Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study claims every degree of temperature above 20C increase the likelihood an Indian farmer will commit suicide. Just one problem with this claim: Indian agricultural yields are rising (see graph above).
Crop-damaging temperatures increase suicide rates in India
More than three quarters of the world’s suicides occur in developing countries, yet little is known about the drivers of suicidal behavior in poor populations. I study India, where one fifth of global suicides occur and suicide rates have doubled since 1980. Using nationally comprehensive panel data over 47 y, I demonstrate that fluctuations in climate, particularly temperature, significantly influence suicide rates. For temperatures above 20 °C, a 1 °C increase in a single day’s temperature causes ∼70 suicides, on average. This effect occurs only during India’s agricultural growing season, when heat also lowers crop yields. I find no evidence that acclimatization, rising incomes, or other unobserved drivers of adaptation are occurring. I estimate that warming over the last 30 y is responsible for 59,300 suicides in India, accounting for 6.8% of the total upward trend. These results deliver large-scale quantitative evidence linking climate and agricultural income to self-harm in a developing country.
Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1701354114
Unfortunately the full study is paywalled, so we don’t get to see the magic by which the authors process a rising agricultural yield into a climate threat. But the base OECD data speaks for itself.
Even if temperature is a negative, other factors such as global greening, CO2 induced drought resilience, improved agricultural technology and Prime Minister Modi’s efforts to improve rural access to cheap energy are more than compensating for any negative factors.
India may have a serious rural suicide problem. We can speculate about the cause. But whatever is going so wrong for so many rural Indians, the suicide tragedy is clearly not related to climate impacts on farm output. Agricultural yields are rising.
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Ludicrous. 😄
I agree with this
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Well how the hell could he hope to find “evidence” of unobserved drivers affecting anything ? Of course he can’t, Logical error.
This is certainly a case of false attribution and uncontrolled variables. Suicides have been rising and climate has warmed a little, therefore it must AGW that is killing people. Right. Try again.
How about Monsanto is forcing everyone to use their GM grain where the small holder is legally prevented from keeping seed-grain back for next year and instead is forced to buy more grain, not use his own. Expensive grain is putting whole families into debt to Monsanto for generations and starving them.
How about that for an unobserved driver .
So every time the temperature changes from 68f to 70f (20c to 21c) 70 Indians kill themselves?
Ludicrous doesn’t even come close.
“[F]luctuations in climate, particularly temperature, significantly influence suicide rates. For temperatures above 20 °C, a 1 °C increase in a single day’s temperature causes ∼70 suicides, on average. This effect occurs only during India’s agricultural growing season, when heat also lowers crop yields.”
Simply applying logic, wouldn’t a measurement of suicides related to agricultural output relate to a seasonal timescale rather than a daily timescale since agricultural yield cannot be measured as a daily trend? Or is the research paper author merely attempting to model daily temperature changes and seasonal suicide rates as a simple arithmetic function?
Fascinating. For some people everything bad in the world must be caused by CO2.
For others, everything bad in the world must be caused by a big company.
Both use bogus statistics and depend on weak correlations to prove their points.
” I study India, where one fifth of global suicides occur and suicide rates have doubled since 1980.”
I cannot determine from the text what is the meaning of the term suicide rates. It could be actual numbers, or per capita values.
If actual numbers, considering the population of India has also increased since 1980 more suicides would not be untoward. Otherwise?
Very sloppy, and a stupid premise to begin with, to seek a link between rural peasant farmer suicides and temperature increase seems like a case of confirmation bias.
Keep in mind that urban temperatures are much higher than rural, what is the connection between urban dwellers suicide “rates” and temperature, would not this be a good control for comparison purposes?
What is true for the goose should also be true for the gander. Higher urban temperatures should invoke an even greater increase in suicide.
No curiosity there?
I call BS on the whole pointless escapade, just another free grant make work project.
Wow! 59,300! Three significant digits. This must be a very precise and accurate measurement. Are they sure it wasn’t 59,200 or 59,400?
Greens and the left are constantly looking for a bogeyman for which to attribute the Indian farmer suicides. The problem is that these suicides predate most of the causes speculated.
The GMO-Suicide Myth
The GMO-Suicides a reality.
