Communicating global warming faces the problem of translation, e.g. translating climate to weather. This new piece in Nature Climate Change is a pretty wild attempt to translate across climate, weather, cognition, affects, and … brain regions! Or, in the authors’ words, from “neurons to societal actions”.

This reminded me of a haunting piece on “fire brain” from the Washington Post this the summer:

The Camp Fire study also looked at cognitive functioning within six months to a year after the fire, using the Flanker task, which measures the ability to suppress distractions while focusing on a task. They found a 20 percent deficit among those who had been exposed to wildfires compared with those who had not. “Breathing in particulate matter can lead to inflammatory responses in the body,” Mishra said. ‘That affects brain processes. How it influences brain processes is still a question.” When the researchers looked at brain function underlying specific cognitive functions, they found heightened activity in the left frontal part of the brain that was more pronounced in those exposed to wildfires, she said. “It’s overprocessing all the stimuli coming at you,” Mishra said. “That’s what happens in traumatized brains.”