12:00 PM 05/07/2019 | Energy
Michael Bastasch | Energy Editor
Can climate change worry hurt one’s mental health? That’s what CNN is claiming about “climate anxiety” and also linking to the election of President Donald Trump.
Trump’s “lack of political will” is making “climate anxiety” worse for many people, CNN reported Tuesday, citing experts. One professor claimed a student spent two hours crying after learning about global warming.
“With the Trump election, the change in my students, the sense of grief and fear and paralysis in the room, became palpable,” Wendy Petersen Boring, a gender studies professor at Willamette University, told CNN.
“Climate anxiety is real” and can be managed by taking part in a host of “green” fads, including going vegetarian with “meatless Mondays,” riding a bike to work and shopping with a reusable bag instead of a plastic one, CNN reported.
Whether doing any of these would work or not is up for debate, but linking climate change to mental illness is more common among mental health professionals. That’s not surprising given encouragement from the American Psychological Association (APA) and environmental activists to link climate change to people’s mental well-being.
A 69-page guide put out by the APA and environmental group ecoAmerica in 2017 urged mental health professionals to “mobilize climate change discussions” and “bring awareness to the interdependent relation of climate change and mental health.”
“They have the opportunity to help guide our communities on a path of progress through clean, healthy climate solutions,” reads the 2017 guide. (RELATED: Trump’s Waging An Uphill Battle Against The Regulatory Deep State. Here’s Who Is Winning)
While not used in the guide, the term “climate anxiety” has been used in the media to describe the supposed psychological toll of worrying about global warming. News stories on “climate anxiety” — also called “climate grief” — detail college students crying about dying coral reefs or people holding “climate change depression” sessions.
More notably, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “young people” are questioning whether or not to have kids because of global warming
On one hand, young people today are bombarded with alarming headlines warning of an unlivable planet because of global warming. For example, reporters for months repeated the debunked warning of only “12 years left” to save the planet.
The United Nations made waves Monday in warning of an imminent ecological crisis and the accelerating collapse of the natural world — the same warnings the international body made in the 1980s.
CNN claimed higher temperatures “have led to more suicides and increased psychiatric hospitalization and have hurt our sleep.”
The APA wants psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to become climate activists. It’s a similar strategy taken by the Obama administration in 2015 when it asked medical doctors to “raise awareness” about global warming.
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Obama gets elected. He’s awarded a Nobel Peace prize for promises before his election.
Trump gets elected. Sea levels stop healing immediately, and TDS causes widespread anxiety in America snd Europe.
Not all colors are equal. Brown half Kenyan is million times better than orange half Hebridan. We note this and remember that Whiteness is a crime and Trump is white, so no questions should be asked.
It is sad.
The ideal, what our country was based on, is we all Americans.
We work together and will support our president regardless of his or her racial features or party.
The point is racial features do not matter as we are all on the same side. Black lives matters. All American lives matter.
Now it is vote for me because I am a woman, I am a minority woman, I am gay, I mindless will support your red line issues.
We note this and remember that Whiteness is a crime and Trump is white, so no questions should be asked.
I thought Trump was supposed to be Orange? Orange Man bad and all that. Wish the left would make up their minds, if he is white or orange. Will they please pick one and stick to it.
A lot of ‘look what you made me do’ coming from the left.
See – they’re not responsible for going on three years of atrocious behavior – Trump (and of course every body who’s NOT them) made them mad… which, because of their self-declared moral-high-ground, justifies anything they do.
“… linking climate change to mental illness is more common among mental health professionals.”
The claim provides another drum to beat regarding the evils of ‘climate change.’ However, something that is overlooked is that this may be yet another spurious correlation and there may be something else at play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Like highlighting their own mental illness? Or the evils inherent in their own world view?
..”a host of ‘green’ fads, including going vegetarian with ‘meatless Mondays,’ riding a bike to work and shopping with a reusable bag instead of a plastic one, CNN reported.”
There’s never any mention of how the climate will be affected, how much “climate change” will be averted and by when if those “recommendations” are followed.
Oh those whacky fun filled folks over at CNN! What won’t they think up next? Climate anxiety! (Is climate anxiety a deadly disease like cancer or like having a stroke or like polio? Maybe we should start the climate anxiety March of Dimes to help find a cure for this deadly killer?) Keep that humor coming!
