Essay by Eric Worrall
If the young victims of climate education suffer a nervous breakdown, how can educators “truly equip young people for life and work in a changing climate”?
Why emotional resilience should be at the heart of climate change education
Published: March 26, 2026 4.01am AEDT
Jessica Newberry Le Vay
Senior Researcher in Climate Change and Health, University of OxfordThe mental health effects of climate change are receiving growing attention, including how children and young people are uniquely affected. Supporting young people to build and sustain good mental health and wellbeing, and to feel prepared for life and work in an uncertain world, has never been more urgent. However, action is still lagging behind need – including in education.
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What surprised me was just how much students spoke of climate denial and disengagement, mental health stigma, and stigma around engaging with climate action. Students highlighted these as barriers to discussion and community building. One said:
There seems to be a passive feeling amongst my age cohort and, despite most accepting the truth of climate change, they feel removed and disempowered. This is obviously quite demoralising.
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The transformational societal changes that the climate crisis demands can only take place by considering the emotions, thoughts and beliefs that shape our actions, including support to minimise burnout. Our actions, in turn, shape our emotions and can influence our health and wellbeing. Recognising and resourcing these connections in education systems is critical to truly equip young people for life and work in a changing climate.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-emotional-resilience-should-be-at-the-heart-of-climate-change-education-275610
There is evidence that such “climate education” is doing real harm;
I’m outraged there is still no sign of people like Jessica urging a pullback from “climate education”.
During the WW2 London Blitz, when people huddled in underground shelters with bombs detonating overhead, parents and teachers didn’t try to indoctrinate kids about all the ways they could die. They tried to distract the kids from the nightmare unfolding above their heads, they told kids stories and played games, to try to create a sense of normality, to help the children feel safe.
Only climate activists seem to think it is necessary to indoctrinate young children with the full horror of their apocalyptic fantasies.
Even worse, when faced with evidence climate education is causing significant distress in children, instead of pausing, maybe suggesting a deferral of climate education until kids are old enough to cope, the climate educator response appears to help kids integrate this distress into their lives by turning the kids into little activists.
One day there will be an accounting for this brutal mistreatment of our children.
Today’s kids maybe can’t read, but just watch them at the protests!
“When we’ve finally gotten serious about
global warming, the Climate Scam, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” David Roberts, Grist, 2006. Fixed. Hoist by their own petard, they are.If Greta had one of those ‘come-to-common-sense’ moments, finally fully comprehending how she’d been misled this whole time about CAGW, it might be a news headline event if she decided to sue her parents for mental abuse. But the legacy news media would do one of two things with that: they’d either pretend it wasn’t happening, or else they’d quote pundits across the spectrum who’d say Greta has lost her mind, and/or was bought off by ‘Big Oil.’
I explored this problem back in Sept 2019: “What was #Greta Thunberg Taught, and Who Taught Her about It?”
Concluding excerpt: Maybe it’s too late for Greta to recapture what she’s lost in her earlier teenage years, and hopefully she can find a graceful way to exit the issue before her fame implodes in an embarrassing way. The silver lining to her situation may be that later when she is an adult and able to reflect more deeply on the whole situation, she can sue her parents for robbing her of an ordinary teenager’s life she was entitled to enjoy.
She might grow up to be a leader in an area nobody intended for her, a case study of what one-sided indoctrination can do to a child, and how such unfairness can be overcome.
I’d met teenagers capable of planning and leading political-type events and assumed Greta was one of those. When I found out she is definitely not one of those, the next question had to be the one you address: Who was running the Greta show? More importantly for Greta, have they set aside any of the skimmed revenue to support her not-quite-independent future?
Who was running the Greta show?
The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg
https://theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
Wow. The most amazing part of stories like that is where the actual misguided people are quoted. I can’t help thinking “do they really believe these words they’re saying/writing?”
Having solved the Climate Crisis, Greta is now happily bring Peace to the world.
If the young victims of climate education suffer a nervous breakdown
Then we have confirmation that the induction of psychoneuroses by conditioned reflex under stress (IPCRESS) is highly effective.
Hmm. I still recall the clever but gruesome method of resistance employed by Michael Caine in the movie adaptation of the Deighton novel. Perhaps every child should be issued a three-penny nail and shown how to use it during conditioning sessions?
Better yet, how about science teachers just stick to the facts when they teach their units on earth science and atmospheric physics? Kids who need any kind of coddling or (de)conditioning should be in special ed.
One of the main goals is to
” unequip young people for life and work ”
If someone is scared of a changing climate than they can be scared with everything and therefore easily controlled and subjugated into any form of tyranny.
Especially if they have no life nor workskills as they will always need a big daddy to feed and protect them.
