Fear often sits behind anxiety, and there’s been growing attention to climate anxiety. We don’t see that climate anxiety is really widespread among populations, but it is higher among younger people. Often it motivates action. What we found was that there is a positive relationship between climate anxiety and taking action to tackle climate change. Fear can be a motivator in the same way that we were just saying about anger.

This could be interesting to be studied more. All too often I hear “we need to stay optimistic to act” and “doomerism leads to inaction” without anything to back that up.

Decades of optimism about climate change have lead to hardly any action.

Personally I believe the average person needs to worry much more than they do now. While more people know about human made climate change now, most of them do so only superficially and very optimistically.

Yes, that could have been written. That there are some people who are readily throw humanity into the biggest crisis for their own profit.

The situation is very dire. There is hardly done anything to improve the situation and there are people who misinform and spread doubt. Scientists and activists get ridiculed and attacked.

That all can be written. I just don’t find the comparison to pre WW2 very matching.

It’s a human decision as it’s humans who can make this decision.

However it’s a decision that only a very small minority of humans can do, most of us have no say in this.

The article compares the years before WW2 to now. How England failed to properly judge the threat from Germany and didn’t get the army ready. As written in an essay by George Orwell. Compared to how we currently fail to realize the threat of climate change.

I don’t know, it doesn’t make much sense to me. Of course there are parallels, like inaction now means bigger problems in future. But that’s pretty much it. I don’t like to compare the climate crisis to war.

Nature isn’t fascist. Earth doesn’t arm up. Yes, disasters get stronger and more common. But this is no war. Nature isn’t expanding and invading neutral countries. We are not fighting and should not fight against our planet, instead we should learn how to live sustainable on it. The climate isn’t the aggressor, it’s simple reacting to our action. Nature doesn’t have ideals nor any agenda, it doesn’t have morality.

And again a very common thing: humanity should not be semantically separated from nature! The two aren’t opposing parties or something, we humans are part of environment, while being dependant on the environment. We can’t save or help environment, when we say so, we merely mean that we don’t harm it.

If we think nature is waging a war against us, we can only lose that war. We need to realize that we are a part of nature and that we harm nature and that we need to stop! We need to do the opposite than fighting, we need to stop destroying!

Do you have any numbers or studies to support your claim?

I hear that all the time. I am a doomer and long for meaningful action, even if it makes my life harder.

I don’t fly, hardly travel, live very simple without aircon or heating. Don’t eat much meat.

I would love to travel. I enjoy driving, I have a thing for combustion engines. I most times sit out the heat and don’t even turn on the fan. I like the taste of beef, yet never buy it. I do this despite me believing that it doesn’t make much of a difference and it will certainly not save me.

Some rich person will pollute all I save during my life within a few minutes.

For real change, I believe, it must come from politics, not individuals. And forget about company’s responsibility, they clearly don’t care.

I just don’t see this happening. That’s why I believe we won’t make it.

Yet, this realization has only made me restricting myself harder. Before I believed so, I lead a much more polluting way of life. “'Cause someone will figure it out”

I think like this: Knowing everyone must die one day, still in no way it justifies doing bad.

I want to know how climatologists recommend dealing with depression.

Since I read this more often recently: I don’t think the scientists are the right address for that. Scientists expertise is mostly factual, emotionless calculus and number evaluation. Some might deal with the same fears, just hiding them from the public.

Probably a scientist who has also expertise in psychology would do, though.

But ultimately, I think, the fear’s and depression’s origin comes from the knowledge that the way we live makes the situation only worse. So the only way to get rid of that conflict in the mind would be a meaningful change in the way we live. As that doesn’t seem happen, we can only work to deal with the situation.