Climate fatalism
The belief that damaging climate outcomes are inevitable or that action cannot alter them.
Example
Perceived distance between effort and visible results can shape this attitude.
The catch
Avoid treating all concerned or disengaged people as sharing one belief.
In more depth
Climate fatalism, explained.
Climate fatalism mistakes a partly locked-in problem for a fully locked-in one. Some further warming and sea-level rise are already committed, but the IPCC is clear that how much warming occurs this century depends on emissions from now on. Near-term choices count as well. UNEP's Global Methane Assessment found that cutting human-caused methane by 45% this decade would avoid nearly 0.3°C of warming by the 2040s.
Accepting that some losses are now unavoidable is realism. Fatalism takes the further step of concluding that effort is pointless, and that step has consequences, because 'too late' arguments end in the same inaction as denial. The belief also feeds on misreading other people. When each person assumes others do not care, a form of pluralistic ignorance, shared effort looks futile before it starts.
Information alone rarely shifts it. People tend to respond better to visible results nearby and to evidence that others are already acting, the raw material of constructive hope. Use the term for a belief or a line of argument, and avoid it as a label for people who are grieving, exhausted or unconvinced that a particular measure works.