University of Bath Press Release
UNIVERSITY OF BATH
Nearly half of global youth surveyed (45%) say climate anxiety and distress is affecting their daily lives and functioning – according to results from the largest scientific study into climate anxiety in children and young people, according to recent research.
The inaugural study, based on surveys with 10,000 children and young people (16-25) across 10 countries, found 75% of young respondents believe ‘the future is frightening’ – jumping to 81% of youth surveyed in Portugal and 92% in the Philippines.
It found, for the first time, that climate distress and anxiety is significantly related to perceived government inaction and associated feelings of betrayal. 58% of children and young people surveyed said governments were “betraying me and/or future generations,” while 64% said their governments are not doing enough to avoid a climate catastrophe.
The study finds widespread psychological distress among children and young people globally and warns ‘such high levels of distress, functional impact and feelings of betrayal will negatively affect the mental health of children and young people.’ Experts warn that because continued government inaction on climate change is psychologically damaging, it potentially amounts to a violation of international human rights law.
Caroline Hickman, from the University of Bath, Climate Psychology Alliance and co-lead author on the study said: “This study paints a horrific picture of widespread climate anxiety in our children and young people. It suggests for the first time that high levels of psychological distress in youth is linked to government inaction.
“Our children’s anxiety is a completely rational reaction given the inadequate responses to climate change they are seeing from governments. Children and young people are now mobilising around the world and taking governments to court; arguing that failure to act on climate change violates their human rights. This study makes an important contribution to these legal arguments, framing climate anxiety and distress as a ‘moral injury’.”
Co-lead, Dr Liz Marks, from the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology added: “This study shows us how many young people around the world feel betrayed by those who should be protecting them. Despite this, governments at COP26 failed to take the bold and decisive action required to combat climate change. The decisions that those in power are making now will have the greatest impact upon the youngest and future generations, but they feel dismissed and ignored.
“We must consider the futures of young people, listen to their voices and place them at the centre of decision making. By bringing together all generations, we can demand that that governments engage in the urgent action on climate change we so desperately need.”
Mitzi Tan, 23-years-old, from the Philippines, said: “I grew up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom. Society tells me that this anxiety is an irrational fear that needs to be overcome – one that meditation and healthy coping mechanisms will ‘fix.’ At its root, our climate anxiety comes from this deep-set feeling of betrayal because of government inaction. To truly address our growing climate anxiety, we need justice.”
Beth Irving, a 19-year-old climate activist behind the Cardiff student climate strikes, said: “When I was 16… I went through phases of feeling utterly helpless in face of this immense problem, and then would launch myself into organising protests or changing things within my school. To put so much energy into something and then see so little real life impact was exhausting; I had many occasions where I would hide myself away and think “None of this is enough”. It’s so damaging to put this problem on the shoulders of young people – hope needs to come instead from palpable structural action.”
Additional findings from the study include:
- 59% of children and young people surveyed were very or extremely worried about climate change;
- More than half of respondents said they had felt afraid, sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and/or guilty;
- 55% of respondents felt they would have fewer opportunities than their parents;
- 65% felt governments were failing young people, while 61% said the way governments deal with climate change was not “protecting me, the planet and/or future generations”;
- Almost half (48%) of those who said they talked with others about climate change felt ignored or dismissed.
- Young people surveyed from the Global South expressed more worry and a greater impact on functioning; while young people surveyed in Portugal (which has seen dramatic increases in wildfires since 2017) showed the highest level of worry amongst those from the Global North.
The study concludes that governments must respond to ‘protect the mental health of children and young people by engaging in ethical, collective, policy-based action against climate change.’
Notes about the study
- 10,000 young people (aged 16-25 years) were surveyed, using polling company Kantar, in ten countries:
- Australia, United States, United Kingdom, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Finland, Portugal, Brazil, and France. Data was collected on their thoughts and feelings about climate change, and government response.
- The study was carried out by academics from a range of institutions: The University of Bath, the University of Helsinki, NYU Langone Health, University of East Anglia, Stanford Medicine Centre for Innovation in Global Health, and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, The College of Wooster, Climate Psychiatry Alliance.
- The costs of the survey were funded by AVAAZ. Avaaz is funded by small donations from citizens worldwide which allows it to finance urgently needed quantitative research in the emerging field of climate psychology. Avaaz has been campaigning on climate change for over a decade.
