Climate change is huge problem, it has significantly
impacted the modern world, despite what people may think. Temperatures are rising at an irresponsible rate. This year we have
seen wildfires blaze their way across the world, which has been attributed to
rising temperatures and dry conditions caused by global warming. Global warming
has been linked to rising sea levels, melted ice caps, absurd weather
variations and overall changes in the climate. Last week however, it was also
linked to an increase in suicide risk. Is this really as clear cut as rising
temperature lead to a rise in people taking their own lives?
The article
Well, according to a study, yes. The Guardian ran an article
reporting on a study which demonstrated that an increase in heat linked to a
spike in suicides within the US and Mexico. They concluded that the 0.7% increase
in suicide in the US and 2.1% in Mexico was connected to the average monthly
rise of 1 degree Celsius heat.
“Determining whether or not the rate of suicide responds to
climatic conditions is important, as suicide alone causes more deaths globally
than all forms of violence combined and is among the top 10–15 causes of death
globally,”
Luckily, the guardian published the clenching sentence:
"This kind of study
cannot prove a causal link between rising temperature and more suicides."
However, their headline was still ‘Rising temperatures
linked to increased suicide rates’, so it’s a bit of a swing and a miss from
this journalist. I understand the reasoning in this to grasp peoples attention,
but it is also negligent knowing how misleading it is. Other media have been a
little less pro-active in warning that correlation doesn’t equate to causation with the Dail FMail claiming that the raising temperatures will cause THOUSANDS OF SUICIDES.
The Study
Now, look at this paper closely. The paper was published in
journal Nature Climate Change. The study found a link between temperature and suicide
rate, taking into account the a few factors that could affect the suicide rate
(i.e. wealth). They used data from the US National Vital Statistic System and
Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía to obtain monthly suicide
rates. They also considered the seasonal variations, ages distribution, wealth and
even took into account the news of celebrity suicides around the period. In
conjunction with this, researchers tried to look at how the heat may be
affecting people by assessing the use of ‘depressive language’ during the
higher temperatures. To do this, they assessed over 600million public tweets
from 2014 to 2015 from the locations used in this study, using words based on
similar research looking at links between tweets and suicides. The research
found that as the temperature increased, as did the suicide rate. As the
temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius in the US, the suicide rate increased by
0.7% and by 2.1% in Mexico per month. They also found an increase in the tweets
that used ‘depressive language’. The researchers have dumbfoundly stated, that
their research provides evidence for a link between increased temperatures and
increased suicide rates.
The approach taken by these researchers was an ecological
study, that is, studying a population in a geographical location. Looking at small
areas allowed for the researchers to collect and analyse data over longer
periods of time. As the researchers looked at averages of the exposures of heat
and outcomes throughout the time, rather than the individuals, the data is somewhat
meaningless. Many of the US utilises air conditioning, which is used to cool
down or heat up a room. It is unknown how many of the individual people had
been exposed to the raising temperature, there is no way the researchers could
know. Suicide and mental health is one of the most complicated struggles of our
time. With more mental health awareness being pushed, more research is being
conducted and suicide being associated with more mental health issues. My point
there being; it’s too complex to say one thing has caused suicide. This study
did not go into the experience of the individuals that had taken their own
lives. They didn’t look at the individual factors that lead up to that moment. When in research we make a discovery, we have
to think as to why that has happened. What was the psychological/biological/sociological
link as to why the temperature increased the suicide rate? The only attempt to
explain this by the researchers was from the twitter data looking at how people’s
tweets changed in response to the heat. Those of you familiar with twitter will
know that you can tweet anywhere, anytime. Even when on a holiday or visiting family.
The data show the researchers that a tweet was in that particular location, but
it will not reveal that they are passing through.
Conclusion
If you have made it this far in life without hearing the
fallacy ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ you have lived under a rock. As a
researcher, I find this sentence wholly annoying, simply, because it is true.
Research is hard and rarely as cut and dry at this. There are many factors involved in even the simplest of human participation studies that render the most simple findings even shaky at best. There is no proof that suicides have been caused by an increase in temperature
by the means of this study. The main design flaw in this study is that the study
wasn’t conducted on an individual basis, meaning that it is unknown what drove
these people to take their own lives. We have no information about the
experience of the individuals. As I have stated, suicide is a very complex
thing and is hugely oversimplified here. Climate change is used as a determining factor in a lot of the phenomenons going on around the world at the moment and most of them true, this however, is not one of them.
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