This page was created for the participants in one of our Climate Conversations. Responses are edited for clarity and anonymity. They represent the personal feelings and opinion of participants around that topic. They are not intended to be used as a source of factual information, they are not fact-checked and there may be errors and inaccuracies.
What are our thoughts and feelings about facing uncertainty?
“Embracing uncertainty feels like winging it. I can’t process things quickly enough to cope. I worry about pretty much everything. Rushing to do stuff because I’m uncertain what will happen tomorrow, I try to prepare. To preempt what will happen or to make allowance”.
“Relating to climate change, I get frozen in the headlights when thinking about what the pace could be and the extent of it. I’m wondering how much it will affect me and my life, but also my daughter as well”.
“I feel that the level of uncertainty accelerating started with Brexit. It’s at a level where I don’t even know if I’ll get the season I’m expecting”.
“Maybe I’m better at coping than some because I’m bad at planning and come to terms with not knowing what will happen”.
“Uncertainty can be positive. I tend to doomerism, but I can’t predict the future. It can mean living in the present. As I’m getting older, I’ve got experience that you can’t see things coming. Life just throws things at you”.
“It’s not necessarily catastrophic”.
“I’m thinking about fantasy worlds. It can be hard to break from what we know.”
“I want to go around and know what things are, but that leads to limits of possibilities”.
“Sometimes when people say they are bringing something new, it’s just the old orders in disguise”.
“There can be wonder in not having all the answers, although that could lead to people being naive and vulnerable to people giving them answers”.
“You gain resilience as you get older. You’ve experienced things coming at you and coming through that”.
“Uncertainty has negative connotations, but hope is uncertain. Risk is exciting”.
- “Risk isn’t exciting to me! It’s frightening”.
“Maybe it depends on what is at stake?”.
“Does uncertainty about climate change make you more inspired to act or less?”
- “Less I think”.
- “It helps because there is the possibility of change”.
“Uncertainty also keeps people polluting. People use it to argue for more polluting behaviour until it’s too late”.
“There is a definite policy of promoting uncertainty”.
“Is anyone in control?”
- “I don’t think there’s any one person”.
- “People do make deliberate decisions”.
We looked at this First Dog on the Moon cartoon, published in the Guardian.
“Everything is terrible but so what? It always has been”
“it is a deliberate plan and it is working”
“Realism and fatalism are two different things”
We also mentioned the book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman which has a chapter on the way that trying to gain more control and certainty can backfire.
“Politicians promise control, but who says that’s what we want?”.
“Politicians won’t admit to not knowing what to do. I do wonder what the point of it all (politics) is”.
“How do people live in hurricane alley?”.
- “Why build on a flood plain?”.
- “People do it all the time”.
- “Some don’t have a choice”.
- “Floodplains are fertile”.
“Trying to understand climate science is a way of coping with uncertainty, to predict where it’s going better”.
“I think it was like that for me. I did lots of research, which felt compulsive. I think I was looking for reassurance.”
“I think I might get some sort of perverse enjoyment out of the misery”.