Global Warming and Suicide Rates

Just skimming through stories about global warming. Here are a few selected items. Excuse me, it's cold in here. I'm going to go turn up the heat while you enjoy these. (Say, are you going to drive a car today? Are you heating your home? Using anything made of plastic? Yes? Hmmm.) Today's Forecast: Fearmongering Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) warned that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Ice Melt Helps Get Rid of Carbon Dioxide The clouds of global warming don't exactly boast a silver lining, but there is a little bonus. Melting sea ice in the Arctic is enabling ocean waters to soak up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Ice retreat over the last 30 years has tripled the amount of CO2 the Arctic Ocean can absorb. Commentary: Debating Global Warming: Free Speech Gets Pushed Aside Members of the global-warming Gestapo probably do not see the irony of comparing skeptics of man-made catastrophic climate change with "Holocaust deniers."Their tactics are shockingly evocative of the ideology that took the lives of millions of ethnic and political "undesirables."Heidi Cullen, who hosts The Weather Channel program on global warming, calls for the American Meteorological Society to withdraw its "Seal of Approval" from any TV weathercaster seen as a skeptic, which would jeopardize his career and financial well-being. Wacky Winter Not Caused By Global Warming, Scientists Say "If we go back and look at those couple of 70-degree days in Boston a couple weeks back, or this record-breaking cold snap that's destroyed a large part of the citrus fruit crop in California, that's weather," Mann told LiveScience. "There's no way to attribute those individual episodes in any way to climate, let alone climate change." Suicide and Global Warming "For males, increasing anomalies in monthly average temperatures associated to a higher monthly suicide mean from May to August and, to a lower extent, in November and December. In January, on the other hand, increasing anomalies in monthly average temperatures appeared to be coupled to a lower number of suicides. For females, the links between temperature and suicides are less consistent than for males, and sometimes have a reverse sign, too."