No matter where we live, weather touches each of us daily and the warming effects of climate change go beyond the physical environment.
A rise in average monthly temperatures is tied to a small increase in mental health issues, according to a study published in the journal PNAS.
Over five years, a 1-degree Celsius increase in average temperature results in an even greater prevalence of mental difficulties.
“We don’t exactly know why we see high temperatures or increasing temperatures produce mental health problems,” said Nick Obradovich, lead author of the study and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.
“For example, is poor sleep due to hot temperatures the thing that produces mental health problems? We have a lot of work to do to figure out precisely what is causing wha,.” he adds.
Based on temperature records beginning about 1850, our globe is about 1 degree Celsius hotter today than it was between 1850 and 1900, according to climate scientists.
For the study, Obradovich and his colleagues combined data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes self-reported personal mental health data on nearly 2 million randomly sampled US residents, with daily meteorological data from 2002 through 2012.
Survey respondents reported “anything that falls within the range of stress, anxiety, depression, emotional issues”; this “basically means things that are less extreme than hospitalization and suicide but more significant than like grumpiness or day-to-day emotional [agitation].”
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