Until recently, climate change was a phenomenon debated by scientists, policymakers, and Greenpeace crusties. But doomsday prophets pushing climate fear into the mainstream have anxious liberals running for professional help.

As activist groups around the world prepare to stage a global ‘climate strike’ on Friday, eco-warriors in Washington DC have been staging smaller rallies and outreach events all summer. Behind the drum circles, yoga classes and hacky-sacking that accompanied such events, a cauldron of anxiety bubbled.

According to the Daily Beast, millennial activists – though striving for the same goals as concerned climate scientists worldwide – are losing their minds. Convinced that the world is ending, they’re turning to group therapy sessions to deal with “their feelings of despair, depression, and anxiety.”

“People would say, ‘Isn’t it great that the world is ending in 12 years?’ It’s in the back of people’s minds, and it’s constantly over our heads,” an organizer with the Sunrise Movement told the news site. “There’s a real fear for the next generation. Thinking about the future, I can’t imagine planning for the future when we only have 12 years.”

Another attendee at the rallies, Psychiatrist Alex Trope, believes that mental health is being severely impacted by the changing climate, and recommends those afflicted seek out “climate-aware therapists.”

Trope has even rounded up like-minded shrinks to form the ‘Climate Psychiatry Alliance’ to cater to these new clients. Failing that, organizers at the events have been advising “coping mechanisms including breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, and stretching.”

But, the howling masses may cry, all the stretching in the world won’t matter if the world is ending in 12 years. True, except the world’s not ending.

That date was calculated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, and is an estimate of the date by which we should slow the global temperature rise enough to avoid further damage to our planet in years to come. In the words of one of the report’s authors, this rise, even unchecked, “is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers.”

Even New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the leading proponents of the Sunrise Movement-inspired ‘Green New Deal’ on Capitol Hill, admitted that “you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.”

But tell that to the protesters raging against the dying of the light. Tell that to the Extinction Rebellion activists gluing themselves to trains in London and demanding the government tax society back to year zero in the name of Mother Earth. Tell that to schoolchildren coming home in tears after being told their children will be born into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or the headline writers peddling this doomsday porn for clicks.

— Andy Grayson