Stop Calling It “Climate Anxiety.” It’s Climate Dread.

The phrase “climate dread” better legitimizes the real and tangible threat coming toward us.

The immensity and destruction of the 2018 wildfires in Sonoma County, California, left a visceral impression on Mark Freed.... The walls of flame “make you feel like an ant,” he said. “You don’t feel human, you’re just a thing to burn... as Freed saw fire after fire, he felt a growing sense of helplessness and foreboding. He would wake up and immediately feel the heaviness set in, filling the quiet… Freed said what he was experiencing wasn’t quite anxiety—it was deeper and heavier than that. That looming feeling, he said, was dread.

When burdened by the tangible angst and unease around the future of our planet, a term like “climate anxiety” can seem insufficient. It can feel paltry and shallow, implying we are fretting or fussing over an imagined future. In reality, seeing the mounting global disasters and learning of evidence-based projections of our changing world comes with a heavy emotional gravity…

For people like Freed—and myself, and potentially you, reading this now—the phrase “climate dread,” better than “climate anxiety,” legitimizes the real and tangible threat coming toward us and communicates that fear to others.

In my conversations with Freed, where he called climate change a “credible threat,” he seemed to feel the heaviness of the coming decades too.

“We’re probably all going to die horrible deaths” thanks to climate change, he told me.

Hannah Seo is a science journalist based in Brooklyn who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Guardian, among others.