The increase in CO2 is a GOOD thing! WTH is wrong with people who believe it's a crisis? It's been way higher 1000's of years ago & we weren't around!! Stupid is as stupid does!! It's all about control & nothing to do with climate.CO2 in atmosphere up by record amount in 2024: UN
The World Meteorological Organization said levels from 2023 to 2024 marked the biggest one-year jump since records began in 1957
Author of the article:AFP
AFP
Published Oct 15, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 2 minute read
The jump in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year is the highest ever recorded, according to the UN.
The jump in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year is the highest ever recorded, according to the UN.
GENEVA — The increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year was the highest ever recorded, the United Nations said Wednesday, calling for urgent action to slash emissions.
Levels of the three main greenhouse gases — the climate-warming CO2, methane and nitrous oxide — all increased yet again in 2024, with each setting new record highs, the UN’s weather and climate agency said.
The World Meteorological Organization said the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere from 2023 to 2024 marked the biggest one-year jump since records began in 1957.
Wednesday’s report, which comes ahead of the November 10-21 COP30 UN climate summit in Belem, Brazil, focused exclusively on concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
A separate UN report, out next month, will detail shifts in emissions of the gases, but those numbers are also expected to rise, as they have every year with the world continuing to burn more oil, gas and coal.
This defies commitments made under the 2015 Paris Agreement to cap global warming at “well below” 2C above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900 — and 1.5C if possible.
The WMO voiced “significant concern” that land and oceans were becoming unable to soak up CO2, leaving the powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett.
“Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”
Last year was also the warmest year ever recorded, beating the previous high in 2023, the WMO recalled.
“The levels of the three most abundant long-lived greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — reached new records in 2024,” the WMO said in its 21st annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
In 2024, CO2 concentrations were at 424 parts per million (ppm), methane at 1,942 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide at 338 parts per billion.
That marks hikes of 152 percent, 266 percent and 125 percent respectively since pre-industrial levels before 1750.
Of the three major greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for about 66 percent of the warming effect on the climate.
When the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin was first published in 2004, the figure stood at 377 ppm.
The 3.5 ppm increase from 2023 to 2024 was “the largest one-year increase since modern measurements began in 1957”, the WMO said.
CO2 in atmosphere up by record amount in 2024: UN
The increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere from 2023 to 2024 marked the biggest one-year jump since records began in 1957.torontosun.com
It's Climate Change I tell'ya!! IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE!!
- Thread starter B00Mer
- Start date
Or millions of years ago, etc…& I bet you most people would be absolutely shocked to find out in comparison to the panic, what level of CO2 in Ppm greenhouses pump things up to in order to make plants happy.
Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Oct 21, 2025 • 6 minute read
David Toro was taken aback by the turnout at a climate change anxiety peer-support group.
After all, his feelings of dread and powerlessness when he thought about climate change could be isolating. There were like-minded people in his environmental studies program at Concordia University who shared his concerns, but he at times struggled with how to process those emotions.
Initially sparked by documentaries he saw during his childhood in Colombia, those emotions persisted as he watched the evidence on climate change mount and ecosystems careen toward — and even pass — critical tipping points, from coral reefs dying off to the Amazon rainforest drying up. He’d wonder: did other people care?
So, in late 2023 at Concordia, when Toro walked into that peer-support group meeting, he was surprised. People were pulling up extra chairs to make room for the roughly 20 people piling into the room.
“Finding this group has really helped me because it’s given me a community and outlet to handle these emotions and process them with other people who are feeling similar feelings without disengaging and without disconnecting,” he said.
Estimates of how widespread climate change anxiety feelings are in Canada have been hard to come by, but several new studies are helping to shed light on the issue.
A national survey published Tuesday estimates about 2.3 per cent of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety. Applied across the population, that translates to more than 700,000 people.
It’s believed to be the first population-representative, random-sample survey of severe climate change anxiety in Canada.
The survey found that climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes.
Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent, said the study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health.
That number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous worldviews, the authors said.
