As Cacti Choke on Heat, Deniers Blame “Alarmism” for Climate Anxiety

Above, heat in Arizona bad enough to choke out cactus plants.

Meanwhile, as the country continues to reel from extreme heat and storms, leave it to the Wall Street Journal Opinion writers to put their finger on the real problem – “alarmist stories”.
So, it’s all in your head, you weak minded snowflakes. Pay no attention to that dying cactus, get back to work.

Allysia Finley in the Wall Street Journal:

The media wants you to know it’s hot outside. “ ‘Heat health emergency’: Nearly half the US at risk,” CNN proclaimed last week as temperatures climbed above 90 degrees in much of the country. 

If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are. Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.

“Extreme Temperatures Are Hurting Our Mental Health,” a recent Bloomberg headline warns. Apparently every social problem under the sun is now attributable to climate change. But it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions. The authors also note that “climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

Well, yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

Yet according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential. A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis. “It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane,” Ms. Tolentino writes.

“A couple of years ago, reading a climate report on my phone in the early hours of the morning, I went into a standard-issue emotional spiral thinking about it all,” she recalls. “We had also recently had a baby, whose carbon footprint likely already exceeded that of entire villages in Burundi. I was playing whack-a-mole with my consumer desires.”

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.” 

It isn’t difficult to notice that today’s snowflakes consider hot weather aberrant, similar to how they perceive normal feelings such as anxiety or sadness. But there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.

Meanwhile, all that “climate hypochondria” is putting a serious drag on the real-world economy. Apparently people don’t want to have to die of heatstroke on their jobs.

New York Times:

As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.

Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.

Extreme heat is regularly affecting workers beyond expected industries like agriculture and construction. Sizzling temperatures are causing problems for those who work in factories, warehouses and restaurants and also for employees of airlines and telecommunications firms, delivery services and energy companies. Even home health aides are running into trouble.

“We’ve known for a very long time that human beings are very sensitive to temperature, and that their performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat, but what we haven’t known until very recently is whether and how those lab responses meaningfully extrapolate to the real-world economy,” said R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And what we are learning is that hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy in many more ways than we would have expected.”

A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.

The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050.