Upper Volta in West Africa with the tacit PR of international research institutes in Hyderabad/India, adopted Bt-cotton. It showed steep raise in area under Bt-Cotton. Now the area under Bt-Cotton crashed sharply.
see my book “”Green” Green Revolution: Agriculture in the perspective of Climate Change, 2011. Agriculture versus climate, see my book “Agroclimatic/Agrometeorological Techniques: As applicable to dry-land agriculture in developing countries, 1993.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
As I said on another thread, Vandana Shiva fantasies and lies.
He refers you to two books he wrote and you reply calling it lies and refer by Shiva. Not a convincing rebuttal but it says a lot about your objectivity and lack of respect.
+++Dr S!
the green rev enabling 3 crops, no soil rest, in rice crops also made one hell of a serious pest problem with leafhoppers as well
funny how that can be ignored
about the same as resistance to Bt in the cornborers and rapid turnabout corn to soy to corn enabled the bugs to increase by living in stubbles and adapt to survive to next season
Anyone can write a book. Writing a book is not sufficient to prove that your point has merit.
Books tend to provide only the evidence that supports the author’s position and exclude everything that doesn’t.
I said Doctor! Is there nothing I can take
I said Doctor! To relieve this bellyache
I said Doctor! Is there nothing I can take
https://youtu.be/5LxC3M-Yngs
Reddy or not here you come.
I say BS.
Genetic Fallacy: How Monsanto Silences Scientific Dissent
Gary Null’s and Richard Gale’s work:
http://prn.fm/big-agriculture-and-gmo/ http://prn.fm/seeds-of-death
http://prn.fm/food-fascists-gmo-and-pesticide-manufacturers/
http://prn.fm/the-deadly-duo-of-genetically-modified-food-and-toxic-pesticides/
The Doomsday Seed Vault
(In case of “accidental” contamination of the globe’s plant genome that humanity has consumed since the beginning?)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/doomsday-seed-vault-in-the-arctic-2/23503
Thanks, very informative. ( and nothing to do Shiva ! )
It’s not just climatology which has major issues with publishing bias and fake science.
Suicide rates are higher among the young in middle class urban areas….not in farming communities and its attributed to pressures from globalization and family demands to succeed, not crop loss. Additionally, the government has recently decriminalized suicide. From WHO reports: https://scroll.in/article/694364/four-charts-show-why-indias-youth-suicide-rate-is-among-the-worlds-highest
India is enjoying vast leaps forward in its economy and free market…as a result of access to energy. Energy .lifts the poorest of the poor out of the most Hellish conditions.
Instead of one meal a day, high childhood mortality, and suicide from losing the family’s single crop, families are now enjoying two or more meals a day.
Western ethnocentric Greens think this is about some Oil conglomerate versus the trees. It is not.
Energy is needed to provide clean drinking water and sewer systems, food supplies and housing.
11.9 million people died last year due to lack of energy to run clean drinking water systems and from indoor air pollution. (WHO)
Greens become desperate to assign Boogeyman categories to what suits them. India and very favorable Paris deals means Greens will attack from whatever angle….just like US Greens supported natural gas until everyone was using natural gas.
Rapid changes are always stressful, even when on the whole, the changes are for the better.
Last I checked, some of the highest per capita suicide rates occurred in Scandinavian countries. Japan has high rates also. If they are using high numbers for the ‘study,’ then it probably reflects the high populations. I suspect that we are looking at a spurious correlation, not cause and effect.
Bingo.
“Last I checked, some of the highest per capita suicide rates occurred in Scandinavian countries.”
Suicide rates in the US are higher than 3 out of the 5 Scandinavian countries. And the two higher ones – Iceland and Finland – have very small populations relative to their land mass.https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/suicide-rates.htm
Chris,
You said, “…have very small populations relative to their land mass.” What has that got to do with anything?
The Wikipedia article on suicide rates also lists Sweden as having a suicide rate slightly higher than the US. So, that makes it 4 out of 5. You didn’t comment about Japan.
However, no country can touch Greenland, and Russian has a ‘respectable’ suicide rate. Both of these countries are noted for their cold weather. The point is that there isn’t a good correlation with temperatures and gender and economic conditions are a better predictor of suicide. Although, in the US, it is frequently older White males who are faced with a terminal disease and don’t want to endure the pain and impose the emotional and financial burden on their family that decide to prematurely terminate their temporary stay on “this mortal coil.”
There is also the problem of correct reporting, in catholic countrys like Italy or Spain where suicide is considered a sin, the cause of death will likely be attributed to accident or another cause.
