Climate anxiety is not a real psychological construct

A psychometric model of dooming

I don’t want to get into my views of the reality and dangers of climate change: more on that in a later post. For now, I want to focus on the reality of climate anxiety as a psychological construct.

Climate anxiety is, as the NYT once put it, “a term that includes anger, worry and insecurity stemming from an awareness of a warming planet”. In other words, as strange as it may sound like, some people are stressed because of the weather in future. The terms appears to be gaining popularity (Google Trends data for the full data range):

This increase can mean two things:

1) people are starting to be genuinely more afraid of climate change, or

2) climate anxiety is increasingly part of the psychiatric symptom pool, in other words, the depressed or anxious people who always existed are increasingly shifting their worries from criminals, infections, social rejection, or the other things you can worry about to climate change. The general increase in negative affect in the West can amplify this effect by increasing the anxious/depressed population.

In line with this second possibility, lots of studies tend to find that climate anxiety is not specific but correlates with other psychiatric problems:

- Wullenkord et al 2021: r=0.25 with general anxiety and depressiveness, -0.1 with “relatedness satisfaction”, 0.27 with “relatedness frustration”, 0.29 with “competence frustration”

- Cosh et al 2024 (systematic review): r=0.17-0.7 with psychological distress, r=0.14-0.49 with depression, r=0.17-0.6 with clinical anxiety, r=0.22-0.46 with stress, r=0.17-0.3 with pathological worry

- Gago et al 2024 (meta-analysis): r=-0.296 with wellbeing

But these correlations are not nearly high enough to be able to say that being afraid of climate change is just a new way of being crazy. They are actually somewhat in line with a causal link even. “Depression” or “anxiety” is not the same as being afraid of climate change, but maybe one reason some people are more depressed or anxious is that they realize the looming climate catastrophe.

What bugs me about these studies is that even if people who are afraid of climate change are just crazy in a way, “depression” or “anxiety” doesn’t quite capture the expected nature of their craziness. Climate anxiety is a fear of a monumental negative change that affects all society, not just a feeling of personal inadequacy (anxiety), that the world is bad (depression), or that you are not feeling OK for whatever reason (wellbeing). To be able to say if it is a separate fear or just a general tendency for dooming about a future we would need a psychological test of dooming, not just a depression or anxiety inventory.

It is very important if climate anxiety is a separate fear or just dooming: this tells us how reasonable it is. A reasonable fear should be statistically independent from others. I’m pretty chill in general but I would be terrified in a Latin American prison: my fear would not be a reflection of my neuroticism, but my very rational evaluation of the dangers of being around hundreds of tattooed thugs. In the same vein, if a fear of climate change is well-founded, it should be roughly statistically independent of the fear of other catastrophic scenarios. If your evaluation of the facts drives you to be specifically afraid of climate change, it’s a genuine fear, even if you end up wrong. If, on the other hand, people who are afraid of climate change are also afraid of a Nazi takeover, epidemics, rogue AIs and nuclear war, this sounds more like a neurotic pathology. The world can only end in one way and very different roads lead to different catastrophes, so a rational doomer shouldn’t be equally afraid of all of them.

Fortunately, I could look at a large nationally representative dataset of Hungarians with excellent measures of dooming. Among other things, this dataset (N~7000, <10% missingness for any variable here) asks people to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 sixteen potential dangers facing the country. I omitted a redundant one („political radicals” and „radicals” were both on the list). As heterogeneous as these dangers are, ratings are strongly correlated with a mean value of close to 0.7:

Some people are just doomers. A single factor explains 70% of the total variance, already suggesting that being afraid of one particular abstract future danger is more indicative of someone’s character than a rational evaluation of threats. There are some patches of stronger correlations though. Some make sense (bankruptcy-unemployment, or pollution-habitat loss), but it’s curious to see that a fear of immigration and terrorism is somewhat antagonistic to a fear of climate change and pollution. My dataset doesn’t ask about political orientation but these sound like separate right-wing and left-wing worries.

A single-factor model has a borderline fit to the data (RMSEA=0.06, SRMR=0.055, CFI=0.99, TLI=0.99, using lavaan, the sem() function and a DWLS estimator as this is Likert data). This improves only a little (RMSEA=0.058, SRMR=0.052, others unchanged) if we allow two common-sense residual correlation between depopulation and aging and bankruptcy and unemployment. Little additional improvement (RMSEA=0.055, SRMR=0.049) is seen if pollution and habitat loss is allowed to correlate. There are nuances to individual fears, but it’s not a very bad model to say that climate anxiety is mostly just “being afraid of bad things in general”.

A more straightforward way to test whether climate anxiety is a separate construct is by modelling it as a separate factor. For this, I separated the four items about what I call “ecological anxiety” – climate change, natural catastrophes, pollution, and habitat loss – from the others (we can call those indicators of “dooming”) and modelled two latent variables which were allowed to correlate. This looks like this:

As you can see, “dooming” is modelled as one latent variable on which a fear of every non-ecological catastrophe loads, while “ecological anxiety” (ecR) contains a fear of climate change and its consequences. This model fits quite well (RMSEA=0.048, SRMR=0.043, CFI/TLI=0.99). The “Ecological anxiety” factor correlates at 0.89 with “Dooming”, showing that there is little evidence that when people say in a survey that they are afraid of the consequences of climate change, they are expressing a specific fear rather than general dooming about the future.

How is this “dooming” similar to other bad psychological issues like depression? The dataset has questionnaires about life satisfaction (WHO5), depression (BDI9) and stress (PSS10). A single-factor model fit the life satisfaction and depression questionnaires well, but the stress questionnaire is more complex, with at least two separate factors necessary, one for positively worded items (“I feel competent to solve my problems”) and one for the negatively worded ones (“I feel overwhelmed by stress”) which I called “competence” and “stress”. I put all of them in a single model to extract the latent correlations between the constructs each questionnaire measures. The model fits pretty well (RMSEA=0.039, SRMR=0.041, CFI=0.994, TLI=0.993). This is what the latent correlations look like:

“Life satisfaction, “depression” and “stress” seem to be somewhat iffy constructs, they are not measured in a pure way by these questionnaires, they have a lot of overlap. However, as in the previous literature ecological anxiety or general dooming about the future is NOT just these three things. The strongest correlation is with stress, but even that is rather weak. Statistically, climate anxiety is not the same as depression, general anxiety or stress. However, it is almost exactly the same as a fear of non-ecological catastrophes. People who have climate anxiety, at least in my dataset, are just doomers, not people who decided based on their best judgement that a fearsome climate disaster is coming.