This content is available to subscribers and issue purchasers.
At a Christmas dinner party, I spoke with the hosts’ college-age daughter, who was majoring in environment and sustainability at her university but was home for winter break. During our conversation, she mentioned several times, with Cassandra-like certainty, that the suicide rate among climate scientists is abnormally high and rising rapidly. I found that possibility intriguing—not morbidly so but in a “coalmine canary” kind of way. Despite being long convinced of the reality of human-driven climate change, I was leery of purported suicide-rate hearsay—even from an earnest source. So I went in search of supporting evidence for the assertion that