A growing number of young people are combating “climate anxiety,” and a majority think “humanity is doomed,” according to a study published in Lancet Planetary Health Tuesday.
According to the study, which authors claim is the most comprehensive study in the world analyzing “young people’s fear about the climate crisis,” 45 percent of 16-25-year-olds said, “climate-related anxiety and distress is affecting their daily lives and ability to function normally,” Vice News reported of the study.
Approximately 10,000 young people were surveyed across ten countries, 60 percent of which said national governments are “betraying” the present and future generations by not trying hard enough to save the planet.
Fifty-six percent of people surveyed said they agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed, “and 75 percent said the future is frightening.
Here is the percentage is broken down by country of young people who believe “humanity is doomed.” (Notably, some of the world’s top polluters, like Russia and China, were not included in the list.) :
- Australia: 50 percent
- Brazil: 67 percent
- France: 48 percent
- Finland: 43 percent
- India: 74 percent
- Nigeria: 42 percent
- Phillippines: 73 percent
- Portugal: 62 percent
- UK: 51 percent
- US: 46 percent
“Our children’s anxiety is a completely rational reaction given the inadequate responses to climate change they are seeing from governments. What more do governments need to hear to take action?” said Caroline Hickman, co-lead author on the study from the University of Bath.
Both the UK and the U.S. have very little faith in their governments compared to other countries to fend off the supposed ravages of climate change.
“Only 28 percent and 21 percent of young Brits and Americans thought the government could be trusted when it came to the planet – whereas 51 percent of Indians had faith in the authorities,” according to the report.
Co-founders of Climate Psychologists Megan Kennedy-Woodward and Dr. Patrick Kennedy-Williams developed a list of recognizable climate anxiety symptoms — anxiety which the report’s authors called an “inescapable stressor.”
“Climate and eco-anxiety blanket over a wide range of emotions that the climate crisis can provoke,” Kennedy-Woodward said. “Guilt, anger, grief, despair.”
“It can result in social withdrawal, sleep or concentration issues, to name a few. Clinically speaking, for younger children we aim to support parents to have meaningful and productive conversations with their kids,” Kennedy-Williams added.
In order to soothe apocalyptic fear, Kennedy Woodward suggested young people “lean into self-care” and “take social media and climate information breaks,” Vice reported.
According to the report, the authors of the study hope world governments realize how fragile climate change has made young people feel “rather than expecting young people to handle it alone.” The study’s authors wrote:
Public discourse should encourage the expression of feelings that 60 percent of young people in this survey have described as being ignored or dismissed. We argue that the failure of governments to adequately reduce, prevent, or mitigate climate change is contributing to psychological distress, moral injury and injustice.
As far as public discourse goes, leftist political figures in the U.S. have dialed up the fear around climate change.
Devout socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) once said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She later said she was exaggerating the timeline to make a point. She recently defended flying on a plane to New York because she had a “very tight schedule.”
In early September, the Biden administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry warned the world is “doomed” unless 20 countries take climate action.
Notably, Kerry’s family jet has flown at least 16 times this year, contributing to the very emission problem he preaches about eradicating.
Read more at Breitbart
To cure anxiety, tell kids three climate science truths that have been hidden from them.
The last 350 years of global warming was most likely caused by the sun moving from a prolonged period of very low solar magnetic activity (the Maunder Minimum) to a prolonged “grand maximum” of solar activity that lasted from 1920 to 2000 (the Eddy Maximum, or the Modern Maximum).
This period of global warming has been an unambiguous boon to mankind and we could use some more of it but now that the sun has dropped into what is looking like the beginning of another prolonged minimum phase we are not likely to get it.
Before the global warming hysteria began in the early 1980s the leading theory of climate change on centennial time scales is that it is caused by changes in solar magnetic activity. See Jack Eddy’s 1976 Science article “The Maunder Minimum.”
That theory is a much better fit to climate history than the theory that climate change is driven by changes in atmospheric CO2, and it is a better fit not just before 1980 but also after 1980.
The modest amount of (highly beneficial) warming at the end of the 20th century can easily be explained by the continued high level of solar activity over that period. Similarly for the lack of much warming since, far below what the CO2-warming theory predicted.
Nature is performing the perfect natural experiment to determine which theory is right. Over the 20th century CO2 and solar activity were both high, making it hard to tell which might be causing the observed warming, but now CO2 and the sun are headed in opposite directions, and so far the results favor the solar theory.
