Global Warming Improving Mental Health?

Freelance writer Marlene Cimons, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, wrote an editorial published by LiveScience and Yahoo News claiming increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events damage mental health. Cimons presented this assertion as a means to claiming global warming is harming mental health.

Assuming for the sake of argument that extreme weather events cause mental health-damaging stress, the facts show global warming is improving rather than harming mental health.

While spending the majority of her editorial asserting a link between extreme weather events and mental health, Cimons addressed global warming science in less than a full paragraph. Citing an anecdotal story of somebody claiming to have stress-related headaches and depression after Sandy battered the New Jersey coastline in November 2012, Cimons made an unsupported leap in logic that global warming caused the storm and therefore caused the headaches and depression.

Global warming realists know factual evidence shows extreme weather events have become less frequent and extreme as our planet gradually warms from the Little Ice Age conditions that prevailed through the end of the nineteenth century. Cimons’ editorial is a timely reminder that global warming activists should not go unchallenged when they falsely assert the relatively few extreme weather events that still occur must be caused by global warming.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).