The trick here is of course, to blame the collapse of a society that has no skills
on climate and not on the deliberate dumbing down(Charlotte Iserbyte) of the population.
Climate fear itself is probably the most irrational nonsense in history as every single AGW believer(just like eveyone else) is the product of a continuency of 10000 generations of successfullysurviving the harshest of conditions with an average life expectancy of > 25 years during 99% of human history, while the scared AGW generation itself that gets 80years old, belongs to the lucky 0.04 % that are not depended on climate and completely protected from it and other environmental impacts
The Climate Change Alarmists have done a lot of psychological damage to the younger generations.
We know the names of a lot of those Climate Alarmists, who distort the truth and strike fear in the hearts of many children. They try to sell speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions as representing facts. This is not science, it is activism. Harmful activism.
Mid-career climate change educators try to rationalize “Why” anything except climate change “should be at the heart of climate change education”
Psychologically damaging children with end-of-the-world narratives, and then expressing surprise at the apathy and anxiety that overwhelms them. Claiming that eco-anxiety is proof of mental soundness, while attacking those who, using verifiable facts, try to reassure young people by showing them that the end of the world is not imminent, labeling such people as “reassurers” and accomplices of big capital.
People seek hope when there is reason for despair. The nuclear explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their consequences for nature and the population, are understandable reasons to fall into nihilism and despondency. It is also where one finds the strength to rise again and support one’s neighbor, because the signs of a radical civilizational shift are there, undeniable, and it will be necessary to work tirelessly to make the world better, or at least to preserve it as best as possible. These efforts give rise to thinkers, artists, and statesmen who take these ruins upon their shoulders and strive to lift them toward the light.
But when the dangers we are repeatedly told about are mostly media constructs and propaganda, one must find ways to root character in despair and resentment, and to create, through continuous conditioning, a visceral reflex of aversion to the slightest challenge to the dogma.
What were the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the exception of those who were unfortunate enough to be directly under the explosions? Close enough to nothing to not be worth bothering about. Especially 80+ years after the fact.
I am not at all opposed to nuclear weapons, and even less to civilian nuclear energy. I was simply using an example of devastation that is vivid enough to be understandable to everyone. There was nonetheless anti-Hibakusha segregation (literally: “people affected by the bomb”), which is not insignificant.
I could have referred to events that are just as traumatic, though of a different nature: the atrocities committed by the Japanese themselves in Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War; the Holodomor (the extermination of Ukrainians by starvation during the Soviet period); or the Islamist attacks at the Bataclan in November 2015, the traces of which are still very much present in the minds of my compatriots.
This mention was in no way intended to be polemical or moralizing.
The comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki mainly stems from the fact that the explosion of a nuclear weapon produces immediate and terrifying devastation. I have sometimes heard that CAGW could cause similar damage, which is both false and so misleading that it is difficult to imagine how such statements can come from the mouths of ostensibly responsible adults.
Finally, I am not convinced that, even more than 80 years after the events (eight decades is not very long), it becomes pointless to discuss them, especially if the aim is to set the record straight when shameless alarmists engage in demagoguery, drawing a parallel between an intangible climate apocalypse and a chain reaction that vaporizes everything in its path and causes radiation sickness on the spot. None of which is something that a warming of roughly 1.2 degrees over 150 years, following the end of the Little Ice Age, is likely to produce.
The most dangerous isotopes are also short lived. 80 years is enough time for them to decay away almost completely.
Of course! But I was talking more about collective and cultural memory than about isotope chemistry. In five hundred years, when civilization has not collapsed—despite the passing of a few more Paul Ehrlichs and other doomsday preachers—and humanity has brought forth new inventions from its mind, all of this, including the dropping of atomic bombs, will be ancient history (very, very ancient, in fact).
But if the balance of terror works, it’s for a good reason. A nuclear explosion is so horrific that no one wants it to happen. By comparison, white phosphorus is also terrible—it’s truly nasty—but it doesn’t compare to the devastation caused by a nuclear bomb.
We agree, you and I, on the issue of the nuclear bomb, as on many other things concerning the delusions of alarmists and collapse theorists of all kinds.
This ends in child suicide go ask the parents of the 8 yo that hung himself in mum’s walk in wardrobe.
There needs to be accountability for this
I think they are also pre-conditioning the kids to be ready to pay big taxes (be slaves to) the bloated bureaucrats who will be collecting the taxes and taking big cuts for themselves.
Educational quality and neglect of reforms is the existential crisis on the planet.
Just 1000 years ago, the vast majority of the world’s children had to worry about dying of disease, or starving to death, or being eaten by wild animals, amongst many other real concerns.
In fact only a small fraction of them would live long enough to have children of their own.
Now that’s what I call emotional resilience.
Today’s pansies are so pampered that they have mental breakdowns whenever their iPhone is slow booting up.
