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Fears about climate change are impacting young people’s mental health
Irish Times ^ | 03/17/2022 | Padraig O'Morain

Posted on 03/24/2022 9:17:37 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

In about half of people, mental illnesses arise before age 18 - add climate change fears and the outlook is grim

Suppose you wake up in the night and you notice flames coming from downstairs. You ring for the fire brigade and they say you’re probably imagining it.

Anyway, they add, by the time they could get there it would be too late anyway.

As you watch your house burn, your feelings might include anger, a sense of betrayal and grief.

Is that an extreme metaphor for the feelings of young people towards older generations and governments in regard to climate change?

It’s the impression that comes across to me from research led by the University of Bath and published, prior to being peer reviewed, on the Lancet website. Information was collected last year from 10,000 people in 10 countries including the UK, France, Australia, India and Nigeria.

To me the findings suggest that anxiety and other negative emotions affect younger people to a greater extent than, perhaps, older people appreciate.

If you add in the number of older people who feel the same way then we have a crisis of fear and anxiety that goes unrecognised. The understandable preoccupation with Ukraine has pushed climate change into the background, but it remains a major source of concern and of future mental ill-health.

In the research, almost 60 per cent of respondents said they felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. Over 45 per cent said they felt negatively affected in their daily lives.

Levels of fear were high with as many as 77 per cent saying the future was frightening. Almost half felt dismissed or ignored when they talked to other people about their fears. What this means to me is that climate change is already affecting the emotional wellbeing of significant numbers of people. Directly or indirectly that additional stress, in an already stressful world, will become an increasingly serious source of suffering. It will also make increasing demands on mental health services.

Not all of this will be obvious. Serious emotional pressures can trigger mental illness. The illness may be treated without a recognition that the source was climate change.

The vulnerability-stress theory which originated in the 1960s, states that stresses can bear down on the individual in ways that trigger conditions such as depression, anxiety or schizophrenia. Tragically, these stresses can lead to suicide.

Lots of people go through their whole lives without ever having to know that they have a genetic vulnerability to a mental illness because they never encounter a stress that triggers it. Others are not so lucky and under stress they experience a life-changing psychiatric disorder.

If you take a newish stressor like fears about climate change, it seems to me that this can only lead to increases in mental illness or in degrees of suffering that fall short of psychiatric disorders. And this is all without even considering the direct effects of extreme climate events on mental health.

Research published in the journal Nature suggests an association between extreme weather events and suicide. When pregnant women are traumatised in weather events, the children can suffer mental or physical issues in later life.

In about half of people, mental illnesses arise before the age of 18. For that age group, add in growing worry about climate change and the outlook is grim.

What can be done? One, I think, is to listen to young people’s fears with respect and not to dismiss them. Another is to be seen to be pushing for action by governments on climate change and to be doing our own bit in our own lives to respect the environment. We could encourage young people in promoting action on climate change.

In particular we could recognise that we are being hurt already by climate change even though Ireland has not yet suffered catastrophic events such as floods or extreme heat. But the mental health threat is surely encroaching already like first waves of a tide. And as with the first waves of a tide, it is important not to ignore them and end up trapped.


Padraig O’Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His books include Kindfulness - a guide to self compassion


TOPICS: Health/Medicine; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: carbonpropaganda; climatechange; climatehoax; fakenews; fakescience; greenputinpuppets; izmeneniyeklimata; mentalhealth; noitsthevaccine; oldnews; padraigogreenmoron; padraigomorain; padraigomoron; pootygreenies; putinapproves; russiaapproves; theapprovednarrative
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To: SeekAndFind

there has to be a way to bury the FakeNewsMSM:

22 March: ClimateRealism: Media Scares Themselves, Confuse “Unprecedented” Weather Model Temperature Spikes with Actual Temperatures
By Anthony Watts (WattsUpWithThat)
This past week two left-leaning media outlets, MSN (via The Washington Post aka WaPo), and the always alarmed UK based The Guardian ran stories saying the Arctic and Antarctic, had experienced “unprecedented” high temperatures. These claims can’t be verified since they were the results from a set of weather model simulations, indicating variations of above normal temperatures for the regions, not actual surface temperatures measured by ground-based weather stations...

