What it’s like when your job is to predict the end of humanity [WashingtonPost.com]

Samantha Sangenito 7/17/154:00 AM

As recently as 2009, Camille Parmesan had a career that most scientists can only dream of.

That year, the University of Texas professor was named one of Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “Brave Thinkers” for her efforts to save species whose habitats are threatened by climate change.

The distinction — which placed Parmesan on a list alongside Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama — arrived two years after she shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for serving as a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But beneath the acclaim, Parmesan recalls, her work left her “professionally depressed” and panicked — so much so that she eventually abandoned her life in the United States for a new one on the other side of the Atlantic, according to the environmental news website Grist.

[For more of this story, written by Peter Holley, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...the-end-of-humanity/]

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I often consider this too. I just don't understand why folks with kids cannot understand huge houses, gas guzzling cars are causing massive destruction to the planet and it is then that I realize why it is so hard to get the word about the powerful negative effects of ACEs on someone else's kids. If our society cannot see what we are doing to our planet that will affect our own kids (I am truely glad I have none) how can she grasp how other kids are and will be effected? Such a tragedy our shallow denial. You can deny only so long before the oceans are totally dead and the entire planet becomes anoxic and we are all gasping for air.

7/17/157:27 AM

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