The Patriot Post® · Climate Alarmism Harms Mental Health

A recent study published in The Lancet found that American youth are struggling with negative feelings and hopelessness regarding climate change.

According to the study, “Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.”

The study concludes, “Climate change is causing widespread distress among US youth and affecting their beliefs and plans for the future. These effects may intensify, across the political spectrum, as exposure to climate-related severe weather events increases.”

Surveying nearly 16,000 Americans between the ages of 16 and 25, the study found that 85% of respondents expressed at least moderate worry about climate change, while 57.9% said they were “very or extremely worried” about its impact on people and the planet.

Indeed, this perceived impact of climate change has these young Americans so worried about the future that many are hesitant to have children, and this includes nearly 38% who identified as Republican. They further claim it’s negatively affecting their mental health.

This is what you get when a doom-and-gloom cult is preaching to you at every turn. Here are just a few examples:

Greta Thunberg, back in 2018, predicted that humanity would be “wiped out by climate change” unless the world stopped using fossil fuels by 2023. Whew. Here we are, nearing 2025, and the world is humming along just fine.

Last year, in an apparent attempt to turn the alarmism dial up to 11, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, after blaming climate change solely on mankind, claimed, “Climate change is here; it is terrifying; and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived. The air is unbreathable; the heat is unbearable; and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.”

Again, the planet is not boiling, the poles are still covered in ice, the air is still breathable, and none of Guterres’s ridiculously unscientific claims even remotely comports with reality.

Then there’s this doozy from New York Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who back in 2019 shrieked, “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She further lamented, “And your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”

And no story about climate change would be complete without Dr. Doom himself. In 2009, Al Gore warned that there was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” In 2006, he predicted a possible rise in sea levels of 20 feet “in the near future.”

Democrat politicians have been playing this Chicken Little game for quite some time, and yet the sky never falls. None of their dire predictions ever materializes. And as we have repeatedly noted, the only solution they ever offer is a bigger, more controlling government via higher taxes and more spending.

The value of this survey is that it shows how repeated alarmism, no matter how disconnected from reality, can affect people’s mental health. If you’ve grown up with a steady diet of this language — with constant warnings of oceans rising, ice caps melting, and mass animal and planetary extinctions, all because we in the modern era use fossil fuel for nearly everything — it’s not hard to see how this negative narrative could induce a sense of hopelessness.

Young people need to dream big. They need hope-filled dreams, not constant preaching about a dystopian future where death and destruction are all they have to look forward to. But this is exactly how a culture is broken down and weakened, exactly how visions of hopelessness and despair set in. Instead, we ought to focus on a bright, hopeful future where the possibilities for development, creativity, and growth offer the excitement and vision that energetic youth thrive on, where they see the world as full of possibilities, hopes, and dreams.

Something like that formulation is what made Thunberg famous. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she screamed at a UN summit in 2019. “And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” The adults in her life exploited her fears to practically weaponize her for money and fame. More children around the world now suffer fear and anxiety as a result of her extremism.

While the climate continues to change, just as it always has, the more important consideration is not some fruitless message of trying to stop it. Rather, the message should be that of adaptation and openness to a future with many possibilities.