Pertinent Issue, Flawed Methods

Farmer vulnerability in developing nations is an important agenda item for science and policy. A recent paper by Tamma A Carleton titled “Crop-damaging Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in India” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 24 January 2017) cautions policymakers to invest in adaptation to the impacts of climate change. If not, Carleton suggests, global warming will be accompanied by increasing impacts of the harshest kind: suicides. She concludes that each 1°C increase in summer temperature causes approximately 70 farmer suicides. While we applaud her effort to highlight farmers’ struggles to a global audience, her assumptions, methods, and conclusions are untenable. We caution policymakers against basing their decisions on this problematic research.