Unhinged

The the self serving machine of climate change advocacy, climate anxiety, and climate litigation

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

In mid October, climate anxiety raced to the front pages again because of a new publication in Lancet Planetary Health.¹ The study is similar to one released in 2021 by a subset of the same authors. For purposes here, I will refer to 2024 study as L24², using the first letter of the lead author’s last name and will refer to the 2021 study as H21.

Both L24 and H21 follow a similar approaches and give remarkably similar results.

L24 researchers report that in the United States that about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet:

• 57.9% were very or extremely worried

• 85% were at least moderately worried

H21 researchers reported that in their study across 10 countries that about climate change: respondent the researchers reported across 10 countries,

• 59% were very or extremely worried

• 84% were at least moderately worried

That is a remarkably steady statistic, surprisingly so given the very different geographic scales.

I suspect part of this stability comes from outsourcing survey delivery and data collection to third party marketing research consultants. It is as if, the survey is less about the perceptions of young people and more about the effectiveness of messaging specific group.

Avaaz material here here and here

Both articles are funded by the online activist network, Avaaz, that supports pursuit of climate litigation and runs an information policing program.

H21 explains that Avaaz’s role was paying market research consulting firm, Kantar which prides itself on maintaining an “unprecedented 4,800 attributes” on its panelists “so you know more about them before they answer a single question.”

L24 used Cint which advertises its ability to “match your research to the right people” and “measure the impact of your advertising and media, in real-time.”

L24 describe Cint’s role in the survey process:

Cint distributed the survey via their sample supplier panels. The sample suppliers are responsible for enrolling their own respondents and invite participants to partake in research opportunities through emails, push notifications, in-app pop-ups, offerwalls, publishing networks, social media, and other online communities.

All of these methods suggest Cint knows their participants well. Cint knows them so well, that out of nearly 16,000 surveys sent out only 5% of respondents chose not to participate once they learned it was about climate change.

To this point and despite the headlines, the researchers explain that “the non-probability sampling method limits generalisability of the findings.”

In other words, the survey was sent to a people with select characteristics. Those characteristics are not documented in the paper. But we might make some guesses such as, those who interact with specific influencers or have a tendency to doom scroll climate. Here are Cint’s tips for survey recruitment which gives a good idea of what may be going on.

Despite the authors’ warning the study was most certainly generalized to apply to American young people as a whole in media headlines.

Mother Jones

Moreover, the researchers warn that their work is not actually an attempt to say something about mental health:

Although the findings pertain to mental health and wellbeing, our aim was to describe a broad spectrum of emotional, perceptual, and behavioural responses to climate change rather than to assess for clinically relevant symptoms.

A central focus of these studies is not just how respondents feel about climate change, but what they think about government response to the subject and responsibility of industry.

I encourage you to take a look at the questions being asked of the participants. Questions like:

• In relation to climate change, do you believe that the US Government is lying about the effectiveness of the actions they're taking?

• How much, if at all, does climate change make you think, I don't want to participate in a social and economic system that harms the planet?

• How much, if at all, does climate change make you think, I question whether the work I put into my education will matter?

These are common fodder in online climate doom and talking points claiming youth mental health damage in climate litigation.

What I gather is that the study is actually measuring the effectiveness of different messages common in ‘climate crisis’ advocacy campaigns within a select population. Such a conclusion is consistent with other surveys of American young people finding they favor a diverse energy portfolio that also contains fossil fuels.

L24 takes an interest in the relationship between respondents’ self reported exposure to number of severe weather events over the past year, party identification, and level of endorsement of the different questions asked.

The graphs below show the modeled association between participants who self report exposure to severe weather events and Likert scale scoring responding to the statements on the y-axis.

The y axes represent Likert scale scores on a continuous scale; the full scale ranged from “not at all” (1) to “extremely” (5). Self-reported severe weather events were for the past year. Shaded regions represent 95% CIs. Note that scales on y axes differ between plots.

