Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me – Watts Up With That?

Charles Rotter,

Note the highlighted name.

There was a song that formed a repeated “bit” on the old Hee Haw show that went: “Gloom, despair, and agony on me / deep dark depression, excessive misery.” Every week, the cast would wail it between exaggerated groans before collapsing into laughter. The point was clear: when tragedy is performed loudly enough, it becomes comedy. Reading the 2025 BioScience special report, “The State of the Climate: A Planet on the Brink,” one hears that same tune—only without the laugh track.

“We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of the climate are no longer future threats but are here now.”

That’s the opening line, not of a movie trailer, but of a peer-reviewed paper. If the intent was to conjure images of dashboard lights blinking before the cosmic engine explodes, it succeeded. The trouble is, science is supposed to illuminate, not hallucinate. Instead of laying out data, this report launches straight into revelation. The planet is “on the brink.” Humanity has “failed foresight.” Only collective repentance can save us. Swap “carbon dioxide” for “sin,” and you have Sunday service at the Church of the Imminent Apocalypse.

The document is festooned with what it calls vital signs—thirty-four in all, twenty-two allegedly “at record levels.” This impressive-sounding list includes everything from atmospheric CO₂ to livestock populations, as though the cows were personally responsible for dragging the planet into perdition. The report warns that in 2024, fossil-fuel energy consumption hit a record high, with coal, oil, and gas “all at peak levels,” while solar and wind combined were “31 times lower.” One almost expects the next line to blame humanity for failing to meet its quota in a cosmic game of SimCity: Gaia Edition.

A reader looking for proportion or uncertainty will search in vain. Each graph is accompanied by language worthy of a late-night infomercial for panic: “The largest coral bleaching event ever recorded… Greenland and Antarctic ice mass at record lows… a dangerous hothouse Earth trajectory may now be more likely.” The cumulative effect is less scientific briefing than rolling thunder. If you scroll fast enough, you can practically hear the organ music swelling.

“Deadly and costly disasters surged… the California wildfires alone exceeding US $250 billion in damages… climate-linked disasters since 2000 globally reaching more than US $18 trillion.”

Numbers this large tend to numb rather than inform. The paper never asks whether these price tags include ordinary economic inflation, population growth, or the modern habit of valuing every misfortune in billions. “Disaster losses” are assumed to prove climate deterioration the way medieval plagues once proved divine wrath. The possibility that richer societies simply have more assets to lose—and thus higher accounting tallies—is never entertained. The ledger of doom must balance on one side only.

Then there’s the narrative sleight of hand: every short-term anomaly becomes an omen. A warm year? “Accelerated warming.” A cool one? “Masked warming.” Too much rain? Proof of “hydroclimatic whiplash.” Too little? “Accelerating drought.” It’s a marvel of elasticity. Whatever happens confirms the prophecy. Even the authors note that “warming may be accelerating, likely driven by reduced aerosol cooling, strong cloud feedbacks, and a darkening planet.” Translation: because the air is now cleaner, the models say it should get hotter faster. So clean air is bad news too. One wonders if the only acceptable climate is the one we had on a Tuesday in 1979.

Where the report truly leaves orbit is in its moral framing. Economic growth, it declares, is “largely coupled with increased resource consumption, ecological degradation, and increased greenhouse gas emissions,” and two-thirds of warming since 1990 is “attributable to the wealthiest 10 percent.” Having identified prosperity as a planetary pollutant, the authors pivot to redemption through “post-growth economic models that promote social equity.” In the space of a paragraph, BioScience morphs into Das Kapital with weather maps.

The list of recommended cures reads like the minutes from a global-governance workshop: phase out fossil fuels, overhaul consumption, “stabilize the human population through the empowerment of girls and women,” and pursue “ecological and socially just climate mitigation pathways.” Somewhere between the “systems change” and “broader societal transformation,” one can hear the bureaucratic gears grinding. It’s all very earnest—and utterly detached from the realities of energy demand, human aspiration, or physics.

“Transformative change is needed to address ecological overshoot and the worsening climate emergency… adopting economic models that prioritize well-being, equity, and sustainability over perpetual growth.”

There’s the crux: growth itself is the villain. Not poorly designed policies, not inefficient technology, not corruption or incompetence—growth. The same phenomenon that lifted billions out of poverty, extended lifespans, and allowed societies to afford environmental protection is now treated as a sin against Gaia. It’s the inverse of progress: the conviction that salvation lies in less of everything.

The irony, of course, is that this sermon is delivered via the most energy-intensive information network in human history. The servers hosting the BioScience site hum on fossil-generated electricity; the readers scrolling through its PDFs are likely doing so on lithium-mined devices shipped across oceans on bunker-fuelled freighters. Yet within the text, the only villains are power plants, hamburgers, and human ambition. The authors speak of “systems change” as though civilization were a light switch.

It would be comic if it weren’t so serious—because policy makers actually treat documents like this as evidence. When BioScience prints “the window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing,” ministries translate that into trillion-dollar programs and rationed energy. They never notice that the same paper admits, a few pages later, that much of the observed warming may be due to “a large cloud feedback” and “decreasing emissions of aerosols that mask warming”—in other words, factors poorly captured in models. Uncertainty is smuggled in, then buried under headlines about record heat.