JOURNAL
The Lancet Planetary Health
DOI
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Content analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
9-Dec-2021
COI STATEMENT
COI: No competing interests. Acknowledgments: AVAAZ paid for the costs of the survey and arranged for data collection to be conducted by an independent recruitment platform (Kantar). We acknowledge Judith Anderson (Climate Psychology Alliance) and Natasa Mavronicola (University of Birmingham, Birmingham, U
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Given the massive “you are all going to die” propaganda s*#!, it is a miracle it is not a 100%. But I guess even among the young and inexperienced, there is some resilience.
Exactly right, it’s government propaganda, not inaction, that is damaging people psychologically.
It not only governments that are at fault here, its also green activists, the media and NGO’s that have been infected with the AGW virus, all in the name of saving the planet. Actually this is noble cause corruption on a global scale, whereby psudo-science is being fostered by activist elites who are benefiting from the economic climate chaos, through renewables investments, etc.
I agree.
And I further ask: who pays the piper? NGOs are not “sustainable” if based only on the contributions of their members and “compagnons de route”. You give a hint when you say “activiste elites“; that is to say, those connected to who pays the piper; who, at the same time, have big influence ongovernments.
It’s blatant psychological abuse, unfortunately. We had ‘the bomb’ and the ‘coming ice age’, they have ‘Global Warming’ and ‘covid’.
For some reason, the abuse seems to be having a much greater and damaging effect these days. The real irony is that the world is in a much better condition since the 70s,and is much safer and wealthier.
The only obvious reason seems to be newly created intoctrination in our education systems.
And now, just as I predicted, they are bringing forward covid ‘booster’ shots to 4 months. That’s up to quadruple profits now.
In Australia the so-called medical authorities are calling for a booster shot after 3 months, now. Quintuple profits.
My new prediction is double-shots, possibly of different vaccines (gotta share the profits, guys), every 4, or even 3 months. There’s waaaaay too much profit to let it go to waste.
In later news, Big Pharma actually owns everything ever. Fortunately, in return for owning you and your homes, they will give us ‘free’ covid vaccines monthly, free covid tests weekly, and 10 free ‘masks’ a week. Sign up here, folks!
In even later news, an island of vaccine vials, syringes, used covid tests and used masks, the size of Australia, has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. Net zero is now planned for 2075 because emissions have been steadily rising, despite Al Gore selling one of his mansions. .
https://rumble.com/embed/volc3o/?pub=qnz9d#?secret=uZiV1Ka4AA
Can the Australian police always safely assume everyone speaks English?
I suppose they’ll put him up for the night.
If this paper (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v2) is accurate there’s reason to be worried for the jabbed… vaccine effectiveness going highly negative after 3 months against Omicron. Given the low effectiveness even at the peak combined with the transmissibility of Omicron and its low mortality, the calculus of mass vaccination makes no sense.
In Canada, coffee drinkers often ask for the ‘double double’. Given familiarity with the phrase, it was easy to go there with the ‘jab’.
And the mass media plus social media.
The abuse has more damaging effect, because in my youth days you could be isolated from mass media more. We didn’t have cellphones when I was a kid, and no internet. You could go half a day without hearing/seeing any news, especially if you skipped TV.
Now, kids spend a lot of time on social media… where you’re bombarded with messaging. There is no escape.
To the moderators: sorry about my misspelling of Zuckerberg, but on my keyboard ‘F’ is very close to ‘Z’ 😜
Yeah, and the T and G keys are also close.
Needless to say, I no longer sign off an email with ‘Regards’.
😝
G’Day ZZW,
‘F’ is very close to ‘Z’
I have a hunch it was induced by a change in the refractive index of the air between your eyes and the keyboard. Cane toad exhaust?
Yep, there’s some encouraging news in this study –
about half the youngsters they surveyed DIDN”T think the world owes them a good life.
It’s this ‘other half’ that will out-compete the ‘defeated’ for jobs, partners, housing, recognition as they all make life’s journey.
(but can anyone these days truly imaging a news headline that screams –
“good news – half of all young people see no reason to fear future”
We older folks were toughened up against such frail spookeries as global warming.
In elementary school, we had periodic hallway drills of “duck and cover”.
Older folks have also been following this Human-Caused Global Whatever for decades and watched as its proponents made claim after claim that never panned out. So, needless to say, we are a little cynical about the current claims about Human-Caused Global Warming.
There’s no evidence humans are causing the Earth’s climate to do anything other than what it has done since the begiining of time. And this is after about 60 years of unsubstantiated claims from people promoting the idea that humans can cause the Earth’s climate to change. No evidence whatsoever that this is the case.
Everything about Human-Caused Climate Change is based on unsubstantiated assumptions. People are driving themselves crazy over unsubstantiated assumptions. Stop it!
