The Climate Crisis That Never Comes—and the Fear It Fuels

For more than half a century, Americans have been warned that the end of the world is near. Yet the deadlines pass, the world keeps turning, and yesterday’s warnings morph into tomorrow’s threats. The climate crisis has long been cited as one such crisis that will end the world, and it has been packaged as an unavoidable apocalypse. An October 2024 AgWeb editorial describes this pattern as a “doomsday addiction”—the ritual of issuing dire, time-stamped predictions, watching nothing happen, and then simply resetting the clock. The point isn’t just raising awareness. It’s keeping fear alive because fear sells. And few institutions exploit the climate change doomsday addiction as much as America’s colleges and universities.

Scott Turner, a former biology professor and director of science programs at the National Association of Scholars, told Minding the Campus (MTC) that “Using moral panics to drive ‘science’ is nothing new.” 

“In the 1920s, it was eugenics, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was nuclear Armageddon, 40 years ago it was AIDS, and five years ago, it was COVID-19. In all cases, there’s not a lot of science, but there is a great deal of money and power at stake,” he said.

Belief in the climate crisis is widespread in academia. In 2022, the University of Florida’s Journal of Undergraduate Research published a study titled “University Faculty Perceptions of Climate Change in the U.S.” Surveying professors across multiple disciplines and institutions, it found that 74.3 percent were “Alarmed” about climate change, and another 14.2 percent were “Concerned.” In other words, nearly nine in ten faculty treat climate change as an urgent, real threat. By contrast, only 5.4 percent were “Cautious,” another 5.4 percent “Doubtful,” and just 0.7 percent “Dismissive.”

However, a scientific consensus is not the same as the truth, and history is replete with instances where widely held expert opinions have proven incorrect.

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In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the 1970s, warning that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supplies and claiming that 100–200 million people would starve each year over the next decade. In 1970, a Harvard biochemist told the New York Times that civilization could collapse within 15 to 30 years, and Earth Day organizers declared it “too late to avoid mass starvation,” predicting that gas masks would be necessary by 1985 to survive air pollution. 

A few years later, headlines warned of a coming ice age, from the Boston Globe’s “Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century” to TIME’s “Another Ice Age?” By 1979, the narrative had shifted: The New York Times warned that the Arctic might soon melt, and Al Gore famously declared it would be ice-free by 2016. Today, the United Nations warns of a “climate time-bomb,” calling for trillions in global spending. Time and again, apocalyptic predictions have stirred panic, yet they have failed to materialize. 

Even after decades of failed predictions, however, academics continue to buy into the climate doomsday narrative. A 2015 TIME article, for example, reported that concern over climate change extends well beyond so-called climate specialists. Researchers surveyed 2,000 faculty members from Big Ten universities across various fields, including biology, chemistry, and physics, and received 698 responses. About 94 percent believed global temperatures are rising, and roughly 92 percent agreed that human activity contributes to warming.

One reason for this widespread buy-in is likely the financial incentive. Explaining further, Turner told MTC, “Climate change has been a very profitable area of inquiry for scientists to pursue and affirm the interests of powerful donors (largely through government grants), as well as a very potent topic for the scientifically ignorant to whip students’ normal anxieties to sit up and pay attention.” He added, “Ginning up moral panics is a well-used tactic to do both, and climate change doom-mongering is a classic example of this.”

Spending on so-called climate research has also been highly dubious. 

In October 2024, Oxfam—a self-described “global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice”—released a report on its audit of the World Bank’s climate finance, finding that as much as $41 billion of the Bank’s self-reported climate finance from 2017 to 2023 could not be verified. In Climate Finance Unchecked, Oxfam documented that the Bank routinely classified entire loans as climate finance at the approval stage, without confirming how much was actually spent on climate-related outcomes. This suggests that many loans may have supported projects with little connection to emissions reduction or climate adaptation.

In response to Oxfam’s report, the World Bank insisted that its accounting was sound. “Any claims of missing or unaccounted money are simply false … The Bank accounts for every dollar budgeted across all its operations, and its lending benefits from strict oversight. Bank financials are independently audited annually and are available publicly,” the Bank stated in March 2025.

However, the Bank’s assurance is difficult to take at face value. Two years before its Unchecked report, Oxfam had identified similar auditing problems with the Bank’s climate financing. Its October 2022 report, Unaccountable Accounting, detailed these issues in the briefing section, which is worth quoting in full:

Despite being the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, the World Bank supplies very little evidence to support its claims about the amount of climate finance it provides. Oxfam has attempted to recreate the Bank’s reported climate finance figures using public information for projects in the Bank’s FY2020.

Oxfam found that the Bank’s current climate finance reporting processes are such that its claimed levels of climate finance cannot be independently verified and could be off by as much as $7bn, or 40%.

Without better disclosure practices, the World Bank is asking us to take much on faith. Climate finance funding is too important for us to do that. The World Bank must be more transparent in its reporting so that it can be held to account.

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The persistent lack of transparency and the incentives tied to climate finance help explain why the “doomsday” narrative continues to thrive in academic and institutional settings—espcially governmental ones. Scientifically dubious claims, coupled with financial and reputational incentives, create fertile ground for alarmism to spread. 

As Turner concluded, “Scientifically, there’s no basis for the panic, but it’s effective and profitable, so it goes on, even though it induces something akin to an anxiety disorder in an entire generation.” And he is right about anxiety: Across the country, hundreds of colleges and universities now offer climate anxiety programs, therapy groups, research projects, and “coping” workshops designed to help students deal with fear of environmental collapse.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Psychiatry surveyed nearly 800 young adults and found significant levels of climate-related anxiety, especially among graduate and university students, who reported the highest affective symptoms. For younger generations, this fear is constant; they have never lived through a time when the world wasn’t said to be on the brink of catastrophe, nor have they witnessed the spectacle of so-called experts being proven spectacularly wrong, as previous generations did. They weren’t alive for the global cooling scares of the 1970s, the ice-free Arctic predictions of the early 2000s, or the repeated ‘12 years left’ warnings of recent years. Each generation inherits the crisis as if it were entirely new.

It is time to step back from this cycle of alarm. These repeated predictions, none of which have come true, have done little more than stoke anxiety and undermine trust in academic institutions, the scientists who work within them, and our governmental institutions as a whole. Rather than perpetuating fear, universities, media, and policymakers should focus on honest, evidence-based discussion—acknowledging uncertainty, promoting critical thinking, and avoiding the moral panic that has defined climate discourse for decades.

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