Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., now says that she was just joking around when claiming that the world would end in 12 years if we don’t immediately implement an entire social-economy-energy-agriculture do-over to end climate change.

She had referred to this imperative as her generation’s equivalent of “World War II.”

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez later recently mocked Republicans for not recognizing her combination of “dry humor and sarcasm.” She added, “Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.”

Sea sponge intellectualism appears to be particularly pervasive among Democrats.

A May 20-21 Rasmussen poll showed that 67% of Democrats believe that the U.S. has only 12 years to fight global warming in order to avoid disastrous and irreparable damage to the country and world.

An earlier January Pew survey revealed that the same 67% of Democrats and Democratically-leaning independents rated dealing with climate change as a top priority, compared with 21% of Republicans. Various polls, including Gallup surveys, show an ever-widening partisan sea sponge intellect gap over the past two decades.

Many impressionable and sensitive sea sponges continue to suffer understandable emotional trauma originating with 2006 release of Al Gore’s sensational “An Inconvenient Truth” science fiction horror film.

Just two years later, a Feb. 16, 2008 New York Times article reported a rapidly-emerging market for “eco-therapists,” specializing in treating “eco-anxiety.”

The New York Times noted that more than 120 of these specialists had become listed in a new field of “eco-psychology” to help people who are excessively worried that their own carbon emissions are causing global warming.

An emergent International Community for Ecopsychology soon defined this mental malady as “a synergetic relationship between planetary and personal well-being”, stating that “the needs of one are relevant to the other.”

Some schools, including Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, quickly responded to these exciting new enterprise opportunities by offering accredited patient eco-anxiety counseling courses.

As Sarah Edwards who launched a blog, “Eco-Anxiety,” explained to Fox News in April of 2008, this contagious cranial condition became manifested in her personal feelings of fear, grief, anger, confusion, depression, fatigue, shoulder pain, and fibromyalgia.

There should be nothing either unexpected nor humorous about the fact that many very caring people are truly troubled with alarm and guilt about endlessly hyped hypothetical and empirically discredited computer model-based projections of impending human-caused climate calamity.

A particularly tragic case involved an Argentine family in March of 2010.

Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti shot two of their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears of global warming.

Although their two-year-old son, Francisco, died instantly, their unnamed 7-month-old infant daughter remarkably survived.

Global warming, aka, climate change, has long-served as an effective manipulation tactic to advance a variety of forerunners to hysterical present-day “Green New Deal” histrionics.

In 2006, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank that actually supports CO2 cuts, provided an analysis of circumstances surrounding global warming debates that were occurring then in the UK.

IPPR concluded, “Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire as awesome, terrible, immense, and beyond human control…It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, incorporating an urgent tone and cinematic codes. It employs [a] quasi-religious register of death and doom, and it uses language of acceleration and irreversibility.”

The IPPR observed that such “alarmism might even become secretly thrilling” — effectively a form they referred to as “climate porn.”

Then-Director Mike Hume of UK’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, also took issue with such words as “catastrophic,” and such claims as that “we are approaching the point of no return.”

Recognizing that such use of such language serves primarily to advance climate science funding, he concluded, “We need to take a deep breath and pause. The language of catastrophe is not the language of science . . . Framing climate change as an issue which evokes fear and personal stress becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By ‘sexing it up’ we exacerbate, through psychological amplifiers, the very risks we are trying to ward off.”

Melissa Pickett, an eco-therapist in Santa Fe, New Mexico warned her patients that global warming craze can fuel fear-induced self-destructive behaviors. She advised that you sometimes have to tell extreme greenies to chill out for their own good.

John Berlau, author of “Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Dangerous to Your Health,” urges eco-anxious people need to get a real life, and also to get real facts before freaking out. He suggests that it’s sometimes helpful to relax by taking a good old-fashioned hike in the woods.

Berlau doesn’t peddle pedantic politically-purist punditry that you need to eco-cycle your family and dog (yes, or cat either), out into nature. Instead, “just go camping, and turn your SUV into the outdoors vehicle it was intended to be.