Psychological studies are not known for their rigor. Neither are climate science reports. Combine the two. . .
…combine the two and the ignorance of experts is only exceeded by their arrogance.
Apparently the combined errors in non-rigorous psychological studies and usually fake climate change studies are closer to multiplicative than additive.
But no evidence that cutting emissions will help these poor farmers
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3011279
Oops
Wrong link above
Here is the correct link for that comment
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3000932
Combine the two to create a stinky pile of……!
The world is a complex system and over simplification often results to wrong conclusion. I once gave a short talk of senior persons. I asked them how they would consider pollution as far as they could recall. It was a 100 per cent consensus, not just 97 per cent that pollution from air, water, noise, and solid wastes have increased. Then I asked them to search the life expectancy of their country from any of the database such as world bank. The life expectancy went up roughly in proportion to the increase in pollution. I told them could we then conclude that pollution is good for human health. Then everybody has their favorite factor on the apparent increase in life expectancy from better nutrition, health facilities, medicine, better knowledge of health factors etc. In fact there was no consensus on what is the most important factor for the increase in life expectancy of general population. This is the same problem with climate. It is a very complex system and to allude carbon dioxide as the most important factor practically neglecting the other factors, could result to erroneous conclusion.
A meaningless metric that simply reflects their perception and bias. In the US the environment is much cleaner than it was 40-50 years ago, yet you will hear progressives claim that we are on the verge of environmental catastrophy. They are simply out of touch with reality and never satisfied.
Actually, I read somewhere that the biggest increase in life expectancy over the last couple of hundred years or so comes from a reduction in infant mortality rates.
JC,
Quite true! Soap and antibiotics, especially for childhood diseases, are probably the two most important factors in the increase in life expectancy. Look up historical actuary tables.
India has problems, and India has problems with its weather and Climate, but none of them are caused by CO2, which is aiding India to increase its agricultural output and feed its people.
I wonder, did the author of this study take the huge level of intergenerational debt & slavery which afflicts the poorest people, mostly peasant farmers, in many 3rd world countries – especially India?
fluctuations in climate, particularly temperature, significantly influence suicide rates.
Are temperature fluctuations not called “weather”?
A feeble minded attempt to pin something on “climate change”. Does the author of this twaddle solidly have a degree of some kind?
Just when you think claims attributed to ‘Climate Change’ can’t get more ridiculous…..
That’s as dumb as a bag of ball bearings. He says that if from one day to the next the temperature goes from 68°F to 70°F, then seventy Indian farmers will commit suicide … he doesn’t think much of the resilience of his own people if he believes that.
How can anyone with a nose to smell BS believe this nonsense?
w.
Do you have any evidence that it is false? This seems like a trivial use of statistics. Count how many
people commit sucide each day and then plot that against temperature. Finding a causal link is a lot
harder and since I haven’t read the paper I am not going to comment on how likely that is.
I suggest doing a controlled study. Put a bunch of Indian farmers in one room and a second bunch in another. Supply each room with vials of (fake) cyanide. Turn the temperature up in room A and keep it constant in room B. Measure the number of attempted suicides in each room. Is there a significant difference? If so, publish. If not, don’t even try because negative results aren’t sexy and they don’t get published.
Of course you can comment, using common sense and a bit of knowledge. The data on suicides in India is extremely poor, and the idea that you can compare the figures for recent years with figures going back 47 years is simply absurd. Over that period, suicide was illegal and remains frowned upon by many of the religions in India. A simple explanation for the “rising” trend is that more suicides are reported as such, as legal and social attitudes change.
And how could it be temperature-inked? Does every suicide occur at or past maximum temperature of the day? No. Are rural Indian farmers able to tell whether its one degree hotter or one degree cooler day by day? No.So you have to hypothesise some innate ability to tell temperatures accurately that triggers a suicidal impulse.
You can’t comment? Then you can’t use simple sense and knowledge.
I always thought that of ball bearings as a pretty brilliant invention.
Where I grew up, the phrase was “dumb as a box of hammers”.
Regional differences can be fascinating.
In my neck of the woods it was “sack of hammers”.
What about population growth, meaning each acre of farmland has its need to feed and employ people increasing faster than its productivity despite advances of farming technology and increasing CO2?
