Welcome back to savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you

meet life's challenges with evidence-based Research, A Sympathetic Ear, and Zero Judgment.

Now with the release of the UN Scientific Panel's report, climate change is looking less like an

inconvenient truth and more like an inescapable crisis.

And to this point, listener Trevor from British Columbia wrote in and imagined the future of our planet.

And buckle your seatbelt because it is not pretty.

So Trevor reports, I saw the great forests I grew up around all burned. I saw superstorms and heat stroke deaths

claiming hundreds of thousands every year. I saw food shortages turning people violent and mass

migrations whipping up xenophobic fervor and fascist autocracies.

All I can see is destruction on the scale of what happened to the indigenous communities

in North America after 1492.

How, he concluded, can I not despair?

Well, after I peeled myself off the floor,

I looked into the research.

And then I peeled myself off the floor again because the very first

study I found in the Uber prestigious journal Nature no less linked increased global temperatures

to suicide.

So as you might guess, my floor and I have been through a lot this week.

And it is especially tricky because climate change is a perfect storm, no pun intended, because it hits human nature square in the gut. When faced with dire threats, we

humans tend to react in one of three ways. In the first option, we deny. When prospects seem dire and hopeless, some of us cope by sticking

our heads in the sand. We protect ourselves from going numb and hopeless by whistling through the superstorm.

The second option?

...