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

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 502–504 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 02 June 2020

replying to M. Gammans Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0791-3 (2020)

We thank Gammans1 for his careful replication of our work and engagement on this topic. Gammans is sceptical of our claim2 that future climate change might increase suicide risk, arguing that our data suggest that temperature increases merely hasten suicides that would have occurred soon after, and that our estimates represent the impact of ‘weather’ rather than ‘climate’. We address these concerns in order.

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Fig. 1: Effect of temperature on suicide risk in the United States, using distributed lag models or temporally aggregated data.
Fig. 2: Monthly count of PRISM temperature stations.

Data availability

All data needed to replicate our results can be accessed at https://github.com/burke-lab/NCC2018_update.

Code availability

The code used to generate the results in this study can be accessed at https://github.com/burke-lab/NCC2018_update.

References

  1. Gammans, M. Temporal displacement, adaptation and the effect of climate change on suicide rates. Nat. Clim. Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0791-3 (2020).

  2. 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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  10. PRISM Climate Data; http://www.prism.oregonstate.edu

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Marshall Burke

  2. Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Marshall Burke & Sam Heft-Neal

  3. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Marshall Burke & Solomon Hsiang

  4. Instituto de Economia, Pontificia Univerdad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Felipe Gonzalez

  5. Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Patrick Baylis

  6. Department of Economics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Ceren Baysan

  7. Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Solomon Hsiang

Authors
  1. Marshall Burke
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  2. Felipe Gonzalez
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  3. Patrick Baylis
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  4. Sam Heft-Neal
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  5. Ceren Baysan
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  6. Solomon Hsiang
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Contributions

M.B., P.B. and S.H.N. analysed data; all authors interpreted results and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marshall Burke.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2.

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Burke, M., Gonzalez, F., Baylis, P. et al. Reply to: Temporal displacement, adaptation and the effect of climate on suicide rates. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 502–504 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0792-2

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