Wendy Petersen Boring, a gender studies professor
I always visit a gender studies professor when I want to know something about Earth science.
With that last name, I can’t imagine what her classes must be like.
Ironically she omits borehole C14, CO2, temp and other data from her curriculum; they defeat her narrative.
When you step back from this meme,That of Calamitous Climate, you can only laugh an point.
Or point and laugh as Chicken Little has always been amongst us.
Imagine a person presented with a seashore for the first time, they might ,briefly, believe that the tide will rise continuously drowning us all.
Guaranteed Gullibility ?
Is that what our “public” education systems are designed to produce?
I suspect the screamers know it is over, as all I am seeing are second string dimwits and the extremely gulled.The Cult members.
Where are the “experts”?
I too laughed at;”Trump’s “lack of political will” is …”
I guess you have to be truly special to call the Presidents mocking of this scam, alack of will.
This President has driven a stake through the heart of this scam, for if the USA does not damage its economy with useless regulation and self abuse over the weather, then none who trade with her can afford the luxury of such idiocy.
Affordable,reliable electricity is the tool which has freed so many from physical slavery.
What we call civilization is impossible without this energy.
What was that hauntingly beautiful song?
Days of wine and roses?
Something about too little too late,if you are pushing a weather dependent scam,you must pull it off before the weather changes.
I see the professor quoted in the article is aptly named.
Gender studies – how is that a thing? Is it a degree and how long could the study of male and female actually take.
Any course title ending in “…… Studies” is unlike any other college offering. They are 90% political indoctrination into Post Modern – neoMarxist Relativism. (a totally inconsistent incoherent philosophical mess if you care to delve into the details)
These “…. Studies” courses are mostly Tribe Building exercises (learn tribal rules and tribal behaviors and tribal defenses, etc.)…resulting in quite a few more Democrat voters…and hordes of poorly educated lifelong bitter unpleasant antisocial individuals full of resentment and hate who are deeply in debt from school loans but have no skills to help them make the payments.
It’s a lucrative political indoctrination industry financed entirely by its victims (the students) and its enemies (us – productive taxpayers).
Bananabender56
You asked, “… how long could the study of male and female actually take.” About a minute, if you are a Minute Man. 🙂
I have ‘”civilization anxiety ” the destruction of any hope of a warm, happy, society at the hands of the Greens/Watermelons..
Tell these halfwits at CNN to get themselves bucket of water and a heat gun. Fire the heat gun directly at the surface of the water and check how much heats absorbed.
Better still, have them hold an ice cube near a cup of luke-warm coffee, while leaving them to trust that the ice cube will heat up the coffee to their preferred drinkable temperature. Be very sincere in your assurance about the correct physics involved.
I exhale about 40.000 ppm CO2, so why does my coffee not get warmer when i blow on it?
Have those kids give up their fossil fuel usage for a week and see if they change their minds.
It is snowing here in Denver, so we could use some warm.
This is the exact outcome the liberals want. Create a crisis that isn’t real, make people worry about it, and then get the people to demand more government control to handle the crisis. This worked so well for DDT and so many other issues. Next is Round-Up, a proven non-toxic herbicide that has helped increase crop yields is now under attack by environmentalists and lawyers who’s goal is to ban a useful product and collect billions from a profitable company for themselves and not distribute any of it to the poor. Exactly the same as carbon taxes and any other government mandated green initiative. Just look at Ethanol. Mandated, subsidized, and protected by import tariffs and still not profitable after over 10 years of RINs and LCFS support.
Wendy Petersen Boring.. yes she is and so is what she’s saying
Edward G Boring wrote a history of psychology – assigned in my grad school education. I managed to graduate, despite having given up half way through the first chapter. Wonder if this bird is related to the bane of all psych students.
Irony impairment.
Has anyone thought to open up camps/resorts for the greens where they could go and ‘enjoy’ a completely fossil fuwl free lifestyle for a couple of weeks. I wonder how many of them could survive that long?
The arrow of causality is most definitely as:
Mental Illness –> Climate anxiety.
What saddens me is the total lack of logic (i.e., common sense) displayed by the morons at CNN, to wit: “CNN claimed higher temperatures “have led to more suicides and increased psychiatric hospitalization and have hurt our sleep.”
