Doomerism at the End of the Universe

It’s a tough time to be a doomer.

Doomers are acutely aware of the planet’s acclerating collapse and ongoing sixth great extinction. This includes record-breaking fires, floods, heatwaves, storms and dozens of other human-caused impacts that are creating suffering for life around the planet.

We are exhausted by the volume of information we ingest: that it’s happening faster than expected, it’s worse than expected, ‘everything will be fine’ once we reach net-zero, we’re still within the models, that an ‘anthro-shift’ will save us, that the heat will kill us first, that a tipping point has tipped, and that we can avoid a climate disaster if we vote for the right people.

We are sickened by the political hard turn to the right that has seen the rise of kakistocratic fascism, wiping out access to years or decades of scientific research that allow humanity to track the trajectory of this beautiful planet’s collapsing systems.

We are grieving the loss of a treasure-triad of doomer voices articulating collapse, including Gail Zawacki, James Lovelock and Michael Dowd.

And doomers are bone-tired weary of the continued strawman assault on ‘doomism’ and ‘doomerism’ by otherwise important climate voices, including Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe, Hannah Ritchie, and most recently, Genevieve Guenther.

The assualt by Guenther in question appeared in The Guardian.com on June 24, 2025, and was titled, “This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield.” This interview has some deep insights by Guenther that would ordinarily be ground zero for how a doomer might describe the current polycrisis. For example,

“it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3°C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5°C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests.”

“If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing.”

“The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists.”

Ordinarily, I would be applauding this interview. However, towards the middle, Guenther took a dark turn towards doomer-bashing. In doing so, she placed herself firmly in the category of academics who are willing to make stuff up just because it must be so.

I know this group very well. As a retired professor of mathematics and computer science, I might deliver a lecture and then tell my students at the end of the hour that, “I may have just made everything up, it’s up to you to figure out if anything I said today is true or not.” My experience is that in casual conversations, discussions and lectures, some academics make stuff up. They do it to tease, to invite, to win, or most frequently, because it just must be so.

Indeed, I even wrote a poem about making things up. See if you can tell where the facts end in this one: How to win an argument: lesson #17. 

Genevieve Guenther’s PhD was in Renaissance literature (2004, University of California, Berkeley). Her first book was “Magical Imaginations: Instrumental Aesthetics in the English Renaissance.” She has no acadamic credential in sociology or in climate science that I could locate. Nevertheless, as an academic with a credential from a top university, she, like myself and many of my elite colleagues, is entitled to just make stuff up.

And so, here are three categories of doomers she identified in the interview:

• • One [type of doomerism] is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. 
  • Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. 
  • Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down.

 

If this classification is based on any type of research, and just not made up, then there are three different ways she could have come to know these categories:

First, maybe Guenther conducted a study, where she interviewed dozens of doomers and asked them some key questions that allowed her to identify these categories. I imagine she then submitted her research to a peer reviewed journal, where it was published, or is pending publication. Maybe it’s just a white-paper. If so, I am sure she could provide a link to her research.

Second, maybe Guenther is quoting an already-published peer-reviewed research article and she just forgot to cite the article in the interview. If so, I am sure she could provide a link to this research.

Finally, maybe this is preliminary research, where she had lenghthy discussions with social scientists studying the topic, and she is quoting what will eventually become published research. If so, I am sure she could provide references.

Just in case, here’s a question for you Dr. Guenther. To which category do the following doomers belong? Thomas Malthus? William Catton? The Club of Rome? William Rees? Michael Ruppert? David Wallace-Wells? Roger Hallam? Yes, Roger Hallam, the man who was sentenced to five years in prison for trying to save humanity from the impacts of climate change. When asked to name a doomer, any doomer, Hannah Ritchie named Roger Hallam.

But, given that this website is the Climate Casino, I’ll give 10-to-1 odds that there is no research article identifying these classifications of doomers, that it never existed, that it is not in progress, that it will never exist, and that she is making it all up, because it just must be so.

I am not going to bother with refuting Guenther’s categories of doomers; they are ignorant and non-sensical. They show that she has had very little involvement with the doomer community, and instead has decided to stereotype doomers based on casual observations of social media posts with little regard for the history or philosophical evolution of the community. I could not place a single doomer I know into any of the three categories.  Guenther has created a peg board with a round hole, a square hole and a triangular hole in it, and doomers are real humans with complex emotional lives who are doing the best they can to cope with the inevetable collapse of global industrial civilization and ongoing sixth great extinction.

As uber-doomer Sam Mitchell stated for his authoritative take on classifying doomers, “If you ask 12 doomers to define what it means to be a doomer, you will get 13 different definitions.” And that certainly describes me. Every single day, depending on events in the world, events in my personal life and maybe what I ate for breakfast, I may have a different definition. I did my best to articulate all of this in my article, “On Being a Doomer.”

Meanwhile, Sam’s definition is usually less nuanced: “we are totally fucked.”

Back to the topic at hand. I posted Guenther’s quote to my Blue Sky account  and have been more than impressed by the sheer volume of thoughtful and insightful responses. Here are a few of my favorites:

While there are notable doomers who take extreme positions on the near-term future of humanity and see little purpose in any type of environmental action, there are also doomers who are fundamentally environmentalists. The former may seek shelter in a small community of like-minded companions in some far-away off-grid location waiting for the apocalypse. The latter may believe in doing everything they can wherever they happen to live to leave the planet as healthy as possible for whatever comes after humans. But most doomers live ordinary lives and carry on with life as best they can, because what else is there to do?

Guenther would be better suited going after the three types of people who visit McDonald’s or the three types of people who drink non-alcoholic beer. I am sure there is a lot of mileage to be made in making stuff up about these groups.

For me personally, my formative years were in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, at the height of the US environmental movement. My personal doomer life began in about 1981, after Ronald Reagan was elected president. Then Reagan removed the solar-panels from the White House and environmentalism as I knew it ended. Old-school environmentalism has never recovered. It won’t recover. Old-school environmentalism has been consumed by the profit-motivated big-green, EV, solar, wind, keep civilization growing at all costs, more stuff, humanity-first above all other life, death machine.

Dear Dr. Guenther, please stop. Just stop. Knowledge is good. Information is good. Action is good. Bullshit from a first-rate academic is bad. And modern industrial civilization is a cancer that is killing this planet. You’ve just got to get your priorities straight: humans or everything else. I’m on the side of everything else.