The Loneliness Epidemic is Not Caused by Climate Change, PBS News
By Linnea Lueken – Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
A recent story from The Conversation (via PBS News), “Climate change may be making us lonelier. How heat waves and extreme weather disrupt social connections,” claims that the loneliness epidemic is made worse by climate change because increasingly common severe weather is forcing people to stay separate. This is ridiculous. While it’s true that young adults report more isolated feelings than past generations, it’s not because weather is getting more extreme. It is not. People are isolated due to cultural changes, often preferring online relationships and forms of communication over in-person, interpersonal interactions. Extreme weather in the past also interrupted communication and routines, and it didn’t cause mass isolation the way that the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns did and social media does. Also, since extreme weather has not become more frequent or severe, it can’t be causing more isolation and loneliness.
Social work researcher Fiona Doherty from the University of Tennessee wrote the Conversation article based on interviews and research she and her colleagues did with other social workers and residents of rural Appalachia. Much of the evidence for her claims come from anecdotal comments from interviewees, which is unreliable as a base for scientific research.
Doherty says, correctly, that “[s]evere storms, heat waves and wildfires can shut down the social life of a community, flooding out festivals, canceling community events and keeping people indoors.” This is true, but her follow up to that obvious comment is that this is “evidence of how climate change isn’t just changing the environments we all live in, but also impeding our ability to connect with one another,” and worsening the loneliness epidemic, is nonsense.
That would presuppose that severe storms, heat waves, and wildfires did not occur before whatever period she claims is representative of “climate change,” which probably in this case are the decades following industrialization and the widespread use of fossil fuels. During this period, she claims, extreme weather has become “more common and disruptive,” listing extreme heat, floods, hurricanes, drought, and wildfires.
It’s not possible in this short post to go into detail about why each of those weather and weather-related events are not getting worse due to climate change, but I will focus on the ones most applicable to Appalachia; extreme heat and flooding. If you’d like to read about wildfires, hurricanes, and drought, you can read the linked Climate Realism posts about this summer’s wildfires in North America, the impact of hurricane Helene on North Carolina, and drought in Georgia, or more generally about the U.S. as a whole, Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, and Climate at a Glance: Drought
Appalachian states have seen some of the least average warming in the country. Tennessee is estimated to have seen just a half a degree Fahrenheit warming of average temperature since 1900, West Virginia saw just 1°F, Virginia 1.5°F, Kentucky 0.6°F. Not one of them has experienced an increase in “extreme heat” days. In fact, recent decades have seen less extreme heat than there was in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Take West Virginia for example. In the 1910s-1930s, West Virginia saw much higher numbers of days where temperatures were 95°F or higher. (See figure below)
Even with this year’s heat factored in, it’s nowhere near the 1930s highs.
The same is true for the other Appalachian states.
As a result, increases in extreme heat cannot be driving increasing feelings of isolation because it is simply not increasing in frequency or duration.
Likewise, flooding is not getting worse, at least not because extreme downpours are getting worse, though it is possible that aging infrastructure can make the impacts of natural flooding worse than would be otherwise. River gauge data from West Virginia, very prone to floods because of topography, show no trend in increased riverine flooding. The worst flood in state history, which impacted multiple rivers and set records across the state, occurred in 1985.
The Conversation piece admits that the COVID-19 pandemic shut down American (and global) social life, and says that social interaction was declining even before then, attributing this to climate change while saying absolutely nothing about any of the other factors, like the rise of social media and changing cultural practices.
Multiple studies have found strong links between increased social media use to feelings of isolation and loneliness among users, even though one would think they were more connected than ever. This is not niche information, and a professional social worker would definitely be aware of this overwhelming evidence.
Weather is temporary, not the permanent state of the climate. It is natural and always changing, and has always impacts the way people interact. For every person who can’t make a church function because a road is closed, another family might benefit from staying in by the fire on a blizzardy night. Consider the impact on human mental health of winters in the far north where the sun sets and doesn’t return for weeks. That doesn’t mean that the Earth’s tilt and rotation around the sun is a problem for feelings of human isolation or depression.
The Conversation, and PBS, should be embarrassed for promoting this borderline pseudoscience. We know what is making the loneliness epidemic worse and it’s not climate change or even the weather.
