Life
As far as practical impacts on human existence go, the effects of climate change are pretty well-documented. We're expecting that global warming will produce higher rates of human mortality, for example, and climate change is also creating a more ideal environment for the spread of parasitic diseases, which is obviously not great for human health. And, thanks to the fact that the climate has changed before, we have insight into the damage it wrought on previous civilizations. But what about the ways climate change will affect human behavior?
I'm not just talking about the choices we'll have to make in response to climate change, like higher rates of migration as water levels rise and various places become unviable for human habitation; I mean the ways in which we react to one another, our environments, and our own mental procedures.
Various species have already been observed to change the way they behave in response to shifts in their environment due to climate change. Some birds, for instance, are changing the way they choose their partners, which is an interesting thought: are humans likely to shift what they find attractive as the globe warms? There's no sign of that just yet; but there are certain ways in which human behavior does seem to be affected by climate change, and they're very interesting. And scary. Don't forget scary.
Climate Change Will Increase The Incidence & Severity Of Mental Illness
Smithsonian magazine made an excellent point back in 2014, when it laid out ways in which climate change damages human existence. Alongside drought, floods, pressure on food supply and other more traditional problems, the effects on the mentally ill were assessed, and the picture wasn't good. Stress is a problem both for the initial experience of mental health problems and for the exacerbation of symptoms, and natural disasters and climate change-induced problems are a direct way to increase it.
A review of available science in 2015 found several ways in which climate change will link directly to higher incidences of mental health problems, and it's pretty comprehensive. Disasters create highly traumatic human responses, but beyond the immediate trauma of a flood or drought, the impacts can also be more subtle: economic shifts, for instance, can leave people suddenly poor, making them vulnerable to mental health issues, while forced migration in response to environmental difficulties like rising water levels takes severe psychological tolls. And that's not including the mental health price of rising rates of physical health problems, like the infectious diseases I've already mentioned. When it comes to our mental health and ability to care for ourselves, climate change is bad, bad news.
Climate Change Will Shift Our Planning Behavior
This is an interesting one: it seems that our responses to climate shifts include how we forward-plan, affecting our ability to handle crises and our likelihood to resort to violence. It's a theory that was presented by a group of scientists in 2015, who were trying to find the common factor between shifts in weather and human behavioral adjustments. It turns out, according to their research, that the way in which we make planning decisions changes according to the daily weather, which in turn is affected by climate change. And poor planning is linked to social restructuring, violence, and other issues.
"In cities with cold climate the planning behavior of residents increases as the weather gets colder," they wrote, "while in cities with hot climate the planning behavior of residents decreases as the weather gets colder." They measured planning behavior, among other things, via the purchase of coupons in that had specific use-by dates and needed to be redeemed in particular locations. People used to hot weather, it seems, don't react well in planning terms to brief dips into cooler temperatures, which is a particular concern as global warming is linked to increases in freak winter weather events. The 2015 study is only the beginning, but be conscious of the fact that changing climate may genuinely be changing the way you think and plan for the future.