*As Global Temperatures 🌡 Rise, so Will Mental Health Issues , Study Says*

For the study, Obradovich and his colleagues combined data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes self-reported personal mental health data on nearly 2 million randomly sampled US residents, with daily meteorological data from 2002 through 2012.

Survey respondents reported "anything that falls within the range of stress, anxiety, depression, emotional issues"; this "basically means things that are less extreme than hospitalization and suicide but more significant than like grumpiness or day-to-day emotional [agitation]."

Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the study is consistent with recent work by other scientists, including his own recent research on heat waves and hospital admissions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over a 17-year period, he said.

"The most important point of this [new] study is that climate change, indeed, is affecting mental health, and certain populations (women and the poor) are disproportionally impacted," Patz, who called for more research on climate change, wrote in an email.

Obradovich, who noted that some people near the coast may be feeling anxiety about the possibility of hurricane damage to their homes, agreed: "There could be additional effects of worry about climate change that we're not able to capture in this study."