The climate nonsense is the same as the COVID nonsense. Just not quite as intense. This is deliberate mass formation. The people pudding this (largely the same on both counts) are driving the western world towards calamity.
We are all going to die. But that is no reason for hysteria.
Are you sure?
Looks like the world is screwed.
Mann et all have released a monster by spreading climate disinformation globally.
There might actually be a way to prove the disinformation angle. It’s an educated guess that these polls ask utterly leading questions about reactions to ‘cataclysmic’ climate conditions. But imagine if they also asked one additional simple question: are the people aware that PhD-level climatologists / atmospheric physicists deeply dispute IPCC conclusions and say we don’t face anything close to the catastrophic predictions seen in news reports? If 97% of the response is “those skeptics are paid by Big Oil to lie,” then there’s your quantitative measurement.
He who pays for the study/poll will most likely get the results he wants.
This reminds me of the story about the man who murdered his parents who pleaded with the court for mercy on grounds that he was an orphan.
That was actually the Menendez brothers and yes, they beg for leniency because their parents were dead. They really set on the stand and vocalized it.
I honestly don’t give a damn what the snow flakes are distressed about …Grow up , move out of Mom’s basement and get a job. Once you have something to protect most of your problems are gone
The problems aren’t gone, they are just seen as irrelevant once you have perspective. Get out and travel, I say. Unfortunately, these days travel is ‘safe’ and people learn extremely little except how to post bollox on instacrap.
I didn’t live with my parents most of the time since age 17. I did return repeatedly (I was the ‘boomerang’ child, last of 4), but in between I travelled to different countries, lived in them, and had my own business. I didn’t sit about wailing about how deprived I was.
Once I married and started a family, I did exactly the same, apart from not going back to live with my parents, and occasionally actually working for other people (ugh!) when circumstances dictated it.
Lacking the experience of the past dozen or so armageddons not happening, the kids will eventually build up resistance to fearmongers.
Then they’ll have kids, and so it goes on…
What do they want ‘governments’ to do? Crash stop CO2 production? Start where?
They want governments to, like, ‘do something’, ya know?
Nail on head 👍.
save the planet! /s
Breathing?
Just wait till these Psyched out people discover it is all a scam.
Never will:
Nuclear Winter
Coming Ice Age
DDT
Ozone ‘Hole’
None have been acknowledged as scams. Ice age is just memory holed.
Acid Rain.
Y2K.
Peak Oil.
Swine flu.
Leave Y2K outta that. Made loadsa money!
There was supposed to be world-wide famine in the ’70’s too.
Yep- we’re all going to starve/ run out of everything before 1980- panic people!
Probably a good distraction. The real problem is the out of control national debt that will wreck the economy within the next decade or two. Democrats want to increase spending, Republicans want to reduce taxes. They comprise and do both, and simply increase the national debt. How long can that unsustainable business model last? How will doubling the debt to $60 trillion in 20 years sit with the financial markets? Is the crisis 600 ppm ATM CO2 in 30 years or $60 trillion debt in 20 years? That’s what I thought.
8 out 10 cats are upset by government inaction
10 out of 10 cats are upset by a lack of food.
10 out of 10 socialists are upset by a lack of socialism.
10 out of 10 freeloaders are upset about a lack of free stuff.
10 of 10 rational taxpayers are upset about paying for the freeloaders free stuff.
If government wants to be a charity, then my federal taxes should be tax deductible.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Best ever comment
I really want to steal that and pretend I thought of it
Young people should get outside more and observe the weather, and not just on their devices either.
In a way, they should have ‘climate change’ anxiety. Just not what is claimed by this survey of brain washed youth.
They have been lied to by ‘scientists’ about sea level rise, snow, polar bears, corals, and much more related to ‘carbon pollution’. That should induce legitimate anxiety about ‘climate science’. Renewables are unreliable and destabilize the grid, inducing blackout anxiety. Renewables make electricity increasingly unaffordable, inducing economic anxiety. EV’s automatically induce range anxiety; fast charging them induces battery failure anxiety. Renewables and EV’s require rare earths dominated by China, inducing national security anxiety. Solutions like GND or Net Zero are ruinous, inducing national debt anxiety.
So there really is a lot of ‘climate change’ induced rationally based legit grounds for anxiety.
Poisoning the brains of youth with climate alarmism has been going on for decades starting with kindergarten and the result of this brainwashing is becoming more and more apparent. It worked so well at replacing legitimate science with a narrative, it’s now being used to implement critical race/gender/idiot theories as a replacement for civil society.