Using the same survey data, the researchers published results in July showing most young people aged 13 to 34 felt at least mild levels of worry (95 per cent) and hopelessness (88 per cent) about climate change.
A separate peer-reviewed survey, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.
“I think we need to keep monitoring and understanding what that feels like for young people because they’re coming into it from a unique perspective,” said co-author of last month’s study, Gina Martin, an associate professor at Athabasca University and adjunct professor at Western University.
“This generation of young people is the first generation that’s living completely under the shadow of climate change.”
Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, whether it be worsening air quality from more intense wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.
Yet, the mental health impacts of climate change may be underestimated in Canada, a 2022 report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada said. That could leave public health understaffed and unprepared to handle the issue, the report said.
Feeling a bit anxious or worried about climate change is a normal, and possibly even healthy response to the scale of the crisis, says co-author of Tuesday’s study Sherilee Harper, an expert in climate change in mental health at the University of Alberta. Yet, for some people, those feelings can become more severe or persistent, disrupting their daily life and mirroring symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, such as obsessive thinking, dread, the inability to concentrate and nightmares.
To find out how prevalent that severe climate anxiety is in Canada, Harper and the team behind Tuesday’s study surveyed 2,476 people from across the country. Respondents were asked a series of questions adapted from a climate anxiety scale widely used among other academics studying the issue. Those questions included how often thoughts of climate change may disrupt the person’s sleep or concentration, how often they question why they react the way they do to climate change and how often their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life.
A person’s symptoms were said to be clinically meaningful if, on average, their anxiety-related thoughts or feelings about climate change disrupted their routine and daily life at least sometimes, rather than rarely or never.
While 2.3 per cent of respondents had that more severe manifestation of climate anxiety, about 15 per cent reported at least one symptom, says the study co-authored by researchers at the University of Alberta and Acadia University.
Climate change anxiety appeared to be less common in Canada than in some other countries, the authors said, while also underlining several challenges with comparing studies. Other studies found the prevalence to be about 9.4 per cent in Australia, 3.6 per cent in the United Kingdom and 11.6 per cent among French-speaking European and African nations, the authors said.
One of the challenges in comparing the studies gets at a deeper question: at what point do concerns about climate change tip into something that could be described as climate change anxiety?
The authors noted recent research in Australia suggests the cut point commonly used on the climate change anxiety scale employed in Tuesday’s study might too high, with “clinical distress” taking place at lower levels than previously thought. The study may be underestimating the prevalence and severity of clinically relevant climate change anxiety in Canada, the authors wrote.
The results, says Harper, suggest there is a greater need in Canada for programs that integrate mental health and climate change adaptation. Supports should be increased for people who have been impacted by “climate disasters” such as wildfires or extreme heat waves, she said. It also means investing resources where they’re needed most, such as Indigenous and northern communities where climate anxiety is most common.
Meanwhile, the authors of the teen mental health study took a different approach. The survey asked more than 800 Canadians between ages 13 and 18 whether they thought climate change is impacting their mental health. Of those who said yes, about a quarter said their mental health was impacted “a lot,” and the others reported “a little.”
The teens, whose responses were anonymous, could then answer an open-ended question describing those impacts. Some talked about feeling uncertain about the future and their concerns about becoming parents as environmental conditions worsen. Others talked about how they felt anxious when they thought about wildfire season or saddened by the inaction of people with influence.
An 18-year-old girl from New Brunswick is quoted as saying it made her sad to know that “big corporations that produce loads of carbon dioxide would rather have a lot of money than a healthy planet.”
Researchers have underlined how community spaces that foster a sense of emotional resilience have been shown to be beneficial for people feeling anxious about climate change. It’s something David Toro has seen firsthand.
Toro has since graduated from Concordia, and in a way, so too has his eco-anxiety group. The facilitators, noticing how many participants were starting to attend from outside the university population, have refashioned themselves as a community group and are working to register as a non-profit called Climate Hearth, he said.
The peer support sessions are broadly structured around the rest, recovery and resistance framework designed by youth climate organizers with the non-profit Shake Up the Establishment, Toro said. The idea is to bring rest and recovery into people’s activism to ensure they don’t burn out and disengage.