Let’s take the situation at face value without questioning how respondents may understand the meaning of ‘exposure’³ and ‘severe weather’⁴

The interest in examining the relationship between strength of endorsement of specific climate change messages and exposure to ‘severe weather’ assumes a connection between climate change and severe weather- or in the very least, a perceived connection.

The researchers provide a good example in their own writing of how weather extremes and disasters have wrongly become understood as a product of climate change:

A well established literature from countries around the world has described many adverse effects to mental health posed by climate change, including direct effects of weather-related disasters and extreme temperatures, and indirect effects associated with displacement, economic loss, and other environmental risks and changes

In this statement, disaster impacts on mental health are wholly and wrongly attributed to climate change, and in context of the work, all of climate change is directly linked to human actions.

This line of reasoning is inaccurate, but it is also woefully common because of advocacy from within science and news reporting.

In the above graphs, Democrats more than other political leanings more strongly associate together mental health impacts- ‘severe weather’- and climate change:

The greatest effect was observed for the model predicting the impact of climate change on self-reported mental health (β=0·14, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·18; p<0·0001).

Democrats and Republicans differed significantly in the reported effect of climate-related feelings on their daily functioning (β=0·34, 0·16 to 0·51; p=0·0001)

Careful observers report that over recent decades, Democrats and Republicans have switched places on the extent to which their views diverge from the IPCC. Democrats moved away from IPCC reporting to became apocalyptic and Republicans moved away from a repudiation to be in line with IPCC reporting.

This is ever more so since climate change activists have pushed forward a litigation industry that hangs its hat on a made-for-TV event attribution practice. Recently, the NYTimes ran the below headline

NYTimes

The article covers a ‘report’ by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an organization developed to create fodder for litigation. It’s co-founder, Friederike Otto, announces in the accompanying press release that,

If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue.

The statement is irresponsible and misconstrues a lot. Here I point out just two obvious issues.

1. Over half of the half a million people killed in disasters mentioned in the headline died in the 2011 Somali famine. Half of the 258,000 that perished were children under the age of 5. To be sure, drought was a factor in triggering famine but it was accompanied by a complex host of other factors not least of which included the region’s instability, “conflict, rapidly-rising global food prices, and other long-standing, structural factors.” Access to aid was limited by the Al-Shabaab.

2. Another ~28% or 138,366 of the half a million deaths in the headline is attributed to Cyclone Nargis (2008), a category 4 landfall in the the low lying delta region of the Ayeyarwady Division of Myanmar, one of the most populated state of the nation. Nargis had a 16 ft storm surge.

It is inaccurate and offensive that the NYTimes paraded the deaths from these events as caused by fossil fuels. Worse yet, the story plants a plug for Democrats in the election.

The NYTimes is proffering the types of advocacy messaging that survey respondents are endorsing coupled with their own emotional responses.

Thus, a more appropriate conclusion of these studies on climate anxiety is that contemporary climate change advocacy in science and media negatively impacts the well-being of a subset of young people, which is then exploited to pursue litigation.

That is messed up, y’all. Deeply messed up.

1. I wrote about the origins of this journal outlet here. Also, new to this year’s iteration of the study is the inclusion of an author that is also head of one of the Sunrise Movement chapters

2. L24 provides this circular and scientifically inaccurate definition of climate change to survey participants: “Climate change refers to the idea that the world’s average temperature has been increasing for the past 50 to 100 years and may increase more in the future, and that the world’s climate is changing as a result.”

3. There is good reason to question. For instance, 9% of respondents in the Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming cluster and 30% of California respondents reported being exposed to hurricanes and tropical storms. UPDATE 11/5: I forgot about Hurricane Hilary impacted Southern California in August 2023 which falls within the study period of L24.

4. The researchers to not define ‘severe weather.’ Extreme weather, on the other hand, has a specific definition. Here by the IPCC: “An event that is rare at a particular place and time of year. Definitions of ‘rare’ vary, but an extreme weather event would normally be as rare as, or rarer than, the 10th or 90th percentile of a probability density function estimated from observations. By definition, the characteristics of what is called extreme weather may vary from place to place in an absolute sense.”