The contrast between rhetoric and reality would make even the Hee Haw gang pause. At least their “Gloom and despair” was sung in harmony.

“Extreme weather is becoming more frequent, intense, and costly. The evidence is overwhelming.”

So begins the report’s chapter on climate impacts. “Overwhelming,” indeed—but only if one defines evidence as anecdote with a press release. A long catalogue follows: typhoons, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves—each tragic in its own right, but arranged here like exhibits in a traveling show titled The Wrath of Carbon. It’s an impressive list, though it resembles a disaster insurance ledger more than a scientific analysis.

Table 1.

Recent climate-related disasters since September 2024.

* Note: We list numerous recent disasters that may be at least partly related to climate change. Disaster descriptions are primarily based on the ones provided in the Climameter hazards database (ClimaMeter 2025). Links to Climameter attribution analyses are given in the “Event” column of supplemental table S2. Where applicable, we have updated the disaster impacts (the “Description” column) using news and other sources as was indicated with hyperlinks in table S2. Information on the Climameter methodology is given in Faranda and colleagues (2024). This list of disasters is not intended to be exhaustive. Events labelled with an asterisk also involve strong winds. Some of these climate disasters may be at least partly related to changes in jet streams (Stendel et al. 2021, Rousi et al. 2022).

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biaf149/8303627?login=false

The pattern is familiar. Every headline-grabbing event becomes proof of a trend. A single hot summer in Europe becomes evidence of “hydroclimatic whiplash”; one hurricane season suggests “escalating risk.” The text never pauses to mention that global disaster mortality has declined over the past century or that human resilience—better infrastructure, early warning systems, sanitation—has made the world far safer despite population growth. That omission would have disrupted the mood, and mood is the currency of this document.

“The tendency for the stationary meanders in the summer jet stream that favor persistent weather patterns … has almost tripled since the 1950s.”

The phrasing evokes a planet lurching out of control, though the source material—climate-model simulations of jet-stream variability—is a statistical field where “tripled” can mean anything from a genuine shift to a quirk of how one defines a “meander.” The paper frames this as a new revelation rather than one more working hypothesis among dozens. It’s good copy, less good climatology.

In this genre, uncertainty is treated not as an integral part of science but as a marketing problem. Where the data are thin, the prose compensates. When the authors admit that “these prolonged and intensifying water extremes are likely driven primarily by rising global temperatures,” the word “likely” is a fig leaf. In scientific writing, “likely” can mean anywhere between 55 and 80 percent probability. In public imagination, it reads as “certain.” The ambiguity serves its purpose: to convey crisis without the burden of precision.

Next comes the “tipping point” liturgy—the notion that one invisible threshold stands between us and planetary collapse.

“A dangerous hothouse Earth trajectory may now be more likely due to accelerated warming, self-reinforcing feedbacks, and tipping points.”

A “trajectory” toward a “hothouse Earth” sounds cinematic. In practice, it’s a cluster of model assumptions stacked atop other assumptions: if warming continues, if feedbacks amplify, if mitigation fails, then maybe Earth shifts to a new equilibrium. Each “if” is replaced by certainty through repetition. The report doesn’t just warn about tipping points; it invokes them, as if uttering the phrase could summon catastrophe.

To its credit, the paper includes caveats—buried deep enough to require archaeological patience. It notes that “impacts on biodiversity are highly uncertain,” that “freshwater changes are accelerating in scope” but difficult to quantify, and that “the Atlantic overturning circulation is showing signs of significant weakening.” In plain English: we have interesting signals, but not much causal proof. Yet the prose swiftly leaps from “signs” to “emerging evidence,” from “emerging evidence” to “collapse could trigger abrupt and irreversible climate disruptions.” By the end of the paragraph, “could” has evolved into “will.”

It’s the same narrative structure used in ghost stories: footsteps, suspicion, apparition, doom.

Then comes the human-interest angle. The authors write:

“We are disproportionately harming the vulnerable and marginalized—those least responsible for the crisis.”

This is a morally virtuous line, but not a scientific one. It conflates cause with consequence. The poor do suffer more from weather disasters—but primarily because they are poor, not because the weather itself has become a sentient agent of inequality. The solution to vulnerability is wealth, infrastructure, and technology—exactly the things the report elsewhere condemns as “overconsumption.” One cannot both decry economic growth and mourn its absence.

The closing sections move from alarm to prescription, proposing “transformative change” and “social tipping points” that would usher in a post-growth utopia. In another context, this might be presented as political philosophy. Here, it’s packaged as empirical necessity.

“Even small, sustained nonviolent movements can shift public norms and policy, highlighting a vital path forward amid political gridlock.”

Translation: science recommends activism. The boundaries between laboratory and legislature dissolve; the scientist becomes the strategist. Yet, for all its talk of “systems change,” the report never details who decides which systems to change, or how a planet of eight billion diverse opinions will vote on a single thermostat setting.

The mood crescendo continues until the finale:

“We are entering a period where only bold, coordinated action can prevent catastrophic outcomes. … Delay only increases the human and environmental toll.”