After attending as a participant for more than a year, Toro is now co-facilitating their new French language support group. The group’s offerings have also expanded to include multi-way workshops.
“It’s reinforced the idea that there’s an appetite for this,” he said.
“It reminds me that not only are we not alone but there’s a need, I think, on our society to deal with these kinds of feelings and do something more productive with them.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Oct 21, 2025 • 6 minute read
David Toro was taken aback by the turnout at a climate change anxiety peer-support group.
After all, his feelings of dread and powerlessness when he thought about climate change could be isolating. There were like-minded people in his environmental studies program at Concordia University who shared his concerns, but he at times struggled with how to process those emotions.
Initially sparked by documentaries he saw during his childhood in Colombia, those emotions persisted as he watched the evidence on climate change mount and ecosystems careen toward — and even pass — critical tipping points, from coral reefs dying off to the Amazon rainforest drying up. He’d wonder: did other people care?
So, in late 2023 at Concordia, when Toro walked into that peer-support group meeting, he was surprised. People were pulling up extra chairs to make room for the roughly 20 people piling into the room.
“Finding this group has really helped me because it’s given me a community and outlet to handle these emotions and process them with other people who are feeling similar feelings without disengaging and without disconnecting,” he said.
Estimates of how widespread climate change anxiety feelings are in Canada have been hard to come by, but several new studies are helping to shed light on the issue.
A national survey published Tuesday estimates about 2.3 per cent of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety. Applied across the population, that translates to more than 700,000 people.
It’s believed to be the first population-representative, random-sample survey of severe climate change anxiety in Canada.
The survey found that climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes.
Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent, said the study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health.
That number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous worldviews, the authors said.
Using the same survey data, the researchers published results in July showing most young people aged 13 to 34 felt at least mild levels of worry (95 per cent) and hopelessness (88 per cent) about climate change.
A separate peer-reviewed survey, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.
“I think we need to keep monitoring and understanding what that feels like for young people because they’re coming into it from a unique perspective,” said co-author of last month’s study, Gina Martin, an associate professor at Athabasca University and adjunct professor at Western University.
“This generation of young people is the first generation that’s living completely under the shadow of climate change.”
Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, whether it be worsening air quality from more intense wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.
Yet, the mental health impacts of climate change may be underestimated in Canada, a 2022 report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada said. That could leave public health understaffed and unprepared to handle the issue, the report said.
Feeling a bit anxious or worried about climate change is a normal, and possibly even healthy response to the scale of the crisis, says co-author of Tuesday’s study Sherilee Harper, an expert in climate change in mental health at the University of Alberta. Yet, for some people, those feelings can become more severe or persistent, disrupting their daily life and mirroring symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, such as obsessive thinking, dread, the inability to concentrate and nightmares.
To find out how prevalent that severe climate anxiety is in Canada, Harper and the team behind Tuesday’s study surveyed 2,476 people from across the country. Respondents were asked a series of questions adapted from a climate anxiety scale widely used among other academics studying the issue. Those questions included how often thoughts of climate change may disrupt the person’s sleep or concentration, how often they question why they react the way they do to climate change and how often their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life.
A person’s symptoms were said to be clinically meaningful if, on average, their anxiety-related thoughts or feelings about climate change disrupted their routine and daily life at least sometimes, rather than rarely or never.
While 2.3 per cent of respondents had that more severe manifestation of climate anxiety, about 15 per cent reported at least one symptom, says the study co-authored by researchers at the University of Alberta and Acadia University.
Climate change anxiety appeared to be less common in Canada than in some other countries, the authors said, while also underlining several challenges with comparing studies. Other studies found the prevalence to be about 9.4 per cent in Australia, 3.6 per cent in the United Kingdom and 11.6 per cent among French-speaking European and African nations, the authors said.
One of the challenges in comparing the studies gets at a deeper question: at what point do concerns about climate change tip into something that could be described as climate change anxiety?
