In early January, Slate columnist Eric Holthaus tweeted: “I’m starting my 11th year working on climate change, including the last 4 in daily journalism. Today I went to see a counselor about it.” Holthaus announced that he was in “despair” over climate-change inaction: “There are days where I literally can’t work. I’ll read a story & shut down for rest of the day. Not much helps besides exercise & time.” His job, he says, is “chronicling planetary suicide.”

Holthaus’s tweets, and the massive online group-therapy session that followed, would be amusing were they not so pitiful. Here is the emotional toll …