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Four Profiles Defining Teen Response to Climate Distress
Understanding adolescent coping is key to supporting well-being and resilience.
Climate change is a (if not the) signature threat of our time, along with AI, overpopulation, and several others [1]-both materially and existentially. Hardly a day goes by during which we do not read about an unprecedented weather crisis. It’s not unusual to notice oddities in the weather, compared to what we remember (for those of us old enough to recall “normal winters”).
Moreover, so many of us have been directly affected [2], by power outages, flooding, unprecedented heat, and an array of other “extreme weather events”. Our vocabulary has likewise expanded to include terms like “atmospheric river”, conjuring vague images of dangerous aqueous reservoirs winding their way through the skies like celestial dragons.
Climate change, including extreme heat, pollution, and other factors, is also associated with increased mental and physical health problems, and increased mortality, not to mention human displacement, mass extinction, and the inadvertent resculpting of geography itself, as ice melts, waters rise, and shorelines recede.