The authors noted recent research in Australia suggests the cut point commonly used on the climate change anxiety scale employed in Tuesday’s study might too high, with “clinical distress” taking place at lower levels than previously thought. The study may be underestimating the prevalence and severity of clinically relevant climate change anxiety in Canada, the authors wrote.
The results, says Harper, suggest there is a greater need in Canada for programs that integrate mental health and climate change adaptation. Supports should be increased for people who have been impacted by “climate disasters” such as wildfires or extreme heat waves, she said. It also means investing resources where they’re needed most, such as Indigenous and northern communities where climate anxiety is most common.
Meanwhile, the authors of the teen mental health study took a different approach. The survey asked more than 800 Canadians between ages 13 and 18 whether they thought climate change is impacting their mental health. Of those who said yes, about a quarter said their mental health was impacted “a lot,” and the others reported “a little.”
The teens, whose responses were anonymous, could then answer an open-ended question describing those impacts. Some talked about feeling uncertain about the future and their concerns about becoming parents as environmental conditions worsen. Others talked about how they felt anxious when they thought about wildfire season or saddened by the inaction of people with influence.
An 18-year-old girl from New Brunswick is quoted as saying it made her sad to know that “big corporations that produce loads of carbon dioxide would rather have a lot of money than a healthy planet.”
Researchers have underlined how community spaces that foster a sense of emotional resilience have been shown to be beneficial for people feeling anxious about climate change. It’s something David Toro has seen firsthand.
Toro has since graduated from Concordia, and in a way, so too has his eco-anxiety group. The facilitators, noticing how many participants were starting to attend from outside the university population, have refashioned themselves as a community group and are working to register as a non-profit called Climate Hearth, he said.
The peer support sessions are broadly structured around the rest, recovery and resistance framework designed by youth climate organizers with the non-profit Shake Up the Establishment, Toro said. The idea is to bring rest and recovery into people’s activism to ensure they don’t burn out and disengage.
After attending as a participant for more than a year, Toro is now co-facilitating their new French language support group. The group’s offerings have also expanded to include multi-way workshops.
“It’s reinforced the idea that there’s an appetite for this,” he said.
“It reminds me that not only are we not alone but there’s a need, I think, on our society to deal with these kinds of feelings and do something more productive with them.”
Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
A national survey estimates about 2.3% of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety.
What alchemical concoction do we need to burn to make it spring again?Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Oct 21, 2025 • 6 minute read
David Toro was taken aback by the turnout at a climate change anxiety peer-support group.
After all, his feelings of dread and powerlessness when he thought about climate change could be isolating. There were like-minded people in his environmental studies program at Concordia University who shared his concerns, but he at times struggled with how to process those emotions.
Initially sparked by documentaries he saw during his childhood in Colombia, those emotions persisted as he watched the evidence on climate change mount and ecosystems careen toward — and even pass — critical tipping points, from coral reefs dying off to the Amazon rainforest drying up. He’d wonder: did other people care?
So, in late 2023 at Concordia, when Toro walked into that peer-support group meeting, he was surprised. People were pulling up extra chairs to make room for the roughly 20 people piling into the room.
“Finding this group has really helped me because it’s given me a community and outlet to handle these emotions and process them with other people who are feeling similar feelings without disengaging and without disconnecting,” he said.
Estimates of how widespread climate change anxiety feelings are in Canada have been hard to come by, but several new studies are helping to shed light on the issue.
A national survey published Tuesday estimates about 2.3 per cent of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety. Applied across the population, that translates to more than 700,000 people.
It’s believed to be the first population-representative, random-sample survey of severe climate change anxiety in Canada.
The survey found that climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes.
Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent, said the study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health.
That number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous worldviews, the authors said.
Using the same survey data, the researchers published results in July showing most young people aged 13 to 34 felt at least mild levels of worry (95 per cent) and hopelessness (88 per cent) about climate change.
A separate peer-reviewed survey, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.
“I think we need to keep monitoring and understanding what that feels like for young people because they’re coming into it from a unique perspective,” said co-author of last month’s study, Gina Martin, an associate professor at Athabasca University and adjunct professor at Western University.
