Essay by Eric Worrall
East Anglia has a new counselling programme to help students who are struggling to eliminate plastic packaging and cook their own food, and other eco-anxiety related issues.
Climate change: Don’t let doom win, project tells worriers
By Georgina Rannard
BBC News Climate & ScienceA new project has been launched to address rising climate anxiety in students at the University of East Anglia.
At the opening in Norwich, students told BBC News they felt hopelessness, anger and despair about climate change.
They worry how they will live in a world with an unpredictable climate and the destruction of nature.
On Thursday a new survey found that 45% of UK students worry about climate change once a week or more.
Literature student Meg Watts, 22, said that she had experienced depression after being overwhelmed by the scale of problems facing the planet. And she sought therapy after developing disordered eating when trying to cut out food packaged with plastic.
The new programme was developed with mental health charity Norfolk and Waveney Mind, who realised young people were coming for counselling about their fears about climate change.
Common worries were about food security and whether or not to have children, explained Ruth Taylor from Mind. “Young people are trying to get ready for what is coming,” she suggests.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61218933
I experience a real WTF reaction when I read things like this.
For example, these eco-anxious students could grow their own green food, if they want to avoid plastic.
Britain has an allotment system, in which the local government leases a decent size patch of garden to poor people to grow vegetables. The lease cost is very affordable, from as low as £8 (US $10) / year.
The land parcels are usually around 250 square yards. This might not sound like a lot, but Britain has some of the most insanely fertile land in the world. I’m no expert gardener, yet I grew 100 square yards of vegetables in 2002 in Britain, and I didn’t have to buy any greens from the supermarket for 3 months. Half the tomatoes I grew were wasted because I couldn’t eat them all. Another year I grew a few rows of potatoes and pulled at least 20lb of potatoes out of the ground.
Yet one of the students quoted by the BBC couldn’t even make the transition away from pre-packaged food, to having to prepare her own meals.
I mean, how difficult and time consuming is preparing your own meals? She couldn’t bring herself to chop a few vegetables and some cheap chuck steak, grab a handful of barley or oats, and throw it all into a low cost electric slow cooker with some water and a stock cube first thing in the morning. 5 minutes preparation and you get a delicious meal at the end of the day, just waiting for you to eat it. She went hungry, instead of taking 5 minutes per day preparing healthy food which doesn’t come out of a plastic package.
On one hand I believe the distress and in some cases mental illness experienced is real, and I feel for anyone who experiences such issues, even if the cause of their distress is entirely imaginary. But someone who experiences an eating disorder because they can’t deal with having to prepare their own food, I mean these people are supposed to be young adults, aren’t they?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
And these are the same idiots who think that the Little Ice Age temps were fabulous and desirable.
“At the opening in Norwich, students told BBC News they felt hopelessness, anger and despair about climate change.”
I’m Imagining the look on their faces when these 22 years olds make it to 82 in 60 years time and realise “they felt hopelessness, anger and despair about climate change.”
For nothing! Because the climates still the same.But alas with those stress levels they won’t make it past 50.
“For nothing!”
I think a lot of people are going to eventually reach that conclusion.
So when bullying on social media causes anxiety there are calls for the bullies to be prosecuted. Looking forward to similar prosecutions of the climate alarmists who are causing these snowflakes to melt.
Their grandparents who lived through the horrors of WWII must be totally embarrassed by their whimpering descendants.
Their grandparents were born well after WWII in the baby boom.
The slow cooker would have to be powered wby either wind or solar. It would only increase the anxiety if it was powered by fossil fuels.
Ship them off to Ukraine so that they can learn what a real and immediate crisis is.
#snowflakes Maybe it’s best they don’t breed…
Eric, search Guugle for an image ‘Broad Lake UEA.’ Look through the ones that you get for one where the lake shows pollution by oil or surfactant – some of the surface is smooth (polluted) and some is ruffled by the wind (clean).
A polluted water surface has lower albedo and evaporates less, both warming factors.