These researchers, and the corporate media outlets which uncritically parroted their claims, have presented no extraordinary evidence that either Antarctica or the Arctic experienced an unusual spike in warming. Model simulations simply aren’t evidence.
https://climaterealism.com/2022/03/media-scares-themselves-confuse-unprecedented-weather-model-temperature-spikes-with-actual-temperatures/


21 posted on 03/24/2022 11:00:43 PM PDT by MAGAthon
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To: SeekAndFind
Pardon me for posting this, I don't like posting whole articles as responses to a thread.

Michaels, P. J. (1999, July 13). Global Warming’s Dirty Secret. Cato.org. Retrieved March 24, 2022, from https://www.cato.org/commentary/global-warmings-dirty-secret

The lead story on the June 29 MSNBC News was that there were terrible floods in the United States and–interspersed in the middle of the story–that global warming is going to be even worse than we thought. This was one‐​sided, emotional science reporting even worse than I thought possible.

The story was rooted in a recent study by Tom Wigley, introduced as “a respected climatologist.” Wigley’s study was financed by the Pew Foundation, which is running a multi‐​million‐​dollar campaign to hype global warming.

...

Having held a doctorate in climatology for two decades, I feel confident in saying that every one of my colleagues who has expressed an opinion to me dislikes Wigley, mainly because he seems arrogantly dismissive of some facts when they get in the way of his theories. He actively discourages the airing of points of view that conflict with his.

In October 1994, at a global warming meeting called by Rep. John Dingell (D‑Mich.), Wigley was confronted with the reality that satellites had found no warming. He merely waved his hands and said, “Oh come now, that's just the satellite data.” Oh come now, Tom, it's just the only global measure of temperature that exists!

...

He co‐​authored a famous 1996 paper that showed that, from 1963 through 1987, the behavior of the atmosphere did in fact increasingly resemble that of one in which greenhouse warming was being counteracted by sulfate cooling. But the data available for his study actually began in 1957 and ended in 1995. When all of the data on the critical region of the atmosphere was looked at, there was no change whatsoever! Wigley has never given a satisfactory explanation of why he ignored all the data. Should he write a response to this paper, I reserve the right to reply.

Muller, Richard. (2005, October 15). Global Warming Bombshell. Technologyreview.com. Retreived March 24, 2022, from https://www.technologyreview.com/2004/10/15/274740/global-warming-bombshell/

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. Advertisement

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

Life, Liberty and LevinInterview with Professor Patrick Michaels posted Nov 3, 2018, from Oct 21, 2018.

CO2 does not explain climate change over the last 100 years, and the computers models are predicting far too much warming. The models have been wrong for over 20 years. The only model that has worked for the last 20 years is the Russian model which does not show much warming. Most of the talk about climate change is about models that have been wrong for over 20 years.

Before that, there was the University of East Anglia "Climategate" over released emails showing rigging of data and models. The issues over Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which as I recall, showed global warming even if random data was put into it. The evidence that past temperature records are being rewritten to prove warming in models, which is tampering with government records.

Of course, in today's grade schools good luck having this taught or talked about openly at all.

22 posted on 03/24/2022 11:06:07 PM PDT by Widget Jr
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To: SeekAndFind

Democrats are having an even greater impact with all the fear porn they are swamping young people with.


23 posted on 03/24/2022 11:08:30 PM PDT by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith…)
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oh yeah..worried about global warming are they??...what will they do if there is a nuclear exchange?...Minuteman 3..Trident D-5 ...10 million degrees at the center....then what....


24 posted on 03/24/2022 11:12:58 PM PDT by basalt
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To: SeekAndFind
If things continue as they are in Ukraine we may have a whole helluva lot of global warming quite soon.

Then to be followed by something called Nuclear Winter.

So, yes, yutes should get out their beachwear, but keep a good parka in the closet for later.

25 posted on 03/24/2022 11:23:36 PM PDT by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: basalt
The ignorant will become igneous.