Give me a break. Right off the bat, where in the US are people experiencing sustained, warmer than usual temperatures? For climate change to have an effect, there must be a climate change.
But more significantly, where do a great many people go when on vacation? Florida, Caribbean, or for those in Europe, Spain. South of France, etc. Why? It’s warm, even hot. That’s exactly what people desire. The young especially would love to live on a warm, sunny beach (and there is no shortage of beach bums. Ever see a similar group lying around in the snow and ice?). The actions of humans show that the majority are happier in a warm world (eg., summer), than cold (winter).
What is the only psychological problem linked to climate? Seasonal Affective Disorder, causing depression the winter months due to lack of sunlight.
Warmth and sunlight improves mental health. Cold and dark, diminishes it. Only a mentally stunted person would claim otherwise.
There are one of 4 possible treatments for this malady.
1. The MSM and others promoting the fake climate crisis to scare people will have to start telling the truth about the climate optimum we are experiencing………the best weather/climate and especially beneficially increasing CO2 levels for life in the last 1,000 years (the last time that it was this warm but still not as warm yet as the Holocene Climate Optimum just over 5,000 years ago).
2. Trump is going to have to join those in group #1, that use climate model simulations of the atmosphere, programmed on a computer using a speculative(not verifying theory) and tell us that he is on board with the absurd agenda in the Climate Accord and pretend that it could actually have an effect of the climate and he is going to help save the planet.
3. Get professional help to assist in dealing with their inability to manage perceived crisis’s in their lives.
4. Do some independent, critical and objective thinking that includes observations of the planet massively greening up as the biosphere booms and life enjoys this current climate optimum. With special attention to how recent empirical data/observations are falling far short of confirming previous predictions of a crisis.
#1 and #2 will NEVER happen.
#3 is expensive but you can apply it in other realms of your life.
#4 is inexpensive, enlightens/educates you and completely eliminates any reasoning based on misinformation to mislead you that resulted in worrying about the fake climate crisis.
5. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
6. Just get over it.
Good chance that more people will read about it on this blog than saw it on CNN.
“Climate anxiety” is real – among uneducated humans. So are panic attacks among sheep and other herd animals of low intelligence and low understanding.
For the sheep and other animals, you can try to protect them and not scare them. For the humans, education is the answer. But once they have been indoctrinated into accepting the climate scam it’s hard to undo the disinformation and lies.
We need to be teaching people to be more self-reliant and self-educating, and not so accepting of pronouncements by so-called “experts” in any field. Instead we now have several generations of compliant and non-skeptical semi-educated humans mostly incapable of critical thinking and common sense.
NCL…You are expressing a basic philosophical difference that separates you from the left. When you say: “We need to be teaching people to be more self-reliant and self-educating…”, you are calling forth the idea of the sanctity of the human individual. This notion of self-awareness and self-determination springs directly from a Judeo/Christian recognition of the spark of divinity in every human-being, and is the basis of Western philosophy and Western law.
The socialists and post-modernists have rejected the idea of the sanctity of the individual. They have rejected reason, but have reasoned that the good of the group is paramount over the rights of the individual. (When you reject reason, contradictions are perfectly acceptable.) The group inevitably becomes the ‘state’; the mother of all groups!
When the philosophers killed God, they also killed the divinity of the person, undermining the fundamental tenets of Western law and the rights of the individual. The battle is increasingly between group rights and individual rights. Mothers against an unborn child. Gays against a baker of cakes.
Climate/environmental activists against the user of fossil fuels. The ‘have nots’ against the wealthy person. Notice that the battle is always presented as a ‘group’ on one side and an individual on the other. The topic is almost irrelevant. It is a war between groups and individuals. The old laws recognizing and protecting the individual are being attacked at every turn.
What is now unfolding in the Western world is the direct result of philosophical deicide. Once God was killed, the moral code associated with God was doomed, and the rights of the individual are undermined.
Hmmm… yes and no.
First we probably need to step away from the concept that Educated = Intelligent. Education does not increase your intelligence. It increases your knowledge base. You still need to be intelligent to work out how to apply that knowledge.
