Having Trouble Sleeping? Blame Climate Change
“The impact of rising ambient temperatures on sleep and its phases under climate change is becoming increasingly concerning but remains underexplored.”
This brilliant statement begins the abstract of research published in the journal Nature Communications on March 17, 2025 – Saint Patrick’s Day. But the “green” they’re peddling is a darker shade than that of the Emerald Isle.
Instead, the authors hail from Shanghai and Beijing, China, where they compiled “sleep monitoring data of 23 million days from 214,445” Chinese test subjects. They tallied that for every 10 degrees Celsius increase in ambient temperature, both sleep quality and duration decrease precipitously.
You may be thinking that 10 degrees Celsius is quite a jump! What did those poor test participants endure during this research?
Never fear; the authors did not measure actual indoor air temperature — a known factor that influences the quality of sleep. Instead, they used computer models. Of course they did! After all, you can’t tease out the results you want from real life data.
Instead they employed projected temperature data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and meteorological data from the European Union’s NASA equivalent: Copernicus. They correlated this data with a “cardiopulmonary coupling” app on the smart devices worn by study participants.
What could go wrong?
After much data gridding, the authors calculated that “by the end of the century, sleep insufficiency could rise by 10.50%, with an annual loss of 33.28 hours of sleep per person.” (N.B. That’s less than 2 days in one year.) Those in greatest peril of insomnia will be the elderly, women, and obese people. These estimations were based on United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change worst-case emissions scenarios.
“Our findings highlight the importance of mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and implementing tailored adaptive measures for vulnerable regions and subgroups to alleviate the sleep deprivation and degraded sleep quality associated with climate warming,” concluded the propagandists “scientists.”
You may be wondering if they considered any other insomnia-inducing culprits such as screen time, medical conditions (e.g. hormonal fluctuations, sleep apnea), lifestyle choices (e.g. diet, drug use), or real, non-model-based environmental factors (e.g. light and noise levels, bedding quality, indoor air temperature).
Why would they do that? Academics know better than anyone that the way to get continued research funding is to blame climate change.