Fear often sits behind anxiety, and there’s been growing attention to climate anxiety. We don’t see that climate anxiety is really widespread among populations, but it is higher among younger people. Often it motivates action. What we found was that there is a positive relationship between climate anxiety and taking action to tackle climate change. Fear can be a motivator in the same way that we were just saying about anger.
This could be interesting to be studied more. All too often I hear "we need to stay optimistic to act" and "doomerism leads to inaction" without anything to back that up.
Decades of optimism about climate change have lead to hardly any action.
Personally I believe the average person needs to worry much more than they do now. While more people know about human made climate change now, most of them do so only superficially and very optimistically.