Climate anxiety can stop people vigorously tackling global warming

There has never been a shortage of people who predict that “the end is nigh”. The latest manifestation of this phenomenon is the prediction that runaway climate change will soon make the Earth unsuitable for human habitation. Such predictions induce severe anxieties in people and induce a paralysis that inhibits them from vigorously tackling the problems they worry about — a lose-lose situation.

There have been many doomsday predictions throughout my lifetime. The hydrogen bomb was developed in the 1950s and from then until 1989, when the Soviet empire began to quickly crumble, the world lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the symbol of all-out nuclear war between the superpowers that would produce mutually assured destruction (MAD).

And, even the few who might survive MAD would surely die in the severe global cooling (nuclear winter) that would follow a nuclear war. But even if we managed to avoid nuclear war, ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their best-selling influential 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicted hundreds of millions of deaths in worldwide famines during the 1970s/1980s, precipitated by overpopulation.

Thankfully none of these dire scenarios played out, although we came close to worldwide nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Paul Ehrlich’s predictions were wrong. Unfazed by this, Ehrlich claims his 1968 warnings were simply premature and now predicts collapse of our civilisation within the next few decades.

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Many people, particularly younger people, now suffer from “climate anxiety”, induced by the daily predictions of the dire consequences of global warming. A survey of 10,000 young people (16 to 25 year-olds) across 10 countries as to how concerned they are about climate change was described in Nature News in September last year. The results broke down as follows: extremely worried (27 per cent); very worried (32 per cent), moderately worried (25 per cent), little worried (11 per cent), not worried (5 per cent). Overall, 45 per cent said their feelings about climate change seriously impact their daily lives.

Obviously, a certain amount of fear is necessary to motivate people to take action to head off impending dangers, but climate anxiety induces paralysis. Many younger people are now so worried about the future that they decide not to have children or to have fewer children than they otherwise would have chosen. Others see no point in saving money to meet future needs, such as buying a home, or decide not to continue on to higher education, etc. Climate anxiety depresses people and sidetracks them away from vigorously tackling global warming.

Global warming is a deadly serious problem that will not go away unless we all take action. There are very many simple easy ways we can each reduce carbon dioxide emissions — walking, cycling, using public transport, using cars only for necessary journeys, driving at moderate speeds, rationing air-travel, eating food produced locally, substituting tap water for imported bottled water, insulating homes, and so on. And we should support politicians in enforcing the provisions of the 2021 Climate Act to radically reduce greenhouse emissions and punish them electorally if they fail to act. I also believe we should lobby for nuclear power.

We will undoubtedly have to make much bigger sacrifices than these simple steps itemised above. But we should get on with things, stop paralysing ourselves with fear and making poor decisions like further reducing birth rates in the developed world where birth rates are already well below replacement rates. Birth rates are rapidly declining everywhere in the world and further accelerating this decline will have devastating socio-economic consequences.

Media coverage of climate change is mixed, ranging from useful reporting of the scientific facts to regular scary soundbites predicting ruination of the planet. Unfortunately, many media outlets focus mostly on “bad” news, portraying a world that is steadily getting worse. But, the truth is that most things are actually improving because humans are good problem-solvers. Canadian-born cognitive scientist Steven Pinker analysed recent data on war, poverty, pollution, homicide and more, showing that we are doing much better in each of these areas when compared with 30 years ago. In Pinker’s words “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty, yesterday [and] every day for the last 25 years.”

Progress is problem-solving. We should look at climate change as a problem to be solved; not as an apocalypse in waiting.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC