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Climate Change Linked To Suicide?
Global Warming May Play Role In Thousands Of Self-Inflicted Deaths, Study Claims

By Daniel Steingold
9 August 2018

Global warming doesn’t just hurt the planet’s health — it may harm people’s too. An alarming new study from Stanford University brings one potential major human-afflicting consequence of climate change into focus by exploring the link between rising temperatures and suicide rates.

Researchers discovered a positive association between the two, and a shocking one at that. They predict something to the tune of 21,000 suicides in just the U.S. and Mexico by 2050.

The study, led by Stanford economist Marshall Burke, gathered a broad set of data, including historical temperature and suicide rate data across thousands of regions, along with half a billion tweets and Twitter updates, to help establish the correlation between hot weather and suicide rates. Suicide is now one of the world’s leading causes of death, making this research more timely than ever.

While previous research had established that warm weather was linked to a higher incidence of suicide, there was no consensus on whether balmy temperatures were the cause of the epidemic or merely correlated. Extra daylight hours or high unemployment rates, for example, could be the true culprit.

Hot weather, on its own, the researchers found, does increase both suicide rates and the use of depressive language on social media, which confirmed their hypothesis.
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“We’ve been studying the effects of warming on conflict and violence for years, finding that people fight more when it’s hot,” explains Solomon Hsiang, the study’s co-author. “Now we see that in addition to hurting others, some individuals hurt themselves. It appears that heat profoundly affects the human mind and how we decide to inflict harm.”
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