The extension is that being uneducated means you are stupid. I, for example, cannot read Korean. That does not mean I drool when I walk… well… most of the time… It means I cannot read Korean. If I was to take training in Korean I am likely to reach a stage that I can read this language, but that will have zero affect on my walk/drool habits, apart from maybe letting me know what ‘Please Do Not Drool On The Carpets’ is in a second language.
People who are uneducated are probably the least likely to panic about Climate Change(tm). If you grew up under a rock then your comprehension of the world is likely to be sun goes up, sun goes down, the days get slowly warmer, peak, get slowly colder and then repeat. You would have no fear of Climate Change(tm) because you would have only self observations and no one cutting your tree rings in half to explain the consensus.
(also, as a brief aside, I feel you are being a little unfair on the sheep. Flight/Fight is a survival instinct that nearly all animals have. Flinching away from the unexpected is natural. Find the smartest person you know and toss something (soft) at their face when they are not expecting it and they will flinch. Same as sheep. The difference here is unlike sheep we can then process what has been thrown in our face, why it has been thrown in our face and then make decisions based on this. Sheep in these situations rarely think past the ‘DANGER/safe’ aspects.)
The people who do fear CC are the ones ‘educated’ with what they need to know, but who lack either the intelligence, motivation or will to question what they are being told.
In fact I would go as far as to say that many people who do fear CC do so because they WANT to fear CC. Exactly why they do this is a deeper subject.
Climate anxiety is very real, and completely manufactured by ‘Big Brother’. CNN is one of the many mouth-pieces of Big Brother. Donald Trump plays the role of Emmanuel Goldstein in the climate narrative. He is the enemy that unifies the ignorant masses in their hatred. At least, that is the goal of ‘Big Brother’ via CNN.
While the names have been changed to protect the guilty, our reality parallels the events that would be necessary to lead to George Orwell’s prophetic novel. Group think and doublespeak are growing in the world; openly employed by CNN in particular and the radical left in general.
But it isn’t going so smoothly. Mr. Goldstein’s, I mean, Mr. Trump’s approval ratings continue to edge higher and higher. And the only place you can find anything like the movie scene below are on college classrooms, network newsrooms and recently on the streets of London.
Big Brother, however, is persistent. Big Brother knows that winning the war is not about winning every battle…only the last battles.
Not to mention, thanks to things like Twitter, the inability to think in clear complex thoughts that would require far more than 150 characters to express or convey in a rational manner.
CNN, the MSM in general, climate pseudo-scientists, green activists, demos, UN, WMO, etc. are nothing else than pathetic pyromaniac firefighters who indoctrinate all the useful idiots they can catch.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bring+out+your+dead&view=detail&mid=19898E2437022C7A8BF019898E2437022C7A8BF0&FORM=VIRE
When I bring up climate in conversation the nearly universal response is…more or less a belief that something is being done already (solar – wind – etc.)…I’ve encountered not a single soul who lives like climate is or will be a devastating problem. (Similar to the national debt.) Not many folks ever think about it.
Of course, we’ve had no noteworthy weather events, aside from a few localized floods, in decades around here. Farmers are doing great (even with NAFTA). It was colder around here in the ’70s…no complaints about leaving that behind.
Maybe kids somewhere are being coaxed into climate anxiety, but in these parts they are all pretty busy with school, sports, and other activities.
Whereabouts are you Doc? It sounds like a sensible place.
Ohio
Is climate anxiety real? What a silly question! Of course climatophobia is real. If it wasn’t, would it have its’ own name? In a similar vein, Spacealienophobia is also real, for the same reason. There are indeed so many things to be afraid of nowadays. Phasmophobia, the fear of ghosts is also very real. You’d be silly not to fear them, and just go waltzing into a haunted house willy-nilly and all devil-may-care-like. The ghosts are particularly keen on spooking those who aren’t afraid, indeed it becomes great sport for them to see who can make the unafraid person run screaming in fear. They have a good laugh with that.
I have a fear.
It involves being at an international cricket match, having the batsman belt the covers off the ball and having it come straight down my throat.
Then, with international cameras framing me in extreme zoom, I not only grass the catch, but then, owing to a sporting injury to my right shoulder, completely farce up the return throw. My shame will then be spread internationally leading me to be branded as that Australian fan who can’t catch and can’t throw.
I kid you not on this. It is honestly a fear for me.
On the other hand I have never cried for two hours after learning about Climate Change, so I am still winning 😀