Essay by Eric Worrall
Researchers from University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada have suggested encouraging people stricken by climate anxiety to act on their delusions is the path to mitigating their symptoms.
Reducing personal climate risk to reduce personal climate anxiety
Climate anxiety, reflecting concerns about the negative impacts of climate change, is growing. Planning and action on individual specific climate risks could be a way to reduce personal climate anxiety.
…
Personal climate anxiety is a climate impact in its own right, and accepting this is necessary to manage it at the individual level. However, this first step can be challenging, because it can trigger powerful defensive psychological responses, including mental transfer of responsibility for solutions to others, fatalism and even climate change denial9,10. Overcoming these psychological defences involves a journey that in many ways mirrors the challenges of accepting other uncomfortable personal issues such as addiction, trauma and loss.
…
Based on linkages between anxiety, uncertainty and risk established by cognitive science, we argue that personal climate anxiety is most effectively and sustainably reduced by prioritizing planning and action to reduce personal climate risks. Comparing climate anxiety to health anxiety around COVID-19 clarifies this argument. The counterfactual case where one prioritizes psychological, symptomatic methods for COVID-19 anxiety16 as the first line of defence while neglecting to plan and expeditiously undertake available COVID-19 risk reduction exercises such as social distancing, mask wearing and vaccination17 is self-evidently a poor plan, because it doesn’t prioritize attempts to reduce the core anxiety-causing risk itself.
…
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01617-4
Essentially they are saying it is better to encourage victims of climate anxiety to plan and act to mitigate their personal climate risk, because they believe the basis of the anxiety is real. They compare the condition of people suffering climate anxiety to people who fear Covid-19, who act on their anxiety by wearing masks and social distancing.
Another option for treating “climate anxiety” might be to point out the fact indiscriminately rejecting every alarmist climate prediction is a safe bet, given their long track record of predictive failure. Automatically rejecting alarmists predictions means you will be right far more often than wrong. Therapists could teach people the basics of the scientific method, and how to distinguish between genuine and junk science.
But the researchers don’t appear to have considered this option.
From the article: “Therapists could teach people the basics of the scientific method, and how to distinguish between genuine and junk science.”
That’s the ticket!
If they learn their lessons well, they will see that most of climate science is unsubstantiated junk science, and they have nothing to fear from CO2. They can go about their lives without fearing they are destroying the Earth.
AS good example of the typical psycho-babble so close to the hearts of academics. If they’re hoping to convince people to make major lifestyle changes to combat what’s really a phantom crisis, they should get ready to fail because people worldwide have shown that when it comes to climate action , they feel it’s up to governments, businesses and industries to lead the way. The ordinary consumer has few intentions of accepting new laws, restrictions and higher taxes that will supposedly save the planet.
“Climate anxiety, reflecting concerns about the negative effects of climate change, is growing.”
The solution is easy.
Think only about the positive effects of climate change. Always look on the bright side.
Over my 80 years, no aspect of climate change has caused me any anxiety, because no bad measurable or feelable event has happened to me.
On the other hand, the ornamental plants in our garden have never looked better, global food supplies fertilized by CO2 are steadily growing, more ground is going from hot and dry to wetter, better homes for increasing wildlife species, and more, more, more. Wake up and smell the roses.
The climate change story exists because of huge, expensive advertising. Ask yourself when a clothes wash detergent advertised as better than the opposition actually turned out better. It is all hollow fantasy.
The better scientists are finally being heard above the teenage cancel culture, with progress in adding benefits to the calculations of the “social cost of carbon”.
Geoff S
I too have climate anxiety, what I fear is the very real danger of suddenly being surrounded by a XR flash mob and having them dance at me.
“Planning and action on individual specific climate risks could be a way to reduce personal climate anxiety.”
Right. Because giving in to a delusion is just the right thing to do. I mean, then you can say that a man who thinks he’s a woman IS actually a woman, and vice versa.
Andrew Weaver has his own patents on climate crazy so all of this is expected.
Hopefully parents of suicidal kids go looking for him and Suzuki.
I have a serious case of climate anxiety because I read up to 24 short climate science and energy articles like this one every morning.
But I also act to halt the dreaded climate change and protect myself from it:
(1) I am building an ark to save the family from sea level rise
(2) Knowing that cow flatulence causes climate change, today I ate a hamburger, and
(3) I have decided not to buy a private jet, that I have been saving for since 1977, not that $29 would have bought more than a plastic model of a private jet
This comment is serious,
not satire
Same with “trans”: you feel like a boy? Let’s cure that psychological issue by cutting your boobs!
Nice swipe at people who don’t accept the whole CAGW BS.
From the article:
“Based on linkages between anxiety, uncertainty and risk established by cognitive science, we argue that personal climate anxiety is most effectively and sustainably reduced by prioritizing planning and action to reduce personal climate risks.”
The problem here is the confusion between climate and specific weather events. The anxiety is caused by the media attributing the most recent, extreme, weather event, in a particular area, to climate change.
In order to reduce such anxiety, I see two broad methods. First, the anxious person should check the historical records available on the internet, to discover the frequency and severity of past, extreme weather events in their area. If they do this, they will find that it is rare that any current weather event is worse than what has been recorded in the past.
When these rare events occur, as happened in Lismore, Australia, recently, when flood levels exceeded all historical records going back to the 1880’s, one should investigate the changes to the environment resulting from human development.
In Lismore, for example, a raised highway was built across a flood plain, acting like a dam wall with no exits for water to pass through. This was a main feature that resulted in a record-breaking flood height. There were also other man-made changes to the environment that would have contributed to those record floods.
The second method to reduce anxiety is to act upon this knowledge that extreme weather events mostly occur on a regular basis, every 10 or 20 or 30 years, and that one should prepare, through planning and action, to reduce the risk of personal damage from extreme weather events, by refusing to buy a house located in a flood plain, unless the house is raised on stilts above the level of previous flood heights, and refuse to buy a house in an area subject to the occasional category 4 cyclone, unless the house has been built to withstand the force of such cyclones.
The belief in human caused climate change is obviously a cult/religion because non scientific methods are used to defend it’s artificial ‘certainty’, or rather, attack any scrutiny. The most frightening example of this self righteous certainty would be the philosophers Ingmar Persson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford. They have argued that our moral brains are so compromised that the only way we can avoid climate catastrophe is to enhance them through biomedical means.
“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience” – Adam Smith
How do you resolve “climate anxiety” when there is no actual climate crisis to be anxious about? This is a psychosis that has been foisted on these weak minds by stupid and malevolent educators and media. These weak snowflakes have never experienced any real climate changes to be anxious over, but they are taught to fear what hasn’t and never will happen, at least in their own lifetimes.
There is no such thing as “Climate Anxiety” as it would take 30 years to diagnose it.