Here is their therapy solution, and that’s without being used along the way by climate psychologists and their defunct profession.
story tip
Merling the Pig Turned Button-Pressing Into a Record-Breaking Career
As long as public school science curriculums continue to be designed by leftists, parents and the general public should expect a one-sided view of climate and environmental matters. So it’s up to the parents to learn the other side of the whole story and point out the advantages of fossil fuel use and how the planet’s climate has experienced wide fluctuations throughout the centuries regardless of human influence because the schools certainly won’t provide much beyond alarmism.
“The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” by Alex Epstein: Required reading for high school science classes.
“I’m outraged there is still no sign of people like Jessica urging a pullback from “climate education””
Her piece reads like a confession of child mistreatment.
In my view, this is a good reason for skeptics of climate alarm to keep pushing back all the way to the core scientific claim, which is that the incremental IR absorbing power of rising CO2, CH4, N2O MUST be expected to result in sensible heat gain down here. That is incorrect for physical reasons that have been well described for many decades, beginning well before the emergence of computer models of the general circulation.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/03/15/open-thread-181/#comment-4174555
Thank you for caring. It really is “for the children” that the delusions of climate harm are countered firmly.
The Climatistas are Millenarian fanatics, as weird as believers in The Rapture or Shia Twelvers awaiting the Hidden Imam.
“During the WW2 London Blitz, when people huddled in underground shelters with bombs detonating overhead, parents and teachers didn’t try to indoctrinate kids about all the ways they could die.”
When I was a kid hiding in a makeshift shelter (namely, our bathroom, because it was near the middle of the house) when the sirens were going off, I was thinking of all of the ways the storm could maybe hit the elementary school and give me a free week of vacation. It would turn out some years later that I would be getting plenty of “snow days”, less dramatic, but no less fun. For us, climate, in its wonderful forms, was a thing of beauty. 😉
I thought it was only poor people who were uniquely affected and women.
Only poor people and women are uniquely affected and trans
Only poor people, women and trans are uniquely affected and Asians
Only poor people, women, trans are and Asians uniquely affected and LGMGTPQKSF +
Only …..
“Our most vulnerable…”
“What surprised me was just how much students spoke of climate denial and disengagement, mental health stigma, and stigma around engaging with climate action.”
Sounds like most of the other kids haven’t bought into the Climate Scare and wonder about the mental stability of those who have.
I have said this before: some time ago a psychologist on BBC4 adviced worried youngsters to…become climate activists.
It follows a tried and trusted trajectory: scare the living daylights out of young people and then propose a solution. Like becoming a climate priest.
One obvious solition is of course building up resilience by a: not scaring them and b: take whatever comes w courage.
But i guess education has gone backwards. Although, come to think of it it has gotten much worse. They are told they can be whatever or whomever they want and are entitled to happiness just by being themselves.
So, set up for disappointment..
There are, as far as I could see, four comments on this piece at ‘The Conversation’. One of them more or less agrees with most people at WUWT, that frightening the children about nothing is a cruel and stupid thing to do. So the urgency that Jessica Newberry Le Vay feels should attend her concerns, is clearly lacking. Good. I have been in academia, and I recognise the urgency that she feels. Translated, it means ‘give me more money to research what interests me’. Well, no, not necessarily. I have come to think that as soon as a social scientist of any kind (and ‘climate change psychologists’ are near the bottom of the intellectual dung heap) describes their work as ‘crucial’ (and, of course, urgent; even, perhaps, urgently crucial), then we are in a land of make-believe and bluster. How long will it be, I wonder, before Oxford University creates a centre for understanding the mass psychosis of early-21st century climate change apocalypse-mongering, and the intellectual, pyschological and economic damage caused by this psychosis? That would raise a set of questions that genuinely are, now, urgent and crucial.
Supporting young people to build and sustain good mental health and wellbeing, and to feel prepared for life and work in an uncertain world, has never been more urgent.
Start by not traumatizing them with your delusional horror stories.
Not that long ago parents and educators taught kids skills they needed to succeed as adults; things like reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, and how consistent effort yields success. Everyone knew that fairy tales and horror movies were for entertainment. They weren’t real. If you developed some self-discipline and a reasonable work ethic, you could succeed and do well enough to provide for yourself and raise a family. It’s still true. The only thing that changed is leftists elevating self-indulgence over self-control, feelings over reason, “lived experience” over reality, coddling over discipline, debauchery over virtue, celebrating victimhood over accomplishment. It’s hard to be happy, successful, and prosperous when your culture teaches you the opposite.
Instead to telling kids what to think, the purpose of education should return to the basic teaching kids how to think.
I mix solutions for the climate crisis with environmental education… with fun-filled eco games so children feel empowered