The rise and rise of Climate Anxiety

It's not rising sea levels, but raised anxiety that we need to worry about.

There are so many vans driving around with some variation on ‘our commitment to Net Zero’ that you wonder if they might be looking to drive off a cliff to fully meet the demands of their declaration. From electric cars to sustainable beach resorts, eco-agencies and unreliable renewable wind turbines and solar farms, there’s money to be made from climate anxiety. And it’s easy to forget how relentless it is; people are genuinely worried about a world they’ve been told might not be here in a generation’s time, despite regular warnings since the 1960s.

It only takes a few moments of doom scrolling on Threads - or your preferred life spirit dissolver of choice - to find flocks of women and feminist men now declaring how they couldn't possibly bring children into a world that is in climate crisis; some of them behaving as though someone else might actually want children with them. It’s unclear for how long they expect children to live for, as our sun still has about 5 billion years of life to go. For people who like to be informed they could do some homework on this. One can only assume they are watching the news, which isn’t quite as far from ‘a bloke down the pub said’ as people like to think it is.

Not having watched the news for fifteen years, it’s easy to forget the extent to which it intrudes upon (and steers) public thinking. If you lean in to overhear a conversation it’s frequently an opportunity to demonstrate what a great person you due to your horror at awful news stories. Mind you, the last time I eavesdropped in big Sainsbury’s I heard ‘it’s the same weight as two dogs’ in the sort of amazed tone best suited to utter upheaval of long-held beliefs. I now wish I’d inquired what, as I’ll now never know what surprisingly weighed the same as two dogs for the rest of my life. Maybe four cats?

For news addicts there is no climate without the word crisis following it. It’s the usual fear porn that we witnessed during Covid; perhaps impotent abject terror at perceived global catastrophe is a preferable to meaningful self-reflection. There is no phrase harder to counter, and saturated in misplaced trust, than ‘I saw it on the news.’ There are hordes of people with phones pinging the latest ‘news’ so they can inform their friends of newsflashes that they already know, in the hope of appearing better informed. The only issue with being informed is by whom?

The drawback of avoiding the news includes missing tweets from Sky News Climate reporter Victoria Seabrook, who should really go all in and rename herself Vicky Searise. It’s people like Searise who are fuelling the new type of protest of not bringing children into a dying world. Her recent claim that the sea ice on the Arctic ‘continent’ is melting at 12% every decade, presumably resulting in flotillas of sun-loungers drifting in the mediterrean and no beaches. She somewhat undermines her hyperbole by presenting a graph that demonstrates Artic sea ice as stable since 2007.

It's hard to define what a dying world looks like. Things are dying, as evidenced by AI rendered essays securing degrees at university. Students are leaving with nothing more than the ability to ask Chatbot GP questions like: At what point did competing western countries overtake Great Britain's industrialisation advantage? What do ducks think about? How guilty should I be for being white? or Why am I here? The dying world is seen in those AI images of a red sky with burning ground and silhouetted displaced humans, while AI data centre carbon emissions are set to triple by 2030 (a/c to Morgan Stanley). And let’s not forget that eco-terror predictions are based upon computer modelling, which is repeatedly proven as the least reliable of all scientific method.

Not that it’s stopping millennials from protesting by not having children. Not doing something seems to be the easiest sort of protest. The I’m not going to get out of bed in protest against slippers, (or was it war,?) is the easiest call to arms since the Saharan bedouin refused to wear raincoats. And let’s not forget that the people arguing for climate crisis often run eco-consultancy agencies, or sell solar panels, or workshops in ‘how to manage eco-anxiety’. Nothing is more effective in raising eco-worries than a course suggesting we need to manage our worry about it.

