Is climate change traumatic? If not, why do experts say it is?

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Polar bear from An Inconvenient Truth

Read time: 2.0 minutes

This Happened
Experts, agencies, activists, and politicians claim that climate change constitutes a severe psychological stress that causes mental health disorders.
 
Who Did This?
The theory of man-made climate change will create catastrophes has attracted serious scientific attention since the 1960s. This led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 in which 189 countries agreed in principle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. The theory received a burst of popular support in 2006 with Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
 
The Claims
The man-made climate change theory hypothesizes that global temperature rise will cause melting of the polar ice caps, higher sea levels, more frequent and more severe hurricanes and tornados, floods, and droughts. Among the many dreadful outcomes was that without ice caps, polar bears would drown and become extinct. An emotional icon from An Inconvenient Truth was the animated image of a polar bear treading water in a nearly empty ocean.
 
Many government agencies and professional organizations embrace the theory that man-made climate change causes mental problems. For example, the Centers for Disease Control asserted there are two main paths:
(1) trauma from natural disasters that are becoming more frequent and more severe
(2) chronic stress from both reduced access to resources caused by disaster and anxiety about alleged current catastrophes and the possibility of future catastrophes.
 
Representatives of the World Health Organization published a review paper which concluded that climate change is “a most serious threat to the health and well-being of children and adolescents” [1]. They used the term eco-anxiety to describe the chronic stress from worrying about alleged catastrophes. Multiple peer-reviewed literature reviews about the concept of eco-anxiety have concluded that, without doubt, it causes lasting mental health problems for individuals [2].
 
Analysis
Are disasters becoming more frequent or more severe? Trauma from disasters, of course, causes posttraumatic stress disorder in some individuals, but a connection to climate change is only plausible if disasters are increasing.
This has been one of the easier claims to debunk because disasters can be counted. Evidence is clear that hurricanes have trended to decrease over the past 100 years [3], severe tornados are less frequent than fifty years ago, and heat waves have declined over the past eighty years [4].
 
Is eco-anxiety valid as a unique etiology of mental health problems? No. Eco-anxiety exists but so does excessive anxiety about driving over bridges, traffic accidents, body image, germs, and public embarrassment. All of these are common forms of anxiety that fall under a broader umbrella of generalized anxiety disorder. It is likely that if individuals with eco-anxiety did not have climate change to worry about, they would still have many other anxieties. Researchers have made no attempts yet to untangle eco-anxiety from other worries to determine if it is a unique syndrome. Even the literature reviews that embrace the notion of eco-anxiety have noted the flaws of existing studies as nearly all self-report, cross-sectional, and unsophisticated [1,2].
 
Why Is This Happening?
The emotional valence underpinning the need to act with the utmost urgency to reduce fossil fuel use has always been about individual morality. As Gore stated in his documentary, “This is not a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to happen it is deeply unethical.” This moral crisis provides the value proposition as a political tool, and, coupled with anticipatory fear of natural disasters, is largely what creates additional worries in a subset of individuals with pre-existing anxiety problems.


REFERENCES
[1] Proulx K; Daelmans B; Baltag V; Banati P. Climate change impacts on child and adolescent health and well-being: A narrative review. [Review] Journal of Global Health. 14:04061, 2024 May 24, doi: 10.7189/jogh.14.04061
[2] Coffey Y, Bhullar N, Durkin J, Islam MS, Usher K. Understanding eco-anxiety: A systematic scoping review of current lit­erature and identified knowledge gaps. J Clim Change Health. 2021;3:100047. doi:10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047
Léger-Goodes T, Malboeuf-Hurtubise C, Mastine T, Généreux M, Paradis PO, Camden C. Eco-anxiety in children: A scoping review of the mental health impacts of the awareness of climate change. Front Psychol. 2022;13:872544. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872544
Martin G, Cosma A, Roswell T, Anderson M, Treble M, Leslie K, et al. Measuring negative emotional responses to climate change among young people in survey research: A systematic review. Soc Sci Med. 2023;329:116008. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116008
[3] Nyberg J, Malmgren BA, Winter A, Jury MR, Kilbourne KH, Quinn TM. Low Atlantic hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years. Nature. 2007 Jun 7;447(7145):698-701. doi: 10.1038/nature05895.
Vecchi GA, Landsea C, Zhang W, Villarini G, Knutson T. Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century. Nat Commun. 2021 Jul 13;12(1):4054. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24268-5.
Yang W, Wallace E, Vecchi GA, Donnelly JP, Emile-Geay J, Hakim GJ, Horowitz LW, Sullivan RM, Tardif R, van Hengstum PJ, Winkler TS. Last millennium hurricane activity linked to endogenous climate variability. Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 27;15(1):816. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45112-6.
[4] Wrightstone G (2017). Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know. Silver Crown Productions, LLC: USA
 
 
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