“This generation of young people is the first generation that’s living completely under the shadow of climate change.”
Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, whether it be worsening air quality from more intense wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.
Yet, the mental health impacts of climate change may be underestimated in Canada, a 2022 report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada said. That could leave public health understaffed and unprepared to handle the issue, the report said.
Feeling a bit anxious or worried about climate change is a normal, and possibly even healthy response to the scale of the crisis, says co-author of Tuesday’s study Sherilee Harper, an expert in climate change in mental health at the University of Alberta. Yet, for some people, those feelings can become more severe or persistent, disrupting their daily life and mirroring symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, such as obsessive thinking, dread, the inability to concentrate and nightmares.
To find out how prevalent that severe climate anxiety is in Canada, Harper and the team behind Tuesday’s study surveyed 2,476 people from across the country. Respondents were asked a series of questions adapted from a climate anxiety scale widely used among other academics studying the issue. Those questions included how often thoughts of climate change may disrupt the person’s sleep or concentration, how often they question why they react the way they do to climate change and how often their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life.
A person’s symptoms were said to be clinically meaningful if, on average, their anxiety-related thoughts or feelings about climate change disrupted their routine and daily life at least sometimes, rather than rarely or never.
While 2.3 per cent of respondents had that more severe manifestation of climate anxiety, about 15 per cent reported at least one symptom, says the study co-authored by researchers at the University of Alberta and Acadia University.
Climate change anxiety appeared to be less common in Canada than in some other countries, the authors said, while also underlining several challenges with comparing studies. Other studies found the prevalence to be about 9.4 per cent in Australia, 3.6 per cent in the United Kingdom and 11.6 per cent among French-speaking European and African nations, the authors said.
One of the challenges in comparing the studies gets at a deeper question: at what point do concerns about climate change tip into something that could be described as climate change anxiety?
The authors noted recent research in Australia suggests the cut point commonly used on the climate change anxiety scale employed in Tuesday’s study might too high, with “clinical distress” taking place at lower levels than previously thought. The study may be underestimating the prevalence and severity of clinically relevant climate change anxiety in Canada, the authors wrote.
The results, says Harper, suggest there is a greater need in Canada for programs that integrate mental health and climate change adaptation. Supports should be increased for people who have been impacted by “climate disasters” such as wildfires or extreme heat waves, she said. It also means investing resources where they’re needed most, such as Indigenous and northern communities where climate anxiety is most common.
Meanwhile, the authors of the teen mental health study took a different approach. The survey asked more than 800 Canadians between ages 13 and 18 whether they thought climate change is impacting their mental health. Of those who said yes, about a quarter said their mental health was impacted “a lot,” and the others reported “a little.”
The teens, whose responses were anonymous, could then answer an open-ended question describing those impacts. Some talked about feeling uncertain about the future and their concerns about becoming parents as environmental conditions worsen. Others talked about how they felt anxious when they thought about wildfire season or saddened by the inaction of people with influence.
An 18-year-old girl from New Brunswick is quoted as saying it made her sad to know that “big corporations that produce loads of carbon dioxide would rather have a lot of money than a healthy planet.”
Researchers have underlined how community spaces that foster a sense of emotional resilience have been shown to be beneficial for people feeling anxious about climate change. It’s something David Toro has seen firsthand.
Toro has since graduated from Concordia, and in a way, so too has his eco-anxiety group. The facilitators, noticing how many participants were starting to attend from outside the university population, have refashioned themselves as a community group and are working to register as a non-profit called Climate Hearth, he said.
The peer support sessions are broadly structured around the rest, recovery and resistance framework designed by youth climate organizers with the non-profit Shake Up the Establishment, Toro said. The idea is to bring rest and recovery into people’s activism to ensure they don’t burn out and disengage.
After attending as a participant for more than a year, Toro is now co-facilitating their new French language support group. The group’s offerings have also expanded to include multi-way workshops.
“It’s reinforced the idea that there’s an appetite for this,” he said.
