In a small office at the University of Somewhere-or-Other (he asked me not to be specific about the location, citing "professional considerations"), I met with Dr. Wendell Circularis, whose 2025 paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy formally defined climate absurdism as a distinct philosophical position. The office was unremarkable except for a poster of Sisyphus on one wall and a melting glacier on another. When I asked if the juxtaposition was intentional, he said, "I honestly can't remember anymore."

Dr. Circularis is a thin man in his fifties wearing a cardigan despite the building's aggressive heating. He seemed both eager and reluctant to discuss his work, which is perhaps the only appropriate stance for someone who has spent two years thinking professionally about pointlessness.

This interview took place in early February 2026, shortly after a severe polar vortex event brought record cold to much of the United States while global temperatures continued their relentless climb toward the Paris Agreement limits.¹ The conversation that follows is real in every sense except the ones that matter.

You've defined climate absurdism as acknowledging climate change is real and human-caused, but suggesting it's "impossible and/or pointless to try to prevent." How did you arrive at studying this particular position?

Wendell: I kept hearing this pattern in conversations. People who weren't deniers, who accepted all the science, but who'd somehow landed on inaction anyway. They'd say things like "the climate's always changing" or "China's emissions make anything we do meaningless" or "we're past the point of no return."

These aren't denial arguments. They're something stranger. They accept the problem but reject the possibility of meaningful response. Philosophically fascinating because it creates this recursive trap where the acknowledgment of crisis becomes the justification for passivity.

I wanted to understand the logical structure, how they differ from classic absurdist philosophy—Camus, Beckett, that tradition. The short answer is they don't hold up under scrutiny. But that hasn't stopped them from proliferating. So then the question becomes: are these arguments actually intended to convince, or are they rhetorical strategies for managing cognitive dissonance? And if they're the latter, does that make them more or less dangerous than outright denial?

Your paper argues that climate absurdism is "self-defeating." Can you explain?

Wendell: The argument collapses under its own weight. Climate absurdists claim that because the climate has always changed naturally, our efforts to stabilize it are meaningless. We're fighting against geological and cosmic forces too vast to matter. But this requires adopting a perspective so zoomed-out that human agency disappears entirely. At that scale, nothing humans do matters. Not art, not love, not civilization itself.

So the absurdist has to answer: if we should "step back" and view climate action on a cosmic scale where it appears insignificant, shouldn't we also step back from everything else? Why go to work? Why have children? Why eat breakfast?

The cosmic perspective that makes climate action seem pointless makes everything pointless. The climate absurdist can't justify their own selective inaction without undermining the entire framework.

(He paused here, looking at his hands.)

The really fascinating part is how this mirrors the structure of the problem itself. We know we're contributing to climate change through our daily lives, we want to stop, but we feel trapped in systems that make individual action seem meaningless. The perception of pointlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doesn't it?

You mention in the paper that climate absurdist arguments are "primarily rhetorical claims." What's the distinction you're drawing?

Wendell: I'm suggesting these aren't good-faith philosophical positions so much as rhetorical shields against uncomfortable truths. When someone says "the climate's always changing, why should we care about anthropogenic change," they're not really asking for geological data. They're asking to be released from moral obligation.

The rhetorical structure invites you to zoom out until human action becomes invisible, but it's selective zooming. They're not applying this logic to their mortgage or their child's education or their retirement planning.

(He stood up, walked to the window, sat back down.)

But here's where I start to wonder about my own argument. If these are rhetorical strategies rather than philosophical positions, am I just describing a psychological defense mechanism? And if so, does philosophical analysis even apply? Can you defeat a defense mechanism with logic?

Or am I committing the same error I'm critiquing? Using academic analysis as my own shield against the uncomfortable reality that rational argument might be pointless when people are motivated by emotional self-protection rather than truth-seeking?

The timing of your paper is interesting. It came out in 2025, the third-hottest year on record, while we're seeing both extreme global heat and events like the January 2026 polar vortex that brought record cold to the U.S. Does that kind of contradiction fuel climate absurdism?

Wendell: Oh, absolutely. The polar vortex disruption is perfect absurdist material. People experience record cold and think "so much for global warming," even though the cold itself is likely linked to Arctic warming destabilizing the jet stream.² A local contradiction that obscures a global trend. Exactly the kind of perceptual confusion that absurdist arguments exploit.