The assault will turn the rest into basalt.

26 posted on 03/24/2022 11:24:44 PM PDT by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: who_would_fardels_bear

I agree.


27 posted on 03/24/2022 11:25:52 PM PDT by sport
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To: No Party Affiliation

“The yutes have it so good that they have to make up stuff to worry about.”

The yutes??! What about all the irrational incessant fear mongering that goes on here? “We’re all going to die.” “Russians are going to nuke everyone” “Oil will hit $500” “we’re all going to starve.” “Insert hair on fire noise hete”


28 posted on 03/24/2022 11:31:51 PM PDT by BiglyCommentary
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To: SeekAndFind

They’ve been trying to scare people for a really long time. I’ve been watching some old eighties shows the last couple of weeks and they were inserting agendas back then, too.


29 posted on 03/24/2022 11:47:55 PM PDT by Trillian
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To: SeekAndFind

Wouldn’t it be great if all had a boomers’
birthday? The first gen after WWII were
brought up right. What the hell happened?
Hippies?


30 posted on 03/24/2022 11:50:58 PM PDT by Lean-Right (Eat More Moose)
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To: SeekAndFind

31 posted on 03/24/2022 11:54:13 PM PDT by McGruff (Biden - There's going to be a new world order out there and we've got to lead it)
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To: SeekAndFind
Doomsday cults use mass psychosis to exploit sheeple, fleecing them of everything, including their life. These false religions are common and continuous throughout history, the work of evil people.

From WebMD: Psychosis is a condition that affects the way your brain processes information. It causes you to lose touch with reality. You might see, hear, or believe things that aren’t real. Psychosis is a symptom, not an illness. It can be triggered by a mental illness, a physical injury or illness, substance abuse, or extreme stress or trauma.

32 posted on 03/24/2022 11:56:49 PM PDT by Reeses
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To: SeekAndFind

It’s not climate change, it’s being told that they need to question their gender identity.


33 posted on 03/25/2022 12:43:03 AM PDT by Telepathic Intruder (Democracy is two dead Democrats and a Republican voting who's brains are for dinner.)
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To: SeekAndFind

That’s because their parents raised them to be morons.


34 posted on 03/25/2022 1:31:13 AM PDT by albie
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To: albie

Previous generations were subjected to nuclear war psychosis.


35 posted on 03/25/2022 2:42:07 AM PDT by Vehmgericht
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To: SeekAndFind

Our energy policy is being run by 15 yr old girls on twitter.


36 posted on 03/25/2022 5:57:07 AM PDT by bray (The Vax is fake and deadly)
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To: SeekAndFind

“Fear is the path to the dark side, fear leads to anger anger leads to hate hate leads to suffering” -Yoda


37 posted on 03/25/2022 5:57:07 AM PDT by Farmerbob
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To: fireman15

Why should they worry? Shortly we may have nukes rained down on us and that will set us back so far there won’t be any global warming to worry about.


38 posted on 03/25/2022 6:07:24 AM PDT by oldasrocks
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To: basalt

Remember the fear of a Nuclear Winter caused by Nuclear War!

That was After the TERROR OF THE COMING ICE AGE, and the Ozone Hole, caused by Freon-12 cooking everyone!
In between those times it was the ALAR poisoning apples and Radon seeping into your houses from the ground.

And don’t forget the fear of STRAY INDUCED ELECTRIC CURRENTS causing your house wiring in your walls to give you cancer!

Somewhere in that mess Dioxin and PCBs were gonna get you!

Always keeping the people in a constant state of FEAR.


39 posted on 03/25/2022 8:11:06 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar (No dog in the Unraine war, but we still root for the underdog.)
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To: Jeff Chandler

I still remember the first fear a teacher inflicted on me back in 1956. She said bubble gum would rot your teeth.

This scared me so bad I rarely chewed bubble gum again! And I loved bubble gum!

At the age of 75, I still have my teeth.


40 posted on 03/25/2022 8:15:04 AM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar (No dog in the Unraine war, but we still root for the underdog.)
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