“It reminds me that not only are we not alone but there’s a need, I think, on our society to deal with these kinds of feelings and do something more productive with them.”
Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
A national survey estimates about 2.3% of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety.
I hope they all move there......
www.bbc.com
Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time after record heat
Previously the country was one of the world's only mosquito-free zones.
www.bbc.com
Its not climate change. There are skeeters far far further north here in Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland and Norway. There is no skeeter free latitude line in the permafrost.I hope they all move there......
Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time after record heat
Previously the country was one of the world's only mosquito-free zones.
There's a skeeter on my Peter whack it off
There's a skeeter on my Peter whack it off
There's a dozen on my cousin he's a whackin' they're a buzzin'
There's a skeeter on my Peter whack it off
Mental Health issues are exploding & it doesn't look like there's any help for it. Sad really because these people couldn't be bothered to a) get help or b) do their research to find out that it's a hoax. But I guess it is what it is.Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Oct 21, 2025 • 6 minute read
David Toro was taken aback by the turnout at a climate change anxiety peer-support group.
After all, his feelings of dread and powerlessness when he thought about climate change could be isolating. There were like-minded people in his environmental studies program at Concordia University who shared his concerns, but he at times struggled with how to process those emotions.
Initially sparked by documentaries he saw during his childhood in Colombia, those emotions persisted as he watched the evidence on climate change mount and ecosystems careen toward — and even pass — critical tipping points, from coral reefs dying off to the Amazon rainforest drying up. He’d wonder: did other people care?
So, in late 2023 at Concordia, when Toro walked into that peer-support group meeting, he was surprised. People were pulling up extra chairs to make room for the roughly 20 people piling into the room.
“Finding this group has really helped me because it’s given me a community and outlet to handle these emotions and process them with other people who are feeling similar feelings without disengaging and without disconnecting,” he said.
Estimates of how widespread climate change anxiety feelings are in Canada have been hard to come by, but several new studies are helping to shed light on the issue.
A national survey published Tuesday estimates about 2.3 per cent of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety. Applied across the population, that translates to more than 700,000 people.
It’s believed to be the first population-representative, random-sample survey of severe climate change anxiety in Canada.
The survey found that climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes.
Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent, said the study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health.
That number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous worldviews, the authors said.
Using the same survey data, the researchers published results in July showing most young people aged 13 to 34 felt at least mild levels of worry (95 per cent) and hopelessness (88 per cent) about climate change.
A separate peer-reviewed survey, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.
“I think we need to keep monitoring and understanding what that feels like for young people because they’re coming into it from a unique perspective,” said co-author of last month’s study, Gina Martin, an associate professor at Athabasca University and adjunct professor at Western University.
“This generation of young people is the first generation that’s living completely under the shadow of climate change.”
Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, whether it be worsening air quality from more intense wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.
Yet, the mental health impacts of climate change may be underestimated in Canada, a 2022 report prepared for the Public Health Agency of Canada said. That could leave public health understaffed and unprepared to handle the issue, the report said.
Feeling a bit anxious or worried about climate change is a normal, and possibly even healthy response to the scale of the crisis, says co-author of Tuesday’s study Sherilee Harper, an expert in climate change in mental health at the University of Alberta. Yet, for some people, those feelings can become more severe or persistent, disrupting their daily life and mirroring symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, such as obsessive thinking, dread, the inability to concentrate and nightmares.
To find out how prevalent that severe climate anxiety is in Canada, Harper and the team behind Tuesday’s study surveyed 2,476 people from across the country. Respondents were asked a series of questions adapted from a climate anxiety scale widely used among other academics studying the issue. Those questions included how often thoughts of climate change may disrupt the person’s sleep or concentration, how often they question why they react the way they do to climate change and how often their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily life.
A person’s symptoms were said to be clinically meaningful if, on average, their anxiety-related thoughts or feelings about climate change disrupted their routine and daily life at least sometimes, rather than rarely or never.
While 2.3 per cent of respondents had that more severe manifestation of climate anxiety, about 15 per cent reported at least one symptom, says the study co-authored by researchers at the University of Alberta and Acadia University.
