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Temporal displacement, adaptation and the effect of climate on suicide rates

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 499–501 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 02 June 2020

The Original Article was published on 23 July 2018

arising from M. Burke et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0222-x (2018)

Burke et al.1 find large effects of temperature increases on suicide rates in the United States (US) and Mexico, implying that climate change will result in large increases in suicides in these two countries. Using data made public by Burke et al., I directly test two assumptions of their analysis: that there is no temporal displacement of suicides beyond one month, and that the marginal effect of an unanticipated weather shock is identical to the marginal effect of an anticipated climate shift. I demonstrate that there is strong evidence of temporal displacement beyond one month in the Mexico setting and additional evidence of differential responses to weather and climate shifts in the US setting. In light of these findings, I believe that projecting these statistical relationships onto future climates may overstate the effect of climate change on suicide rates.

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Fig. 1: Cumulative lag-inclusive effect of a 1 °C increase in average monthly temperature for models with one- through six-month lags included.
Fig. 2: Comparison of temperature effects for the US across various models that are linear in temperature and do not include lags.

Data availability

The data necessary for replication of the results in this comment are available for download at https://purl.stanford.edu/vm069jx1228. These data were made publicly available by Burke et al.

References

  1. Burke, M. et al. Higher temperatures increase suicide rates in the United States and Mexico. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 723–729 (2018).

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  1. Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Matthew Gammans

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  1. Matthew Gammans
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Correspondence to Matthew Gammans.

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Gammans, M. Temporal displacement, adaptation and the effect of climate on suicide rates. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 499–501 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0791-3

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