We live in an age where drowning in climate fear is commonplace. The news cycle is laden with reports about how sea levels will rise—drowning our cities, how fires will destroy landscapes, or how polluted air will suffocate living beings. Scientists warn of abrupt collapse of oceanic ecosystems, rapid disintegration of ice sheets, compound extremes that trigger crop failures, permafrost carbon being released that amplifies warming, deforestation that flips remnants of forest to savannah, and warming that exceeds sustainable levels for life on Earth.
As a consequence, a large part of the youth’s concerns du jour deals with the changing climate. These fears have not been sown in an organic manner. There is no denying a changing climate. But the majority of beliefs held by those struck with intense eco-anxiety fixate on low-confidence, high-intensity events that hinge on unrealistic estimates of future emissions and population growth.
Given that backdrop, the picture deserves a clear read. The evidence is strong enough without cranking the volume. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the first full calendar year with the global average above 1.5 °C relative to 1850–1900. Think of that as the smoke alarm blaring in a hallway, not the whole house burning down. The Paris benchmarks (1.5 °C and “well below” 2 °C) were designed as long-term yardsticks, judged over multi-decade averages, so one hot year doesn’t equal a formal breach. It does, however, show which way the thermometer is leaning.
And beyond records, effects were tangible. In the U.S. alone, there were 27 separate billion-dollar disasters in 2024—storms, floods, fires—each costly and overwhelming on its own. Meanwhile, extra heat expanded seawater and pushed global sea level up faster than expected last year: an incremental rise that compounds coastal risk for decades. These aren’t plot twists; they’re the shape of the story we’re already in.
The facts stand on their own; alarmism adds nothing. Panic burns out quickly, whereas sustained attention endures. With the macro trend established, the focus shifts to the micro: practices that preserve capacity for long-term action.
If the macro is clarified, the psychological fallout comes next. Climate anxiety is a challenging emotional response to climate change and other environmental issues.
Unsurprisingly, what young people see in headlines can be alarming. It is a commonly held belief among those who mostly watch news highlights that the world is ending, and the dusk of humanity is slowly falling over us due to immense carbon emissions and the rising global populace. Moreover, this is compounded by the lack of agency many young people feel. Not only can they not easily influence policy via voting; few have the power to materially affect emissions at a large scale.
The elephant in the room, however, is not this lack of agency. It is the projections, it is what is being preached to the choir by a select few major media outlets. What might have been good- faith climate alarmism has done more harm than good and has caused psychological damage to an entire generation.
Most doomsday climate projections assumed high economic growth, technological stagnation, and a population boom. Instead, the opposite has happened: global economic growth is slowing, technology has become more efficient, and the global population is projected to decline by 2100. Dogmatic veneration of this low-confidence, high-impact climate ideology has done more harm than good. What it hoped to achieve remains elusive; what it has achieved is a wave of irrational fear.
That is why turning up fear isn’t a strategy; adding efficacy is. Fear can spark action, but it cannot steer it. Communication research shows that threat alone often leads to avoidance and defensiveness unless it travels with efficacy. In the Extended Parallel Process Model, high threat + low efficacy tends to trigger denial or freeze, while high threat + high efficacy sustains more problem-focused action.
Real-world evidence points the same way. Large cross-national surveys report widespread climate anxiety, with a significant share of young people saying distress interferes with daily functioning—the very time, focus, and energy that enable civic or sustained personal action. Psychology bodies reach similar conclusions, noting links between chronic climate distress and rumination, sleep disruption, and concentration problems.
And on the front lines, studies of social-justice and human-rights organisers document activist burnout—exhaustion, cynicism, and withdrawal under urgency cues and scarce recovery time. The heaviest fatigue lands on the most engaged, undermining persistence—the core ingredient of impact.
Hence a working rule: pair clear stakes with doable control—specific, tractable moves at personal, community, and institutional levels. Steady, efficacy-forward messages preserve capacity; panic drains it. Translating that rule into daily life starts with inputs and beliefs. The best way to alleviate climate anxiety is to stop consuming news—which is unlikely. The other would be to trace every article back to its primary source and read that—which is also unlikely. Practically, one simply needs to know what one believes.
“Okay, so, the climate is changing (fact) and that is bad (narrative/opinion) and I want it to stop changing.”
If this is the baseline belief most people with crippling eco-anxiety hold, then there are two general suggestions.
Figure out what the government can do, such as change policy, and what leading companies can do, like set industry standards. Support political parties that efficiently address these issues, or choose to support companies that set better standards. Secondly, you could change your behaviours to be more sustainable and, with that, reclaim agency.
But overall, recognise that most of what is prophesied about climate change is a doomsday narrative and that your agency is not even really required – because you will be fine.
Before layering on actions, clearing the traps keeps things sane. It is easier to know what not to do than to know what you should do.
Stop believing everything you read—more specifically, generalisations. What we read on social media and the news often generalises specifics from scientific reports.
Another trap is clinging to dogma. For example, the belief that decarbonisation is the best path forward to save humanity from climate change. Beliefs are sticky, so it might be daunting to consider that climate change is a necessary evil for the betterment of human life—but this isn’t as fringe an idea as it seems. If we were to regress to a world where we end the use of fossil fuels and immediately go as sustainable as possible, most people would suffer far more than they would under the projected outcomes of climate change. Climate change might be bad; the ‘obvious’ solutions are worse.
Having mapped the dead ends, what follows is the route that actually gets used: low-friction, easy to share. The first element is pace. A fast feed turns every headline into sirens; a steadier tempo turns news into information. In a low-friction week, attention arrives on a schedule and then goes to do its job elsewhere. The result isn’t sainthood; it’s headroom.
Then there’s distance. Shorter distances are less about virtue than convenience. When the things that matter sit nearer, days line up with less admin. A block walked out of habit shrinks both carbon and cortisol without asking for applause.
Nothing in this middle works without maintenance. Kept things keep giving: the jacket with a new zip, the bike with tuned brakes. Maintenance isn’t nostalgia; it’s the cheapest form of progress.
Finally, rhythm. A small pattern that repeats—same train on the same route, same cook-night with the same people—has compound interest. The pattern is the point. It keeps attention available for everything else.
Taken together, this middle path reads less like a plan and more like a texture. It neither argues with doomsday nor promises salvation. It just makes the lower-impact choice the easiest one, and the most compatible with a life that feels good to live in.
The climate isn’t deteriorating to a point of civilizational collapse, and because of technology we are more resilient to natural disasters even if hazard intensity is worse today than a century ago. Technology might be changing the climate, but it also increases resilience. We can acknowledge and tackle climate change without being doomsday prophets and losing sleepless nights. There is a golden middle of climate realism, and we must pull both extremes of the aisle towards it.
Written by Simone Chiarion and Valerio Costa
References
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-first-year-exceed-15degc-above-pre-industrial- level
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-year-record-about-155degc- above-pre-industrial-level
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024-active-year-us-billion-dollar- weather-and-climate-disasters
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22002250/ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/ PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article-abstract/7/3/366/2412085?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three- tough-truths-about-climate
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-truth-about-climate-change-lies-middle-steve- koonin?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-climate-change-would-end? utm_source=publication-search
https://www.thefp.com/p/america-needs-to-go-nuclear-plus? utm_source=publication-search
