How Do We Feel About Global Warming? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety.

Italy was in the grip of extreme heat waves, hellish wildfires and biblical downpours, and a nerve-wracked young Italian woman wept as she stood in a theater to tell the country’s environment minister about her fears of a climatically apocalyptic future.

“I personally suffer from eco-anxiety,” Giorgia Vasaperna, 27, said, her eyes welling and her hands fidgeting, at a children’s film festival in July. “I have no future because my land burns.” She doubted the sanity of bringing children into an infernal world and asked, “Aren’t you scared for your children, for your grandchildren?”

Then the minister, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, started crying.

“I have a responsibility toward all of you,” he said, visibly choked up. “I have a responsibility toward my grandchildren.”

Europe is a continent on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In Greece, nerves are shot as weeks of blazes raging out of control have given way to flooding that has submerged villages, washed away cars and left dead bodies floating in the streets. Italians are frazzled as a summer of incinerating heat…