But what's the counter-argument? "Trust the scientists, not your lived experience"? That's epistemologically sound but rhetorically weak. People's lived experience matters to them more than abstract data. The evidence that should be most convincing—"look how weird the weather is"—gets interpreted as evidence against the scientific consensus rather than for it.

And then you have COP30 with 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance while Indigenous peoples are simultaneously winning land rights and President Lula is approving oil drilling near the Amazon Reef.³ How do you maintain faith in collective action when the institutions designed for climate response are structurally compromised by the industries causing the problem?

Isn't the real absurdity not the philosophical position but the material reality we're living in? Doesn't the existence of my paper about climate absurdism, published in an academic journal that maybe three hundred people will read, prove the absurdists' point better than anything they could argue?

So are you a climate absurdist yourself?

Wendell: No.

(Long pause.)

Maybe?

The paper argues that climate absurdism is self-defeating. I stand by that. But I wrote it while flying to conferences, heating my office, living a comfortable academic life that depends on the same systems driving climate change. I bike to work, I recycle, I buy LED bulbs. And I know it makes no measurable difference.⁴ The gap between my intellectual position and my material reality is... substantial.

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but what if Sisyphus is pushing the boulder uphill while the hill itself is melting? What if the boulder is made of melting ice?

What if I'm using philosophical abstraction right now to avoid confronting my own complicity? And if so, isn't that exactly the move I'm critiquing in the paper?

Your paper suggests climate absurdist arguments are "intended to encourage the listener to 'step back' and view our climate stabilizing efforts on a geologic or cosmic scale, where they can appear insignificant." But couldn't that perspective shift also be liberating? Freeing us from the anxiety of individual responsibility?

Wendell: Is that liberation or abdication?

And who gets to be liberated? The people experiencing the worst climate impacts right now—the people in the Global South, Indigenous communities, people in poverty—they don't have the luxury of cosmic perspective. That's a privilege of relative safety.

But you're touching on something I struggled with in the paper. Is there a non-absurdist version of acceptance? Can you acknowledge the scale of the problem, accept that your individual actions are largely symbolic, and still choose to act anyway? Not because it will solve the problem but because the act of trying matters somehow?

Or is that just another rhetorical shield? "I tried, therefore I'm absolved"?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder: what's the difference between climate absurdism and climate realism? If the science says we're likely to overshoot Paris Agreement targets, if emissions keep rising despite renewable energy growth, if COP conferences are dominated by the industries causing the problem... at what point does acknowledging reality become absurdism?

Where's the line between honest assessment and self-defeating rhetoric? And if I can't draw that line clearly, how can I critique others for crossing it?

What do you want readers to take away from your paper?

Wendell: I want them to understand that climate absurdism is philosophically incoherent. That the arguments don't hold up under scrutiny. But I also want them to understand why these arguments are appealing, why people reach for them, what psychological and social functions they serve.

(He was speaking faster now, leaning forward.)

The harder question is what comes after the critique. If I successfully demonstrate that climate absurdism is self-defeating, does that obligate me to offer an alternative? And if so, what is it? "Keep trying even though it feels pointless"? "Trust in collective action despite all evidence of its inadequacy"? "Find meaning in the attempt rather than the outcome"?

Maybe the real finding of my paper isn't about climate absurdism at all. Maybe it's about how philosophical analysis can diagnose a problem without solving it. How critique can be both accurate and useless. How we can understand why something is wrong without knowing what's right.

What am I doing here? What are you doing here?

What's the point of this conversation? And if we can't answer that, how can we possibly answer the bigger question of what to do about climate change? Shouldn't we start with the small absurdities before tackling the large ones? Or is that just another way of avoiding the real work?

I'm asking. I genuinely don't know anymore.

Do you?

Dr. Circularis had to leave for a faculty meeting. I stayed in his office for a few minutes after he left, looking at the Sisyphus poster. The boulder, I noticed for the first time, was slightly translucent. Melting ice, not stone. Whether this was intentional or my own projection, I couldn't say. The glacier poster on the opposite wall had no such ambiguity. It was just melting.

Footnotes

1. https://earth.org/this-week-in-climate-news-january-2026-week-2/ ↩

2. https://fortune.com/2026/01/26/what-role-did-climate-change-play-in-winter-storm-fern-january-2026/ ↩

3. https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/cop30-paradox-global-climate-change-policy-making ↩

4. https://pshares.org/blog/confronting-our-environmental-apocalypse-the-absurd/ ↩