Never Underestimate Homo Saps' Ability To Block Out Reality; See Also: "I Never Watch The News - It's Depressing"

In Saudi Arabia, temperatures climbed above 125 degrees Fahrenheit during the Hajj in June, killing 1,300 people on their annual pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Across the Arabian Sea, a prolonged heat wave led to hundreds more deaths in southern Pakistan. Hurricane Helene brought 30 inches of rain to an already-waterlogged western North Carolina in September, filling mountain valleys with mudslides and floods that surged through homes in one of the most destructive hurricanes in recent memory. Then, in November, a year’s worth of rain fell on Valencia and across eastern Spain in just eight hours. The floodwaters swept through towns, and flash flood alerts came too late for people already on the road or trapped in garages underground.

As climate change intensifies extreme weather in multiple ways, the kind of push alerts that popped up on phones around Valencia are arriving more and more often. But overwhelm people with too many warnings about heat or flooding or bad air quality, and they might start tuning them out, a phenomenon called alert fatigue that’s been troubling emergency managers. “It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount,” the journalist Zoë Schlanger wrote in The Atlantic this summer.

The phrase comes from medicine, where overworked doctors blasted with hundreds of medical alerts every day got so many false alarms, they’d learned to ignore them. Alert fatigue could also describe the dynamic of becoming numb to warnings about climate change more broadly. Since the late 1980s, scientists have been raising the alarm about the devastation that global warming would bring. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now understand that climate change is affecting their local communities, and yet they elected former President Donald Trump, who has promised to boost fossil fuel production and undo much of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.

It’s a paradox emblematic of an especially turbulent, anxiety-filled time. As 2024 draws to a close, dictionary editors have been sifting through the lexicon to choose a term that encapsulates the spirit of the previous months, with this year’s selections including “brat” and “brain rot.” For us, alert fatigue stood out as the winner in a year in which severe weather — and the accompanying push alerts — added to the chaos. The runners-up, from “climate homicide” to “underconsumption core,” captured other aspects of what it was like to live on our overheating planet in 2024.

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https://grist.org/culture/alert-fatigue-climate-word-of-the-year-2024/