Are We Getting Less Sleep Due to Global Warming?

Health practitioners increasingly stress how important it is for us humans to get sufficient sleep to maintain good health. Now, some researchers are saying we’re getting less sleep due to global warming.

The results of a new, largest-of-its-kind study were published last week as evidence of this loss of sleep. Nick Obradovich–a doctoral student at the University of California at San Diego–is the lead author of the study who conducted much of its research. He says, “We found that unusually warm nights are associated with increased reports of nights of insufficient sleep.”

In October, 2015, San Diego had an unusual heat wave. Obradovich and his colleague in the study, Robyn Migliorini, discovered that “friends and colleagues in grad school weren’t sleeping well at night,… and as a result people were lethargic and somewhat grumpy.”

Maybe that’s why President Donald Trump does his twitter thing at the wee hours of the night, saying he doesn’t get much sleep. Someone needs to tell him it’s the manmade global warming thing. Maybe then he’d quit chirping that the idea of global warming is a “hoax” perpetrated on Americans by the Chinese to somehow bring more trade, and thus money, to China. Does The Donald ever quit thinking about money?

I’ll bet every golfer in the land who ever played golf with Donald Trump and had a Nassau wager on the side, forever regretted it afterwards. Being the great negotiator he claims to be, he would have demanded so many strokes it would have been highway robbery.

Obradovich then discovered that there had never been a study on sleep loss due to global warming. So, he and his research team collected sleep data from 765,000 U.S. residents and compared it to data on nighttime temperatures throughout the U.S. produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). USA TODAY reports, “They found that unusually warm temperatures let to three nights of poor sleep per 100 people per month. Lower-income people suffered more sleep loss because they face tighter budgets than high-income individuals.” Obradovich added, “Running air-conditioning all night can be costly.”

This study is no slouch. USA TODAY informs, “This study was published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. We ought not let Trump get away with calling it “fake news.”

For the past 18 years, I have lived in Arizona. The desert heat, here, can really sizzle in the summer. I’ve noticed that nighttime low temperatures have risen in the summer months since I’ve been living here. I’ve also experienced getting less sleep in the summer in recent years. It has perplexed me, but no more. Global warming must be the culprit.