Every apocalypse needs a deadline. The rhetoric of last chances keeps the audience tuned in, just as it has since the first “Ten Years to Save the Planet” headline appeared decades ago. That deadline has been repeatedly reset, with no refund offered for missed predictions. Yet the sense of emergency must persist, or the narrative collapses under its own weight.

In the end, the State of the Climate report reads less like a diagnosis and more like a mood board—its charts, tables, and color gradients arranged to evoke dread rather than understanding. The data themselves are valuable; the problem lies in the translation from measurement to meaning. Where uncertainty should inspire curiosity, it inspires panic. Where nuance should guide debate, it’s sanded away for clarity’s sake.

Science becomes sermon, and the faithful nod along.

Every drama needs a finale, and this report delivers one worthy of Broadway. It closes with a vision of humanity teetering on the edge of self-inflicted ruin unless it embraces “transformative change.” The word appears repeatedly, as though repetition itself could bring transformation about. The authors call for a “strategy that embeds climate resilience into national defense and foreign policy frameworks” and for “aligning human civilization with the limits of the Earth’s natural systems.” In other words, to save ourselves, we must redesign everything.

It is a peculiar paradox of our age that the same institutions that cannot maintain potholes now promise to calibrate the climate. Governments are urged to restructure economies, diets, and even family planning—all in service to an atmospheric target that shifts each decade. The State of the Climate report treats this as self-evident: if a problem is planetary, then control must be planetary too. What begins as ecology ends as bureaucracy.

“Climate policy must be consistent with what is scientifically and ethically required, regardless of political concerns.”

At first glance, that sounds noble. On reflection, it’s chilling. “Regardless of political concerns” means regardless of voters, budgets, or unintended consequences. Once science is declared the sole source of ethics, disagreement becomes heresy. The climate debate is not improved by turning it into a priesthood of models.

The paper’s appeal to “justice” completes the transformation. Inequality, overconsumption, and population growth all merge into one composite villain: humanity itself. To redeem the species, the report prescribes “postgrowth economic models,” “plant-based diets,” and “empowerment” schemes designed to stabilize population. It’s an ambitious plan—global austerity with a smile. The irony is that such prescriptions would most harm the very people they claim to protect. Cheap energy, economic growth, and modern agriculture are not threats to human welfare; they are its preconditions.

The rhetorical trick is familiar. First, describe ordinary weather as catastrophe. Second, describe ordinary prosperity as guilt. Finally, offer extraordinary control as salvation. The sequence is as old as politics. The difference is that this time, it’s wrapped in the language of peer review.

Even the report’s graphs participate in the theater. The time-series figures rise like seismograph needles of divine judgment. Every line is a slope, every slope a prophecy. The captions warn of “record highs,” but in a dataset only decades long, “record” can mean “slightly above last year.” The audience isn’t told that previous warm intervals—Roman, Medieval, Holocene—were equally dramatic without triggering collapse. Perspective is the first casualty of crisis communication.

The report’s refrain—“The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing”—is not new. It has appeared, in almost identical form, in declarations dating back to the early 1990s. Each closing window gives birth to a new deadline, and each missed deadline brings a new round of headlines about closing windows. It’s the renewable energy of alarmism.

One could almost admire the consistency if it weren’t so counterproductive. Constant emergency rhetoric numbs the public and erodes trust in genuine scientific inquiry. If every fluctuation is apocalypse, none is. Meanwhile, real environmental issues that could be managed—pollution, habitat loss, resource misuse—are crowded out by the endless campaign to recalibrate planetary thermostats.

“The future is still being written,” the report concludes, urging readers to “embrace[ing] our shared humanity and recognize the profound interconnectedness of all life on the planet.”

It’s a fine sentiment, and one hopes it’s true. But the rest of the text suggests the authors already know how the story must end and who must direct it. “Shared humanity” sounds warm until it becomes a policy mandate to share someone else’s energy bills, diet, and standard of living.

Science at its best is a method, not a movement. It works through doubt, replication, and humility—qualities notably absent from the literature of crisis. When a field begins to speak in the language of certainty and moral urgency, it steps into the realm of persuasion. That’s not inherently wrong; persuasion has its place. But it should be recognized for what it is: advocacy, not analysis.

There will always be droughts, floods, storms, and seasons hotter or colder than we expect. What matters is our capacity to adapt, not our capacity to despair. The BioScience report invites the world to measure virtue by anxiety, to equate fear with foresight. Yet history suggests the opposite: societies that thrive are those that refuse to surrender to panic.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that the planet’s “vital signs” are not the only ones worth monitoring. The pulse of reason, too, deserves attention. When it flatlines under the weight of hyperbole, science itself is the patient in distress.

So perhaps the right song for the next climate summit isn’t a hymn of doom but a refrain from Hee Haw:

“Gloom, despair, and agony on me—
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

The line was meant as a joke. Reading this latest report, one suspects it wasn’t far from the truth.

Addendum: Michael Mann isn’t happy that in this time of government shutdown, Democrat and Republican infighting, Bill Gates backpedaling, and much much more in this news cycle, that no one cares about his latest sky-is-falling screed.