on the resilience of the biosphere. Maybe I’m missing something about past climate shifts, but I’m reasonably certain that none of them had a mix of factors even resembling the nightmare we’re confronting.

Regular readers will know that I put a fair amount of time and effort into hope and excitement as motivation, rather than fear. I try to make this blog a place that faces the terrifying reality of what’s happening, while also holding on to enough hope and happiness that we can keep working to make things better. I clicked on this research because I was hoping it would give me genuinely good good news to share, but I’m honestly more worried that this will be used to claim that global warming isn’t an urgent issue.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Morbid Monday: Heatwave edition

It is far too hot. Over the last three years, the cool climate of these islands has spoiled me a little, but at 31.1°C/88°F, I’d be suffering even if I was more accustomed to the heat. It’s at times like this that I find it hardest not to think about what the rest of my life might look like. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the fact that this heat wave is almost identical to a hypothetical 2050 forecast run two years ago to raise awareness about climate change.

One of the most consistent themes in climate science over the past couple decades has been the ways in which the temperature is rising faster than expected, and the ways in which that’s causing problems faster than expected. The current heat wave has already killed over one thousand people on the Iberian Peninsula, and it is an absolute certainty that it has killed a great many people in the other affected countries. And, in case you need reminding, there are other heat waves happening around the world at the same time, and we are only halfway through July.

This is at 1.2°C over pre-industrial temperatures.

The rate of warming has been increasing, and it’s pretty much certain that that acceleration will itself accelerate in the coming decades. We are currently on track for a whole host of worst-case scenarios, and what do our political leaders do? Toady up to the same vicious monsters they’ve always aligned with, and push for more fossil fuel extraction.

Either these people actively want to bring about the extinction of humanity, or they are so senile, pampered, ignorant and arrogant that they truly cannot comprehend what is happening. Whether through malice or incompetence is irrelevant – these people are on track to getting us all killed.

In case it wasn’t clear, that’s not hyperbole. The path we’ve all been forced to take will lead to our extinction if we don’t make extremely big changes extremely soon. That extinction could happen a lot faster than a lot of people seem willing to consider.

And it’s going to be a miserable death. I’m writing this at 2am because I decided to just sleep through the hottest part of the day. The sun set a few hours ago, and it has cooled down a little, though there’s still depressingly little breeze. I’m irritable in the heat, and physically uncomfortable. It feels like it’s tiring just to exist, let alone work. Year after year, decade after decade, it’s going to just keep getting hotter. Heat waves are going to keep getting longer, and more intense, which means more and more people are going to suffer and die, and all of this was preventable.

Never forget that.

Never forget the future that these fuckers have stolen from us, and never forgive them for their crimes.

In spite of it all, I still think a better world is possible. I think we can reforge our civilization into one that can actually last, and can uplift everyone. What we can’t do is build that world in the image of the one we’ve got today. Obviously that means a more just and equal society, but it also means radically different infrastructure.

Take this heat wave, for example. Even without melting pavement, the way we live will not work in the climate we’re creating. If we want to avoid massive death from heat, we’re going to need to make air conditioning available to everyone. We also have to end fossil fuel use as soon as possible. Part of the reason scientists have been pushing for a proactive approach to climate change is that the energy transition will itself require a huge amount of energy. That means more emissions. The longer we delay it, the more we’re adding momentum to an avalanche that’s already set to destroy us.

But let’s say we end all fossil fuel use by 2030. The temperature is still going to keep rising. Even if greenhouse gas levels stayed the same, it would be at least 20 years before we reached thermal equilibrium. Ending fossil fuel use will also cause a drop in aerosol pollution, which will cause a spike in temperature, as that pollution will no longer be reflecting sunlight. And greenhouse gas levels are going to keep rising, because amplifying feedback loops, from permafrost to forest fires, are already active.

You know how futurism in the mid-20th century had everyone expecting flying cars and futuristic cities by this point in history? Well, the cars don’t seem practical, but I think we’re going to increasingly going to need cities that allow people to navigate without having to go outside.

I’ve been called alarmist a number of times by a number of people over the last decade, but I think most people have caught up to the idea that this really is an emergency. We really are facing ever-worsening heat waves and storms. We really are facing massive crop failures leading to planet-wide famine. This is happening, and it’s killing us.

And as it does, we have to keep paying rent.

Keep paying taxes to a government that funnels all that money into death and profit, while scolding us for “not doing enough”.

So we have to keep going. We have to keep surviving so we can change things. Personally, I highly recommend shaving your head. When I realized my immigration status didn’t allow me to get normal work, I decided to try out a mohawk, and I honestly like how it looks. I also am a huge fan of how much it helps  me stay cool. I sharpened my razor and shaved yesterday, and I can feel every breeze leeching a little heat off of my scalp. I honestly don’t think I can ever go back to having a full head of hair. It’s just too hot.

