Newswise, cites a University of Utah article “How Anxiety Over Climate Change Affects Students,” to claim that that hundreds of undergraduates feel powerless, frustrated, and anxious about climate change, arguing that universities need more resources to help them cope. The anxiety may be real, but the implication that physical climate change is causing it is false, and unsupported by the study. The study itself points toward a different explanation: generalized anxiety, political ideology, and repeated exposure to alarming climate information in classrooms and online.
University of Utah researchers surveyed 547 students and found that 54 percent frequently or strongly felt powerless about climate change and 55 percent felt frustrated. Yet the researchers explicitly caution that their findings do not establish a causal connection between climate change and anxiety. One author acknowledges the relationship could run in either direction, with people already prone to generalized anxiety potentially being more susceptible to climate anxiety.
That distinction is crucial. A student saying, “I’m terrified of climate change” demonstrates that the student is frightened. It does not demonstrate that the physical climate caused the fear.
In fact, the study itself provides evidence that climate messaging may be the biggest part of the problem. Students with greater exposure to stories about climate change in classrooms and online reported greater climate anxiety. Students holding more liberal political views also tended to report greater anxiety. The researchers found a “strong positive correlation” between exposure to online climate information and climate anxiety.
That should have been the headline.
The survey didn’t examine temperature, sea level, hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire incidences or trends. It measured what students believe about climate change. Its Climate Anxiety Index asked students about propositions such as “The things I most value will be destroyed,” “The future is frightening,” and “Humanity is doomed.” Those are measurements of beliefs about catastrophe, not measurements of knowledge of real climate information.
There is another revealing number. Only 14.8 percent of respondents listed climate change among their three greatest concerns. The sample was also drawn from three Environmental and Sustainability Studies courses and one communications course, and 63 percent of respondents leaned politically left. The researchers themselves caution against broadly generalizing the results.
Other research points directly toward the media’s role. A 2024 study in the Journal of Health Communication examined climate anxiety and media exposure among college students. Media-exposure variables explained about 33 percent of the variance in climate anxiety, with frequency of media use and attention to climate news significantly predicting greater anxiety.
Students aren’t simply looking out the dormitory window, observing modest long-term warming, and spontaneously descending into despair. What they are being told is what makes them anxious.
After years of headlines warning about a “climate emergency,” an “existential threat,” tipping points, disappearing coastlines, civilization-threatening weather, and only a few years left to “save the planet,” why would anyone be surprised that many young people are frightened?
Climate Realism has documented this problem before, noting that climate anxiety is routinely presented as evidence of how dangerous climate change is without asking whether relentless catastrophic messaging helped create the anxiety. Another Climate Realism analysis discussed the widely cited survey in which 56 percent of young respondents said they believed humanity was doomed.
Humanity is not doomed. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report doesn’t say that. It identifies risks, largely manageable risks, from additional warming, but that is worlds apart from telling students civilization has no future or that having children may be irresponsible.
Another peer-reviewed study makes the point even more sharply. Hannes Zacher and Cort Rudolph examined 2,066 people in a 2023 Climatic Change paper, “Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety.” They found that greater general environmental knowledge and greater climate-specific knowledge were both associated with less climate anxiety, even after controlling for demographics, personality, and environmental attitudes.
In plain English, the people who knew more of the facts and had a better understanding of science were less anxious about climate change.
That matters because much of the popular conception of the world’s climate future comes from computer projections, including extreme emissions scenarios presented as likely futures. RCP8.5 is the classic example. Climate researchers warned in Nature against treating that very high-emissions pathway as the most likely future. Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie likewise documented the misuse of extreme climate scenarios as “business as usual.”
A hypothetical worst case escaped the scientific literature and became, in popular culture, a forecast. Then adults seem surprised when young people believe it.
Watts Up With That has addressed the same issue in; “A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. Science Just Admitted Why” asked whether adults had frightened young people by presenting extreme projections as their expected future. “Worry About Climate Fearmongering, Not Climate Change” noted that young people already face academic pressure, social media, finances, relationships, and uncertainty about their futures. Adding repeated warnings that Earth itself is becoming uninhabitable hardly improves their mental health.
Meanwhile, real-world indicators don’t suggest a planetary apocalypse. Our World in Data shows that death rates from natural disasters have fallen dramatically during the past century. Better forecasting, infrastructure, communications, agriculture, emergency response, and rising wealth have made humanity far more resilient to environmental hazards.
Students should be taught the difference between observations and projections, plausible scenarios and extreme scenarios, manageable risks and planetary doom. They should also learn about adaptation, technological progress, uncertainty, and human resilience.
Instead of merely creating climate-anxiety support groups and steering frightened students toward climate advocacy or psychiatric care, universities might try something more fundamental: report the state of the climate accurately. Tell them humanity isn’t doomed. Tell them computer models are not observations. Tell them the worst emissions scenario are in fact impossible. Tell them humans are remarkably adaptable. Better yet, buy them a copy of Climate at a Glance and assign it as required reading.
The University of Utah study has identified a real problem, but Newswise has the diagnosis backwards. It does not demonstrate that climate change is psychologically harming students. It shows that students who are generally more anxious, politically predisposed to climate concern, and more frequently exposed to climate information in classrooms and online report greater climate anxiety.
If young people are repeatedly told that their planet is dying, their future is frightening, humanity may be doomed, and having children might be irresponsible, we shouldn’t be astonished when surveys discover that they’re anxious.
Perhaps before universities create another climate-anxiety support group, educators and journalists should consider whether the first treatment for climate anxiety ought to be less alarmism, more context, and a much larger dose of reality grounded in real world data, which with regard to extreme weather and human health, is generally positive.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.