Exactly right Donald. Indian average farm size has come down from about 3 hectares in 1960 to about 1 hectare today. Even with improved yields, relying on such a small piece of land with unreliable rains to sustain a family without a capital cushion to fall back on must be extremely challenging and psychologically stressful.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002703
I thought climate hysteria had peaked but along comes this garbage and tops the lot.
Dr J Reddy is correct of course. It’s well-known in anti GMO circles that Indian farmers were deluded or “tricked” into buying GMO seeds with promises of vastly increased production but were unaware apparently that they would not be able to save each year’s seeds (in contrast to their traditional practice) but have to purchase afresh every year, with the result many went bankrupt. Hence the suicides. Scandalous! And so little written about it in the USA – one wonders why.
Because your story is a bald-faced lie. See my link above.
Where is the link?
The steady rise in yield of cotton was due to efforts made by private seed companies — Andhra Pradesh government seed agency was the major seed producer in India but not now due to government apathy –. These seed varieties were converted in to Bt seed to get overnight profits for the same seed otherwise was available at low price and can be used successive year without paying. Also, with the Bt-cotton, cost of inputs rocketed. With the weather the success depends. Also, the market fluctuations on the cost of cotton after the harvest are high. That is the returns and input costs [mostly cropped on borrowed money at high interest rates from money lenders] led to suicides by cotton farmers in the five Bt-cotton states in India. It is not Vandana Siva, I my self along with few others filed a public interest litigation [PIL] in My state High Court in 2003. What ever we presented in that affidavit are slowly coming out. Now Bt-cotton is affected by pink bollwarm and the seed potency was changed three times now.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
cont—
After returning to India from UNO assignments, I started practising agriculture. I used to produce paddy seed for AP State seed Corporation. Also, started producing Sunflower seed to ITC Agro-tech a private seed company. Unfortunately, this company got seed from agricultural university even before completing the process of finalising the release, the seed gran come down drastically leaving farmers in debt.I questioned them on this issue, they openly told me the real story and later this company was closed. One of my colleague in ICRISAT gave me a groundnut seed. I raised this seed and a private seed company started by my former ICRISAT colleague purchased and developed on this. Now, with GMOs this system practically dead.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
None of that is true, and farmers still had access to non-GMO seeds.And if they grow more, they get paid more and so can afford the seeds. It’s not like the seeds are more expensive the grown crop value.
It is not so in the five states where Bt-cotton [the only GM crop grown in India] is grown. The seed companies made it a point not to allow non-Bt-seed sold and thus duplicate Bt-cotton seed was sold. All high yielding cotton varieties were converted in to Bt to get jump in profits as the price of Bt-cotton is several times higher than non-Bt seed. Unfortunately, people don’t read media reports in India on the fate of farmers with Bt seed. The TS government is taking action on spurious seed market, however, already farmers planted spurious seed as sudden raise in area under cotton [as Bt seed was available for a fixed area].
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Some thoughts.
Presumably the 30 year decline in the usually monsoon could be a cause of crop failure causing stress.
This is beginning to reverse.
https://qz.com/1037870/after-slowly-drying-up-over-50-years-the-monsoon-is-making-a-comeback-in-north-india/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo
“But Wang and others have observed that in recent years, India has experienced a reduction in low clouds, perhaps in response to an increase in anthropogenic aerosols such as black carbon or soot, which can simultaneously absorb and heat the surrounding air, and prevent clouds from forming.”
Cleaning up ,their coal fired emissions and fireplace smog will certainly help.
Recently the poor of India have been more affected by the withdrawal of large notes in circulation.
The poor do not have bank accounts and store wealth for dowry in notes.
Those that did not know the notes were being withdrawn and made non tenderable found their savings wiped out.
The very poor do not necessarily speak English or write and read.
“These results deliver large-scale quantitative evidence linking post hoc reasoning and academic drivel.”
Don’t most greenies want to decrease the world’s population?
I would expect yields to only be a second order issue. The first is probably debt. Yields might well have
increased but if debt levels are rising faster then small changes in temperature might well be the straw that
breaks the camels back. Farmers have to pay more for seeds, especically now that companies like Monsanto claim that farmers cannot plant some of their harvest due to copyright. similar all other costs are
going up.
I hate to be crude, but aren’t these suicides a form of negative feedback with respect to the temperature effects of CO2?
Sometimes you have to be crude in order to break through the crud.
But yields bring money and money is what defines debt. Debt is not “first order” and revenue to service that debt secondary. That’s just nonsense.