Climate change anxiety appeared to be less common in Canada than in some other countries, the authors said, while also underlining several challenges with comparing studies. Other studies found the prevalence to be about 9.4 per cent in Australia, 3.6 per cent in the United Kingdom and 11.6 per cent among French-speaking European and African nations, the authors said.
One of the challenges in comparing the studies gets at a deeper question: at what point do concerns about climate change tip into something that could be described as climate change anxiety?
The authors noted recent research in Australia suggests the cut point commonly used on the climate change anxiety scale employed in Tuesday’s study might too high, with “clinical distress” taking place at lower levels than previously thought. The study may be underestimating the prevalence and severity of clinically relevant climate change anxiety in Canada, the authors wrote.
The results, says Harper, suggest there is a greater need in Canada for programs that integrate mental health and climate change adaptation. Supports should be increased for people who have been impacted by “climate disasters” such as wildfires or extreme heat waves, she said. It also means investing resources where they’re needed most, such as Indigenous and northern communities where climate anxiety is most common.
Meanwhile, the authors of the teen mental health study took a different approach. The survey asked more than 800 Canadians between ages 13 and 18 whether they thought climate change is impacting their mental health. Of those who said yes, about a quarter said their mental health was impacted “a lot,” and the others reported “a little.”
The teens, whose responses were anonymous, could then answer an open-ended question describing those impacts. Some talked about feeling uncertain about the future and their concerns about becoming parents as environmental conditions worsen. Others talked about how they felt anxious when they thought about wildfire season or saddened by the inaction of people with influence.
An 18-year-old girl from New Brunswick is quoted as saying it made her sad to know that “big corporations that produce loads of carbon dioxide would rather have a lot of money than a healthy planet.”
Researchers have underlined how community spaces that foster a sense of emotional resilience have been shown to be beneficial for people feeling anxious about climate change. It’s something David Toro has seen firsthand.
Toro has since graduated from Concordia, and in a way, so too has his eco-anxiety group. The facilitators, noticing how many participants were starting to attend from outside the university population, have refashioned themselves as a community group and are working to register as a non-profit called Climate Hearth, he said.
The peer support sessions are broadly structured around the rest, recovery and resistance framework designed by youth climate organizers with the non-profit Shake Up the Establishment, Toro said. The idea is to bring rest and recovery into people’s activism to ensure they don’t burn out and disengage.
After attending as a participant for more than a year, Toro is now co-facilitating their new French language support group. The group’s offerings have also expanded to include multi-way workshops.
“It’s reinforced the idea that there’s an appetite for this,” he said.
“It reminds me that not only are we not alone but there’s a need, I think, on our society to deal with these kinds of feelings and do something more productive with them.”
Study offers glimpse of severe climate change anxiety in Canada
A national survey estimates about 2.3% of people over age 13 in Canada experience clinically relevant climate change anxiety.
Suicide spikes among allergy sufferers of pesky pollen: Study
Author of the article
enette Wilford
Published Oct 26, 2025 • Last updated 5 hours ago • 2 minute read
Seasonal allergies are the worst.
Pollen. Just the word for allergy sufferers may spark a tickle in the nose, a tear in the eye, maybe even the start of a bumpy hive.
And while seasonal allergies may make a person feel angry at the outside world, researchers suggested that the allergies may increase the risk of suicide among sufferers.
A new study published in the Journal of Health Economics found that these deaths tend to spike on certain days — specifically, at times when the pollen outlook is moderate or worse.
The researchers our of Wayne State University analyzed more than a decade’s worth of daily pollen counts and suicide data from 34 U.S. metro areas, spanning from 2006 to 2018.
They found that suicide deaths rose by 5.5% on days with moderate pollen levels compared to days with low to no pollen.
“At the highest pollen levels, we observed up to a 7.4% increase in suicides,” Shooshan Danagoulian, lead author of the study, said in a press release.
She noted: “What’s particularly concerning is that individuals with a known mental health condition or treatment history had an even greater increase — 8.6% — on high-pollen days.”