The persuasive power of propaganda promoting evil wrapped in benevolence has caused much misery in the past and we’re seeing it happen again and again. Some know to recognize and reject such propaganda, but those who have not are the ones with all the anxieties and the ones making all the noise.
“So there really is a lot of ‘climate change’ induced rationally based legit grounds for anxiety.”
I agree with both statements. The reason kids will have “fewer opportunities than their parents” has not got anything to do with climate but everything to do with government reaction to perceived (non existent) climate problems.
The WWF ran a commercial on TV this evening begging for contributions to save the polar bears. In the case of many of these charitable organizations, climate change is the money box.
Quite right, Rud. When science is so handily supplanted by lying for desired effect we know we’re in for a heap of corruption from those in whom we’ve placed our trust, for which anxiety is hardly misplaced! Add to that the temptation to extend all this brainwashing to other matters benefiting the social manipulators; the throttling of the former expansive prospects of youth without due cause and at their own burden of debt to others; their willful deprivation of concentrated energy sources that in former generations had propelled historically unparalleled prosperity; the conversion of transport (and everything else) to dependence upon a sustainably unreliable electric power grid; and the simple inequity of those nations who don’t subscribe to, yet promote all this quicksand of national insecurity to others.
Hilariously accurate, Rud, thanks.
Best Christmas wishes to you two,
w.
So 55% are not worried about climate change?
It would seem so.
But in keeping with “the narrative” these days – it’s the minority view that gets the publicity.
So it’s the government’s fault for not fixing the fake climate crisis that they manufactured……..and not the government’s fault for manufacturing the climate crisis.
What’s ironic is that eco-anxiety is INTENTIONALLY being created. It’s the completely desired response to scaring people with exaggerations about the end of the planet, to justify actions by the government to eliminate fossil fuels.
They’re blaming the right entity but are confused about the reason. The governments intentionally created this problem (that didn’t exist before the fake climate crisis) so that dumb reports like this one can tell us that the same people need to fix it with actions, which is exactly what they want. To generate support to fix the problem they manufactured. That’s what this report is all about.
The smartest fix for this non climate problem……..is to just stop intentionally scaring people to convince them there is a problem………so that you can use the manufactured problem and their supposed fix……….to eliminate fossil fuels.
Just tell the entire objective truth about the climate(and weather) ………….and all the problems go away with the least amount of effort and least amount of deceit and the least cost.
Oh, but then we would be stuck with those dang cheap, reliable, abundant, practical and power charged fossil fuels.
First, there was NOT a random selection of participants. The participants VOLUNTEERED on an online platform called “Kantar”, viz:
So we’ve already self-selected a bunch of folks who a) are educated, aka indoctrinated, b) are wealthy enough to own a computer and know how to use it, c) have enough free time to mess about with voluntary surveys, d) know somehow about Kantar, and e) like Greta, think their opinion matters.
Then there was further winnowing:
Why exactly 10,000? Because they surveyed in 10 countries (Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the USA) and:
So we have more self-selection, only those who really, really want their voices heard so they answered quickly.
In other words, they’re sampling self-selected wealthy entitled self-important wokerati of leisure … and on what planet do those people in those 10 countries represent “A Global Survey”?
And at that point, no results will mean anything about the real world. Want a real survey? The UN My World Survey asked 700 times as many people about their priorities … and action on climate came in dead last.
w.
As usual Willis you slice right down to the bone of the matter.
In a saner world, you’d think the results of the UN My World Survey would dominate all the media articles about climate concern.
But that wouldn’t ingratiate the journalists with all their ‘woke’ friends & colleagues.
So the UN survey gets studiously ignored.
Sad.
Spot on
The current my world 30 survey echos previous surveys.
You need to be healthy to get an education and then a job.
From first hand experience in Philippines after floods and volcanoes the most important thing is to get a job and keep through hard times.
Maintaining a income after a disaster is more important than relying on government to help.
Organised religion s the moral equivalent of a hub-cap stealing racket. Who needs to buy hub-caps ? Those who have had their hub-caps stolen. Who needs forgiveness from sin ? Those whom the Pope, Priest, Vicar, Chief Rabi, Grand Mufti, Ayatollah of Ayatollahs, Archbishop of Canterbury , Grand Imam of Rotherham, Shaman, Grand inquisitor or Chief Druid have convinced are dyed in the wood ,rotten from birth ,unfit to live sinners.
so also the climate clique poison our youth with guilt and promise only misery and doom.
And they are more than capable of delivering on their promises- if we listen to their lies and the poison of theior worm0-tongues.
Silence the screeching leftarded a$$holes and all these problems vanish. Give young people something real to worry about, like a f**king job.