Warming has tapered off, fitting well with the solar theory, which predicts next that global temperature should begin to fall. In contrast, the small amount of 21st century warming has already falsified the CO2-warming theory, which predicted that temperature increase would rapidly accelerate along with the rapidly increasing (but still tiny) level of CO2.
The clincher is the radically anti-scientific grounds on which the CO2 alarmists dismiss the solar theory. They say that because solar activity peaked in the mid-1980s it can’t have caused the spike in warming seen in the 1990s.
That is identical to claiming that because the sun’s rays are strongest at noon, noon will therefore be the hottest time of day. In fact noon is closer to the most rapidly warming time of day, as one would expect when the driver of warming is at its strongest.
That rapidly warming day emits more and more long-wave radiation back out into space and the day doesn’t start to cool until the waning intensity of incoming radiation from the sun falls below that rising level of outgoing radiation, which is usually mid to late afternoon.
The anti-scientific rationale the CO2 alarmists give for dismissing the solar-warming theory proves that they are not just wrong but that they are LYING. No real scientist can actually believe that a temperature forcing switches from having a warming effect to having a cooling effect when it is at its peak.
This is not particle physics. This is grade school physics, and they ALL are claiming in-effect that the hottest time of day is noon. They are the biggest pack of liars ever seen.
On the upside, even grade schoolers, with a little help from honest teachers if there still are any, will be able to determine to their complete satisfaction that they are being lied to and that the scare about dangerous human-caused global warming is the biggest lie in scientific history by a factor of a thousand.
Then they will have to start worrying about global cooling, which always has been and always will be the only real climate danger, but they can approach that happily, as a natural challenge to be overcome.
The CO2 scare is a communist lie, told by our thoroughly communist academia, intended the turn the world against liberty. Economic liberty they say, with its consumption of energy and consequent emission of CO2, is killing the planet, so even though we know communism is terribly inferior to liberty and horrendously evil in many ways, we still have to choice but to go full commie because the economic system of liberty (“capitalism” in Marx’s smear term) is killing the planet.
Once this lie is exposed kids can embrace liberty, which is their bright future, IF we can keep the evil totalitarian communists from stealing any more elections.
I was hearing this sort of nonsense in the 70s and 80s. It’s bad, but it’s not new.
There are answers to energy, waste and air pollution. This article does not give any relief just more anxiety. Cars should be 8X less energy intensive than they are but media will not mention those solutions. 6,923,124 7,127,999 7,334,524 ZL200710167087.1 Aerodynamic EVs on guideway will provide their own power not monopoly grid electricity. There are thousands of solutions to energy and unhealthy air but the fear game is where media keeps us.
My entire household and two electric cars are primarily powered by the PV system on our roof which paid back in three years in gasoline savings alone. No oil changes, no tune-ups, no emissions checks, no trans,mission worries, no muffler or catalytic converter woes.
No engine maintenance at all!
We refuel at night using the power we put into the grid that day.
Do you still PAY?
No surprises here, they have been lumbered with lies and bogus ‘prophesies all their lives. No wonder they don’t look at history with its cyclic warm and cold events. They no longer teach facts or history because their causes would collapse. We can’t have that, just leftist propaganda.
As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is reported to have said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Did you NOT notice the fires in Greenland, the immense fires in Siberia, the world-wide floods?
I took the hard courses and Deniers did not, and now they are too ignorant to respond intelligently.
Suck it up kids!!!! You never lived through real calamities in life and if you read both sides of the story you’ll know the world will still be around in 1000 years and wealthier and better off. No more hand holding!
Brainwashing them with that kind of Lies Joseph Gobbels was a expert on that kind of Propaganda
I earned a Master of Science in this field, and you did not, getting your “opinions” from political prejudice enabled by ignorance.
The kids are right: Look up Ocean Acidification and the slowing of the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which determines our weather and climate. Do you think world-wide fires and floods are a one-time thing? It is a small taste of what us to come.
You ignorant fools have already killed us, and we just wait to die now.
So could you just do it quietly? You’re just distracting those trying to solve the problem.
GKam,
Planet cooled after Roman Warming, Medieval Warming periods. Warm is better. Cold bad. I learned that in the easy courses. Rate of temp increase is .13 deg per decade. So, in 50 years, we’re all gonna die? BWAHAHAHa!