The anxiety runs deep. Therapy rooms across the country are full of patients worried about the future of the earth relentlessly advertised as hopeless, with therapists afraid to challenge the belief, or believing it themselves. Some people are so despondent that it's easy to imagine them typing with their foreheads. It's impressive mental gymnastics to conclude that the best way to care about children is by not having them. Imagine what cave women were thinking as another squall of north easterly battered their dwellings, drowning out the howl of wolf packs circling their settlement. The constant threat of predators is real eco-anxiety, yet it didn't stop them from procreating; to survive. If they had given up, then the eco-anxiety stricken wouldn't be around to glue themselves to roads or throw soup at masterpieces they couldn’t paint if they were still trying when our sun finally dies.

Late to the party but compensating for lack of punctuality via early dance floor enthusiasm is the International Council of Nursing. In their Position Statement it’s easy to forget that their required position and reason for existing is to do some bloody nursing. Instead, they state: Climate change presents the single largest threat to global development with the potential to undermine the past 50 years of public health gains. It reads like they’ve been locked in a room with nothing but C4 News for years. What they actually mean is that the fear mongering about the climate ‘crisis’ is the single largest threat to mental health. Laughably it suggests that leadership from nurses to take immediate action to build climate resilient health systems is necessary. This might be an unwelcome challenge to the overpaid / underworked middle managers already ‘leading’ in matters that are often fuck all to do with health. It’s unclear what climate resilient health systems are other than putting hospitals on stilts to evade the supposed rise in sea levels that Victoria Searise is so buzzed about that she probably sleeps in waders, despite water not rising when ice melts into it.

The International Council of Nursing have gone full fascist in their claim that ‘Climate change is unequivocal: the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the quantity of snow and ice has diminished and the sea levels have risen.’ And that it is a ‘direct result of the rise in global concentrations of greenhouse gases.’ They are strangely silent on the periods when the planet has cooled at times of rising co2.

It’s hard to imagine nursing professionals this hysterical about a slight warming in the earth’s atmosphere as it emerges from a mini ice age to be calming and reassuring bedside presences. In fact they’re more likely to be elbowing you out of the way in the rush to the beta-blockers cupboard (manufactured within Net Zero guidelines of course). There’s something so non-negotiable about the Nursing Council’s stance that one fears for the medical care people for like Nobel Prize winner in physics John Clauser who denies there is scientific consensus on climate change. Or Dr Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of (MIT) who has said that if we reach worldwide Net Zero by 2050, we will avoid about a third of a degree of warming. He adds that “if it’s just Europe and the Anglosphere, it’s closer to a tenth of a degree.” In a clear case of stay in your lane, the nurses evidently consider themselves to know more than some scientists. Perhaps you will only receive medical care if you have tarmac/glue injures or if you cycled yourself to A&E, or arrived by yacht.

If there’s one thing not having children gives you, it’s time, and you’re going to find something else to worry about, which generally means cats, nuclear disarmament or climate crisis. Two of which are guaranteed anxiety; even cats have their moments. In fact, it might be having children that tempers the desire to change the entire world by localising it to the point of success being measured by how quickly your offspring take their shoes off at the door. There are such things as climate crisis cafes, which not only sound like a right laugh, but are a place to share your hysteria over a mass-produced plastic-based coffee cup.

It might be argued that the greatest crisis facing mankind, other than increasing populations of polar bears, is an anxiety pandemic. That medical professions and even therapeutic professional bodies, like BACP, are contributing to client anxiety. They talk on their website about th elciamte crisis building for years with extreme weather events, despite huge reduced death tolls and many of the wild fires a result of arson. Their in-no-way-biased public perceptions survey found 60% of people saying client change has had a negative impact on their mental health. What they really mean is the propaganda. Professional bodies could balance things by pointing out reassuring research showing 50 years of failed climate predictions, such as the UN declaring entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. They could also remind us that a more temperate planet for a temperate species like homosapiens, might actually be a good thing. That public opinion feels otherwise shows how deeply into the sand the climate crisis kool aid has spilled. That it’s not rising sea levels we need to worry about, but rising eco-anxiety.