Researcher's linking of 59,000 suicides in India to climate change 'particularly worrisome' under Trump

Brett T. | 8:36 PM on August 01, 2017

The Washington Post’s coverage of a study linking climate change and suicide managed to hold off for three paragraphs before bringing up President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, making the study’s findings “particularly worrisome” — if you buy into them, that is.

59,000 farmer suicides in India over 30 years may be linked to climate change, study says https://t.co/mS9AwFB2jO

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 1, 2017

Vidhi Doshi reports:

Tamma Carleton, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, compared almost five decades worth of suicide and climate data and concluded that temperature variations in India may have “a strong influence” on suicide rates during the growing season.

In her study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Carleton estimates that more than 59,000 farmer suicides over the past 30 years can be linked to global warming.

Doshi notes that India has the highest number of suicides in the world, with 133,623 reported in 2015 alone. Nearly 12,000 of that number — fewer than 10 percent — were farmers and agricultural laborers.

The Guardian added that, according to the study, “an increase of just 1C on an average day during the growing season was associated with 67 more suicides.”

Only recently we learned from social media that Sen. John McCain had voted to kill 22 million Americans by denying them health care (until it turned out that he didn’t); now we have President Trump driving thousands of farmers across the globe to suicide because of his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Worrisome.