That’s the one upside, if you can call it that. The meme going around is that we live in a cyberpunk dystopia, but without any of the cool fashion or gadgets, and medical technology. Well, we’ve got some of the gadgets, and I know a number of wonderful people who’ve been able to make incredible changes to their bodies, to improve their lives. Mainly it feels like what we’re missing is the aesthetic and the organized resistance movement.

Fortunately, both of those are under our control.

Support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia for more uplifting content like this! It’s a little sparse there right now, but I’m working on a couple things to make it a  more useful resource in its own right, as a sort of supplement to this blog.

Breaking news: Repeated exposure to natural disasters may harm mental health!

This is pretty groundbreaking, are you ready? Researchers have linked repeated exposure to hurricanes, to adverse psychological symptoms:

Findings, published online today in JAMA Network Open, are critical for understanding the psychological impacts of recurring natural disasters, particularly in the context of the escalating threat of climate change. Rather than individuals becoming acclimated to repeated exposure to disasters, results demonstrated that over time, responses to subsequent hurricanes become more negative.

“We show that people are not likely to habituate, or get used to, climate-related natural disasters that will increase in frequency and severity in the years to come. Our results suggest a potential mental health crisis associated with those who themselves directly experienced the storm or knew someone who did, as well as those who spent several hours engaged with media about the hurricane,” said Dana Rose Garfin, UCI assistant adjunct professor of nursing and public health, and first author of the report.

That matches with everything I’ve learned about trauma – it doesn’t “toughen” or “strengthen” us, it wounds us internally, and unless we can take the time to heal, that wound will keep getting worse. Again, it feels like this should be obvious. We’ve all had times when the hits start coming and they don’t stop coming, and it absolutely sucks. We don’t get stronger, we get closer to a complete breakdown. We start lashing out at people, or isolating ourselves, or any number of other things in a mostly subconscious effort to make the bad feelings stop. Trauma doesn’t make us more resilient against trauma any more than stab wounds make us any more resilient against knives.

The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study was conducted by Garfin and her colleagues, Roxane Cohen Silver, Distinguished Professor of psychological science, medicine and health; E. Alison Holman, professor of nursing, both from UCI and principal investigators of the research; Rebecca Thompson, Ph.D., UCI postdoctoral scholar in psychological science; and Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, Ph.D., assistant earth system science professor, and center fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. The team assessed Florida residents in the hours before Hurricane Irma made landfall and examined those same individuals again following Hurricanes Irma and Michael to detect any mental health changes that might have occurred over time. Both were Category 5 storms that hit in succession – Hurricane Irma in September 2017 and Hurricane Michael in October 2018.

The team found that repeated exposure to the threat of catastrophic hurricanes was linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and ongoing fear and worry. In turn, these psychological symptoms were associated with greater social- and work-related impairment, including difficulty interacting with others, and performing work tasks and other daily activities.

“Some distress is normal following traumatic and extremely stressful events,” Garfin said. “Most people will recover and display resilience over time. However, as climate-related catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters such as wildfires and heat waves escalate, this natural healing process may be disrupted by repeated threat exposure. Moreover, we followed people longitudinally over two hurricane seasons, and our data show that as people experience multiple occurrences over time, psychological symptoms accumulate and intensify, potentially portending a mental health crisis.”

We need time to heal. To go back to the knife analogy, it makes sense that being stabbed and surviving it would make it easier to cope with being stabbed again in the future. But if you’re stabbed on a regular basis? If you’re stabbed just after you get out of the hospital from the last stabbing?

Your brain will be focused entirely on avoiding more stabbing, because you can’t heal if you’re still getting stabbed.

We need time to heal.

Sometimes I feel like “research with entirely expected results” is its own category. When studies like this come out, I usually see reactions ranging from “yeah, no duh” to “I can’t believe somebody wasted money researching something so obvious”. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that regular major disruptions in life aren’t great for one’s mental wellbeing, especially when those come with things like personal danger and property damage. Do we really need research to tell us something so obvious? I get it. Sometimes I feel that way too.

Then I think about what I’ve seen, and I realize that we’re in our current climate crisis because there is no end to what some people will lie about to suit their aims. They will claim that weedkiller is safe to drink. They will claim that people whose homes are being consumed by the sea can just sell them. They will claim that society’s problems are all being caused by those with the least amount of power.

Of course they will claim that nothing needs to be done about the mental health impact of climate change and the disasters it spawns. So of course we will need to have research like this to point to, for those mysterious folks among us who somehow think it’s plausible that people will just get used to hurricanes.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!