But they don’t want “jobs”.
They want a “vocation”.
They have shown themselves to lack basic intelligence to master a vocation, job is the best they will ever do. The more menial the better.
I would suggest that it is not the ‘goverment innaction’ on climate change that is frustrating young people but rather the continued leftist rhetoric from the media that is leading to the perception that things are indeed getting worse . .
In other news.. The latest American school shooter Ethan Crumbley, 15, was apparently in the habit of creating “disturbing” drawings at school, on at least one of which he wrote “the world is dead”. I wonder where he got that idea? Not suggesting that this belief was his motivation, but maybe a contributing factor?
Well, if the alarmists spewed out doom and gloom continuously, that’s bound to agitate the psychos, and when psychos get agitated they many times act out violently.
Don’t agitate the psychos!
If they’re distressed about “government inaction” now, just wait until they see what “government action” brings.
I worked for DOD for almost 30 years and my most effective strategy for failing contractors was to offer government help if they couldn’t fix the problem by themselves.
It occurred to me that since the fright is caused by false information possibly the cure could also be. I have a magnetically attached device for every tail pipe or coal chimney that reverses the CO2 ability to heat the atmosphere. It will allow full use of fossil fuels without any fear of warming enhancement. If the Government will just buy enough of them we are all saved.
Biden needs to install this device on every government vehicle.
I just had a friend
tell me he has no intention to travel in retirement because it would increase his carbon foot. I was speechless. I couldn’t believe an othwise pretty smart guy could be so stupid.
That’s ok, it means that he won’t spread his stupidity as far!
“I couldn’t believe an othwise pretty smart guy could be so stupid.”
There’s a lot of that going around. Obviously,even some smart people are easily misled.
Sometimes, I only need to read a little bit, as with this: Our children’s anxiety is a completely rational reaction given the inadequate responses to climate change they are seeing from governments. – article
Well, what IS government going to do, anyway? Nothing. Not a confounded thing. Don’t kid yourselves, kiddos, the Gubmint does not give a flying feather in space if you are emotionally impacted in a bad way by the utter crap that The Gubmint has been throwing at you, via media resources of all kinds.
It’s a pity – a confounded shame, indeed! — that the brainwashing is so obvious to those of us who are firmly rooted in reality while these young people are being lied to and misled and bamboozled into doing stupid things.
And what happens when these younger people find that they have been lied to for decades? Wanna see more cities burning? More destruction? More lockdowns?
Nah, me, neither!
This climate change globull warming has been pushed for over 30 years and the people who have been pushing this scam certainly will not reduce their use of fossil fuels.
If you look at who are pushing this scam you will soon discover that the vast majority have never produced or made any thing of use for mankind.
To put it politely they are leeches .
They are either politicians from most countries or the UN ,or scientists that produce studies to push the falsehood that the doubling of CO2 will destroy the world.
The warming potential of CO2 is logarithmic and we are very close to saturation point .
Any further increase in CO2 atmospheric levels will cause little or no warming .
We are experiencing an early heat wave in New Zealand and the ocean around our coasts are warm but this is because of the La Nina conditions that we are experiencing in this part of the world .
We are constantly bombarded by our news media about the threat of globull warming and I can remember over 40 years ago that Gwynne Dyer predicted peak oil and now he is all climate gloom .
He never got peak oil right and he won’t get climate doom right either.
Is it any wonder that young people are worried about the climate with the constant barrage on TV and the news papers?
Recent research also shows that children and young people are not willing to make any material personal sacrifice to address climate change. They all assume it’s up to someone else to take care of, and to pay for.
Why should there be any surprise that these children and young people think and act just like children? The sad part is that a large percentage of the adult population thinks the same.
Like children.
In the forty-four (44) years since satellite-based measurement of the global lower atmosphere commenced in 1979, the global temperature has risen 0.08° C. (that’s eight hundredths of a degree, folks) over the 1991-2020 mean global average temperature.
Source:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/12/uah-global-temperature-update-for-november-2021-0-08-deg-c/
That’s hardly an “existential threat.”
The truth will set you free.
That’s why the government is reducing past temperatures. If you can’t change reality, change history. Any “journalist” worth his salt makes that 0.08 C look like 800 C. It’s not as if they’re teaching journalism in journalism school any more.
The Left creates a very sick neurotic society.
That’s because the radical Left are very sick, neurotic people.
We in 34 million year Ice Age, and teachers are telling kids there is some worry about Earth becoming like Venus. Of course they are crazy.
Not educated, but given very bad daycare, and fervently teaching a crazy religious doctrine of end of the world, which makes absolutely, no sense.