Itchy eyes and runny noses may seem like minor inconveniences but given how that can affect sleep, strain concentration and make an individual feel generally miserable and moody are all known risk factors for suicide.
The research team also analyzed Google Trends data, where they noted spikes in searches for allergy symptoms and depressive thoughts on high-pollen days.
The evidence backed up the idea that aside from allergies impacting physical health, they can also pile on to those already struggling with their mental well-being.
The scientists also looked at how the climate change is intensifying and drawing out pollen seasons, meaning that what is now seasonal could develop into a year-round risk, even estimating that by the end of the century, the number of suicides linked to pollen could more than double.
“This is an overlooked cost of climate change,” Danagoulian explained.
“We often focus on environmental damages, but here we see clear evidence that climate change may also worsen mental health outcomes in ways that haven’t been fully considered.”
She acknowledge that the risks are preventable, and seasonal allergies can easily be treated with safe, inexpensive and widely available options such as antihistamines, nasal sprays and allergy testing.
“Small, accessible health interventions could have lifesaving impacts,” Danagoulian said.
“If managing allergies helps reduce suicide risk even slightly, it represents a meaningful step in addressing one of the most pressing public health crises of our time.”
today.wayne.edu
torontosun.com
Author of the article
enette WilfordPublished Oct 26, 2025 • Last updated 5 hours ago • 2 minute read
Seasonal allergies are the worst.
Pollen. Just the word for allergy sufferers may spark a tickle in the nose, a tear in the eye, maybe even the start of a bumpy hive.
And while seasonal allergies may make a person feel angry at the outside world, researchers suggested that the allergies may increase the risk of suicide among sufferers.
A new study published in the Journal of Health Economics found that these deaths tend to spike on certain days — specifically, at times when the pollen outlook is moderate or worse.
The researchers our of Wayne State University analyzed more than a decade’s worth of daily pollen counts and suicide data from 34 U.S. metro areas, spanning from 2006 to 2018.
They found that suicide deaths rose by 5.5% on days with moderate pollen levels compared to days with low to no pollen.
“At the highest pollen levels, we observed up to a 7.4% increase in suicides,” Shooshan Danagoulian, lead author of the study, said in a press release.
She noted: “What’s particularly concerning is that individuals with a known mental health condition or treatment history had an even greater increase — 8.6% — on high-pollen days.”
Itchy eyes and runny noses may seem like minor inconveniences but given how that can affect sleep, strain concentration and make an individual feel generally miserable and moody are all known risk factors for suicide.
The research team also analyzed Google Trends data, where they noted spikes in searches for allergy symptoms and depressive thoughts on high-pollen days.
The evidence backed up the idea that aside from allergies impacting physical health, they can also pile on to those already struggling with their mental well-being.
The scientists also looked at how the climate change is intensifying and drawing out pollen seasons, meaning that what is now seasonal could develop into a year-round risk, even estimating that by the end of the century, the number of suicides linked to pollen could more than double.
“This is an overlooked cost of climate change,” Danagoulian explained.
“We often focus on environmental damages, but here we see clear evidence that climate change may also worsen mental health outcomes in ways that haven’t been fully considered.”
She acknowledge that the risks are preventable, and seasonal allergies can easily be treated with safe, inexpensive and widely available options such as antihistamines, nasal sprays and allergy testing.
“Small, accessible health interventions could have lifesaving impacts,” Danagoulian said.
“If managing allergies helps reduce suicide risk even slightly, it represents a meaningful step in addressing one of the most pressing public health crises of our time.”
Wayne State research reveals link between seasonal allergies and suicide risk
Wayne State University researchers have uncovered a striking new connection between seasonal allergies and mental health: spikes in pollen can increase the risk
Suicide spikes among allergy sufferers of pesky pollen: Study
Researchers suggested that seasonal allergies may increase the risk of suicide among sufferers.
OMG, I've known lots of people with allergies & NONE have been suicidal!! Any that are, the allergies aren't the issue. Just sayin
