Word.ws English Dictionary

climate despair

climate despair noun: depression caused by fear of climate change.

Noun

climate despair (uncountable)

  1. Depression caused by fear of climate change.
    • A lot of people think we don't know how to solve climate change. So we could go from climate denial to climate despair.2015 March 24, Jonathan Mingle, quoting Durwood Zaelke, Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World, St. Martin's Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 256
    • It's impossible to know how many people like Ruttan Walker have experienced climate despair as a mental health crisis, but despair is all around us: in our own momentary but intense reactions to the latest bit of climate news, in pitch-black memes and jokes about human extinction, even in works of...2019 July 11, Mike Pearl, “'Climate Despair' Is Making People Give Up on Life”, in Vice
    Synonyms:
    climate grief

Synonyms of climate despair

Origin of climate despair

Blend of climate change + despair.

Questions about climate despair

What does climate despair mean?
Climate despair means depression caused by fear of climate change.
What part of speech is climate despair?
Climate despair is a noun.

Words near climate despair in the dictionary

  1. climate denialism
  2. climate denialist
  3. climate denialists
  4. climate denier
  5. climate deniers
  6. climate despair
  7. climate emergencies
  8. climate emergency
  9. climate fatigue
  10. climate finance
  11. climate fire

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: climate despair (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “climate despair.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/climate_despair. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.