There’s A Solution To Climate Anxiety Or Something

You can also call it climate depression, as well as climate rage

The harm from worrying about climate change

Back in 2014, my partner and I marked a date in our shared online calendar. Unusually, this was for 27 August 2015 – a year ahead. It was an arbitrary date.

We’re indecisive when it comes to big life decisions, and this was the biggest: whether to have children. We were aware that, now in our 30s, we couldn’t wait indefinitely to decide. So we marked “baby-making conversation” in the calendar, as ever using irreverence in an attempt to make weighty matters seem less daunting, and happily pushed the question away for the time being.

But 27 August 2015 came and went. We felt no more prepared. We moved the date back another year. Then 27 August 2016 passed too. Clearly our stratagem hadn’t worked. While plenty of factors affected our ambivalence, the personality-level issues were overshadowed by a global one: anxiety about a future planet made unliveable by climate change.

Even if the average temperature went up to 2C (3.6F), our planet will not be unliveable. It will be fine. And it still wouldn’t be proof of anthropogenic causation.

Climate change harms mental wellbeing in a number of ways. From trauma and stress following disasters, to relationship damage caused by separation and displacement, the psychological effects of climate change can be enduring. Of course, these effects are heightened for certain vulnerable populations, such as elderly and low-income people, as well as those on the frontlines of climate change.

Loonies.

Researchers at the University of Bath have some suggestions. When I visit the university, surrounded by woodland, with soaring views of the stately city below, Caroline Hickman and I decide to talk not in her office, but by a small lake on campus. We sit on rocks surrounded by sunbathing students and preening ducks, and swap stories of climate anxiety (or Hickman’s preferred term, “eco-awareness”)….

Yet Hickman insists that climate anxiety – like climate depression or climate rage – isn’t a pathology. It’s a reasonable and healthy response to an existential threat. “I’d kind of wonder why somebody wasn’t feeling anxious,” she says.

Because they aren’t nuts, would be my guess. And this turns rather dark

This is true even for extreme feelings. Hickman has counselled parents who fantasise about killing their children, out of fear of the climate-ravaged future. But she calmly points out that history is rife with examples of parents preparing to end their children’s lives in order to protect them. “If we disallow those feelings, we’re just driving them back into the unconscious,” Hickman argues.

You can thank the Cult of Climastrology for creating this type of atmosphere. I’d usually consider dropping a Prozac graphic in that paragraph, but, this is really no laughing matter. These people are beyond unhinged, and really do need proper mental health professionals, not idiots agreeing with them on climate doom.