Point out to anxious students that this something they can tackle, forcing sewage companies, ocean going ships, oil-dripping cars, etc to stop letting this stuff warm water surfaces. That should be good therapy for the Greenies.
Science students should get a lot of thermometers. Measure the temperatures at various points on the lake. Then using a few ml of olive oil smooth the whole lake. Measure what happens to the lake temperatures. To explain the reasons for the effect theyb should study Lord Rayleigh’s oil drop experiment. And the history students should read about Ben Franklin’s experiment with olive oil on Mount Pond on Clapham Common
JF
A world where the surface is three quarters covered with water can be warmed by surprisingly small amounts of light oil or surfactant. Mathematical students can work out how much. Get the basic numbers from Ben Franklin.
Biological students can work out what happens when you feed a minor sea with sewage, dissolved silica, nitrate and phosphate from cities and farming – a field trip to the Sea of Marmara will help.
Students of the History of English Theatre should stop pulling the PM’s strings*.
JF
*Ahem.
From memory Willis did an excellent piece on oil smoothing a while ago. But there is another factor, all the bacteria which eats said oil. Still I agree it would be a fascinating project for say a PHD thesis.
https://conidia.com/diesel-bug/
I’ve been nagging Willis for years to crunch some numbers on oil/surfactant/lipid from oleaginous plankton smoothing. My Feynman guess is that it explains why many enclosed bodies of water are warming anomalously rapidly. Beyond that, with a bit of hand-waving, maybe an appreciable contribution to AGW.
Look at Lake Michigan, Black Sea etc. Above all, look at the Sea of Marmara.
JF
Eric, look up Ruf and Evans work on microplastic pollution. They found that they can detect it using CYGNISS satellites but that they were actually detecting entrained oil/surfactant pollution.
Ruf is a contributor to another paper about experiments on albedo change from smoothing.
If you have any contacts on WUWT see if you can persuade Anthony to publish my entry to his competition, 1000 words plus footnotes about this guess.
JF
There is a simple solution to all the worries about plastic.
It comes from petro-chemical processes, therefore it will burn.
Us it as a fuel.
But what about the dreaded ” emissions”
Simple, look up the research of William Harper & David Coe.
CO2 is not a problem, the more we produce the better.
When will our Politicians finally realise that the hidden heads of the Green movement want to destroy our economy.
Michael VK5ELL
“For example, these eco-anxious students could grow their own green food, if they want to avoid plastic.”
That would involve work though and getting their little handies dirty.
You mean UEA? Enough said
Eric, what about all the guilt the gardeners will certainly feel for the violence against plants they commit? /sarc
“Vegetarian’s Nightmare” on the Johnny Carson show.
The smell of freshly cut grass? That’s how grass “bleeds”. 😮
Plants respond to physical trauma and other inimical influences like any other living thing. They just do it in a way that doesn’t offend the sensitivities of your average soyboy snowflake.
The pheasants, pigeons and partridge I shoot every year don’t come in plastic packaging. The trout I catch don’t either.
Nor does the occasional joint of road kill deer I get given every now and then.
Our allotment is £20 a year for a half plot which is about 16×32 feet. However, ours is not for the poor it is for local residents. Any surplus funds are actually donated to the poor, a policy in the original rules.
I went university in 1981. You applied for a place at 5 universities (plus if you were clever and well connected,Oxford and Cambridge could be applied to separately).
Everyone was advised to put the University of East Anglia as your last choice because it was well known they would accept students no matter how bad the grades. They offered me a place to study science with just two E grades at A level. I actually went to my first choice, where the rock climbing was much better…. 🙂
UEA wasn’t known as the University of Easy Access without good reason.
I wonder what advice these poor things are getting from Norfolk and Waveney Mind.
Perhaps Georgina Rannard, BBC News Climate & Science, should publicly ponder the effect of BBC disinformation on the creation and propagation of ‘Climate anxiety’?