And simply saying debts are rising faster than incomes is meaningless. That happens everywhere for some people. Unless you can show that suicides are caused by debt levels and debt levels are rising, you are just plucking ideas out of the air despite saying you couldn’t comment.
We are entering fund raising season for the climate Armageddon industry . Like Super Bowl commercials what will this season of climate alarmism bring .
Drowning polar bears … Done
Ice free Arctic … Done
Disappearing islands … Done
Bleached coral … Done
Flooded continents … Done
Hurricanes multiply like rabbits … Done .
Ocean Acidification … Done
This is get unfun .
This years nominations go to :
Beached whales swimming from boiling waters
Sharks jumping into boats having mental breakdowns
Owls searching out wind mills on suicide packs
The NYT and LA Times actually returning to journalism . OK no chance .
Like the oh so hyped Russia cooked the election , climate Armageddon is a great big fat nothing burger
but did you know climate changes ?
+10
It may be that rising yields are the problem, bringing down prices and making it harder for marginal farmers to make a living.
Yes, rising yields and depressed prices might have caught farmers by surprise, if they ran up too much debt upgrading their farms. But this is just a guess, I don’t know what is happening on the ground – other than the obvious lack of evidence that climate is impacting farm productivity.
This paper is garbage. As any epidemiologist knows one has to look at the rates per 100,000. The WHO data can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
Clearly India in 24th spot has no problem with it’s suicide rate. Interestingly for men the rate is 65 but for women it the the 7th highest in the world. This numbskulls should have looked at the question as to why the large difference between males and females in India. Or does climate change selectively cause women to do themselves in?
Thank you for the informative post.
Large difference between men and woman are related to forced marriages and rapes, especially involving outside toilets for latter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1567291/Forced-marriage-caused-sisters-suicide.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rose-george/open-defecation-india_b_7898834.html
Lets blame global warming on it because everything else is.
For temperatures above 20 °C, a 1 °C increase in a single day’s temperature causes ∼70 suicides, on average. This effect occurs only during India’s agricultural growing season, when heat also lowers crop yields.
During the growing season? You’d think if the effect were real it would be at HARVEST. During the growing season it is IMPOSSIBLE to calculate the effect on yields from a single day of +1 degrees. This is a level of BS that wouldn’t even register on the average BS detector, they don’t go that high.
This all about hope and despair. If you are deeply in debt and need a good harvest to pay off the loan
or risk losing everything then a single bad day could be enough to tip you into depression. Similarly the
paper states that increased rainfall decreases the sucide rate for two years. So it is all about hope and how people’s emotions change depending on the temperature.
then a single bad day could be enough to tip you into depression
Seriously? A human being cannot even sense the difference between +20 and +21 from one day to the next, let alone get a mental impression of how that is going to affect crop yields weeks later. But let’s put aside those little facts and let me ask you the bigger question.
How did someone that easily tipped into depression/suicide get to adulthood in the first place? See the problem here Germonio?
Sounds to me like the usual grasping at straws for links to cause and effect without any proof.
It is that sort of illogicality that brings us to believe (and there is no observed scientific proof) that a very, very, very rare gas (CO2) changes level by a few parts per million and that changes global temperatures.
I am sure that Indians suicides, like climate variations, are far more complex than these kind of light-weight studies suggest.
I could see a real CO2 caused depression; if CO2 suddenly dropped to 280 ppm and crop yield all dropped some 20 percent.
Right, suicide happens based on one day when it’s a bit warmer than you thought it might be.
Not even too warm just warmer. Because warmth is bad for growing things. Just one day of warmth, And they think that despite being farmers…
Just more unadulterated nonsense.
If HADCRUT 4 can be believed the global average temperature has risen ~0.8C since 1960, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen ~ 90 ppm and the average life expectancy at birth for the population of India has risen from ~40 years to ~70 years (not least due to the fall in infant mortality rate).
Hooray.
Another myth about suicide masquerading as science to further the alarmist narrative about global warming. Unfortunately it distracts from the real causes of suicide. About 90% of people who attempt suicide have a mental illness. There are several risk factors that can contribute including abuse, trauma, drug use, unemployment and financial problems. It has been recently postulated in a fascinating U.S. study that altitude may also be a significant factor as the Rocky Mountain states have a noticeably higher rate of suicides. Most suicides can be prevented if the friends of the victim know what signs to pay attention to. Please take time to read up on it so someone you care about doesn’t become a victim.