Sensory reality and climate change

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I have been counseling people since the late 70s.  I graduated from Wright State’s School of Professional Psychology in 1984, a member of the charter class, the first group of students to start and finish the five year program crammed into four years including the predoctoral internship.  I got licensed in California in 1986 and started my private practice in 1987.  I have provided over 40,000 hours of psychotherapy in the last three decades.  I schedule 54 hours of direct care every week.  I love what I do.

And I keep learning.  The science of psychology continues to produce exciting new advances that enable me to help my clients.  The latest development is called the Matrix, an extremely simple diagram that beautifully describes the tension each of us faces every minute of our existence between psychological flexibility and psychologically inflexibility, between avoidance of our emotional experience and connection with our deepest values, and between our sensory and behavioral reality in the present moment and our attachment to the life of the thinking mind, the source of all psychological suffering.

The Matrix explains why we suffer and it offers us a means of escaping the mental traps of depression, anxiety, anger and other sources of emotional struggle and pain.

Here is a brief explanation of the Matrix:

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Between 1850 and 1964, the Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland’s largest outlet glacier, retreated at a steady rate of around 984 feet a year, according to NASA. After holding steady for more than 30 years, in 2001 the ice front retreated rapidly by around 9,800 feet (1.9 miles) and has continued to recede dramatically almost every year since. (Image: NASA)

Global climate change is real.  It is happening.  While humans use their minds to create false realities and bizarre arguments and waste time in pointless argumentation, the world is warming.  The frozen parts of the Earth are rapidly melting.  This can be observed with our senses in the present moment.

Take Greenland.  It has been covered with an ice sheet for at least 110,000 years.  Our species evolved into its present form only about 40–50,000 years ago.  The first humans to set foot on Greenland did so about 4,500 years ago.  Humans started burning fossil fuels about 250 years ago.

Human-generated global warming is evident in the last 135 years.  “The global average (land and ocean) surface temperature shows a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C in the period 1880 to 2012, based on multiple independently produced datasets.”

In the century from 1906 to 2005 the planet warmed about 0.74°C and most significantly, “the rate of warming almost doubled for the last half of that period.”  Over the last 25 years, “global mean surface temperatures…have been higher than any comparable period since AD 1600, and probably since AD 900.”

 

“The warming that is evident in the instrumental temperature record is consistent with a wide range of observations, as documented by many independent scientific groups. Examples include sea level rise, widespread melting of snow and land ice, increased heat content of the oceans, increased humidity, and the earlier timing of spring events,e.g., the flowering of plants. The probability that these changes could have occurred by chance is virtually zero.”

The Greenland ice sheet covers 660,000 square miles which is about 80% of the continent’s surface.  The ice sheet is more than a mile thick on most of Greenland and is nearly two miles thick at its thickest point.  If all the ice on Greenland melted, we would see a global sea level rise of 24 feet.

The Jakobshavn Glacier is a large outlet glacier in West Greenland that produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year.  If you can picture three Rhode Islands covered in ice five times as high as the Empire State Building and then imagine a 7.8-square-mile iceberg chunk calving off, that is what actually happened a few days ago, the latest casualty of human-caused climate change.  

 

“Since the 1990s, the Jakobshavn has failed to regain the ground it loses in summer, and the glacier’s leading edge is now further inland than it has been in 135 years of record-keeping,” said Twila Moon, an ice sheet scientist at the University of Oregon.

“’It is not difficult to say that this continued retreat is in line with what we expect to happen with climate change, with the Jakobshavn as well as the many other glaciers around Greenland and the rest of the Arctic,’ she added. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any glaciologists who were surprised by this event.

“The United Nations climate agency has forecast that unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut sharply in the next 35 to 50 years, the ice sheets on both Greenland and West Antarctica will begin to completely collapse, speeding up rates of sea-level rise. Scientists estimate that together, they are losing 300 billion tons of ice annually owing to rising temperatures.

“’I do think it’s important for people to understand that this not a surprise event,’ Moon said. ‘This is a signal that is consistent with what we expect from climate change. It’s a reminder that we should act, not that we should give up.’

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