Just 4 days ago the BBC was forced to publicly admit that Justin Rowlatt, its Climate Editor, disinformed not once, but twice, during an episode “Wild Weather: Our World Under Threat” broadcast on its (once) flagship Panorama current-affairs programme launched 69 years ago.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/04/28/two-complaints-upheld-against-justin-rowlatt/
Eric, there are lengthy waiting lists for allotments
But this is proof that IPCRESS works. BBC journalism is all about feelings
We need to bring back institutions where the mentally ill can be kept for treatment. Everyone would benefit.
Computer games — all about me
Social media — all about me
triggering words and phrases — all about me
hurt feelings — all about me
safe spaces — all about me
remove student debt — all about me
gender — all about me
climate change — all about me
college course of study — all about me
government spending — all about me
work, only if I can be the boss — all about me
Get the picture?
How many would know or understand John Kennedy’s quote:
Too bad they get to vote.
I have some sympathy for these students, as have been under relentless attack from the Green Blob for their entire lives. Not to mention the constant green assault from the politicians, press and professors. Destroyed lives are their goal.
At the opening in Norwich, students told BBC News they felt hopelessness, anger and despair about climate change.
They worry how they will live in a world with an unpredictable climate and the destruction of nature.
I just have to think that at some point they will wake up one morning and realise that they have been ‘taken for a ride’. There never was a ‘climate emergency’.
Then I have to think that there will be a backlash against the liars and manipulators. And, in the end, a total rejection of any and all concocted ‘narratives’.
Not for all of them but, I suspect, more than a few.
They are the kind of people you meet at certain dismal dull affairs,
Center of a crowd talking much too loud running up and down the stairs,
Well it seems to me that they have seen too much in too few years,
And I could not help but notice that their eyes are edged with tears,
19th nervous breakdown! Here it comes!
Ah! A Stones fan.
The sad thing is the amount of youth who simply have zero life skills.
Back about 10 years ago I was siting in on a meeting by the ‘youth’ branch of the political party I used to get a toss about.
(apathy kicked in as well as my cold dead heart…)
So we had a bunch of uni age types discussing important issues. One was that ‘Fast Food’ was simply too cheap and that is why people were buying it.
Really?
Had these people never actually been shopping?
Fresh vegetables are still relatively cheap. Take the money you spend on your ‘value meal’ of choice and go see how many potatoes you can take home for the same amount.
‘Fast Food’ is simply that – fast. You pay for the convenience of someone putting the food into your mouth and then massaging your lazy jaw up and down so you can swallow it.
We have a generation that is so coddled that many of them have no idea how to cook and by extension also never learned to shop and seriously, if you are a single man and can’t cook you need to grow a pair.
All men should know how to cook. Cooking is something YOU do in order to produce the food YOU want to eat. It is ultimate MAN self indulgence. You should know what your ultimate favourite foods are and make them for yourself at every opportunity.
“A new project has been launched to address rising climate anxiety in students at the University of East Anglia.
At the opening in Norwich, students told BBC News they felt hopelessness, anger and despair about climate change.”
A self-selecting sample. It is ground zero in UK global warming hysteria.
Norwich may still have a decent Cathedral but there is no good reason for an Englishman to traverse East Anglia. I know. I live on the edge. I want to see mountains, Gandalf.
What are these kids doing at a university to begin with? They are obviously too emotionally brittle for anything resembling a rigorous academic regimen, and/or are wasting their time considering the world is about to end. On top of that, they’re lazy, which makes me question their commitment to their ideology.
In modern Progressivism, it’s always up to someone else to make the real sacrifices and/or to pay for them.
Sad to see that it’s not just American universities that have surrendered to abject mediocrity.
Besides the appearance that Meg Watts’ descriptions sound self diagnosed.
Notice the careful phrasing by this source:
All of which reminds me of the Harry Potter interaction with an aggressive manipulative reporter and her “quick-quotes quill”. Actively lying to get attention in the press.
If the picture provided is one of the climate change sessions, I note that none of the attendees look depressed or overly anxious beyond the normal social worries.