BBC Claims ‘Climate Change’ Is Affecting Our Brains

Written by Andy Rowlands on August 13, 2025. Posted in Current News

On August 1st, a website called BBC Future published an article entitled The world is getting hotter – this is what it is doing to our brains

The article begins with a description of how hot summer days when the humidity is high can affect small children, and cites the case of a lad who was diagnosed with Dravet Syndrome, a neurological condition that it says affects a small number of people, and which can be made worse by hot temperatures.

The article then says:

Dravet Syndrome is just one of many neurological diseases that are exacerbated by higher temperatures, says Sanjay Sisodiya of University College London and a pioneer in the field of climate change’s impact on the brain.

A neurologist who specialises in epilepsy, he frequently heard from patients’ families that they had more troubles during heatwaves.

Sisodiya is quoted as saying:

“And I thought to myself, of course, why shouldn’t climate change also affect the brain? After all, so many processes in the brain are involved in how the body copes with heat.”

Just because Sisodiya thinks ‘climate change’ is causing an increase of neurological diseases, does not make it true. It is nothing more than his opinion, but we are expected to take it as fact because the BBC says so.

As he dug into the scientific literature, he discovered a range of neurological conditions that are made worse by rising heat and humidity, including epilepsy, stroke, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, migraine, along with a number of others. He also discovered that the effects of climate change on our brains are already becoming visible.

The increase in strokes has fork oil to do with temperature. Most of us should know by now the sudden, and large, increase in strokes, especially in younger people, had an entirely different cause.

Hold out your arm, jab jab.

During the 2003 European heatwave, for example, about 7% of the excess deaths involved direct neurological problems. Similar figures were also seen during the 2022 UK heatwave.

But heat can also alter other ways our brains function – making us more violent, grumpy and depressed.

This sentence I can agree with, I have experienced it myself (though thankfully I have never experienced depression), but I see no reason to blame it on anything other than what used to be called weather.

So, as the world warms due to climate change, what can we expect the effect on our brains to be?

The human brain is, on average, rarely more than 1C (1.8F) higher, on average, than our core body temperature. Yet our brains – as one of the more energy-hungry organs in our bodies – produce a fair amount of their own heat when we think, remember and respond to the world around us.

This means our bodies have to work hard to keep it cool. Blood circulating through a network of blood vessels helps to maintain its temperature, whisking away excess heat.

This is necessary because our brain cells are also extremely heat sensitive. And the function of some of the molecules that pass messages between them are also thought to be temperature dependent, meaning they stop working efficiently if our brains get too hot or too cold.

“We don’t fully understand how the different elements of this complicated picture are affected,” says Sisodiya. “But we can imagine it like a clock, where all the components are no longer working together properly.”

Although extreme heat alters how everyone’s brains work – it can, for example, adversely affect decision making and lead to people taking greater risks – those with neurological conditions are often the most severely affected. This is for many reasons. For example, in some diseases, perspiration may be impaired.

“Thermoregulation is a brain function and can be disrupted, if certain parts of the brain are not functioning properly,” says Sisodiya. In some forms of multiple sclerosis, for instance, the core body temperature appears to be altered.

In addition, some drugs that treat neurological and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia affect temperature regulation, leaving those taking them more vulnerable to heatstroke, or hyperthermia as it is known medically, and at a greater risk of heat-related death.

Heatwaves – and elevated nighttime temperatures especially – can affect people’s sleep, affecting our mood and potentially worsening the symptoms of some conditions. “For many people with epilepsy, poor sleep can increase the risk of having seizures,” says Sisodiya.

Many of us, myself included, have experienced trouble sleeping during heatwaves.

Evidence suggests that hospital admissions and mortality rates among people with dementia also increase during heatwaves. Part of this may be due to age – older people are less able to regulate their body temperature – but their cognitive impairment may also mean they are less able to adapt to extreme heat. They may not drink enough, for example, or forget to close the windows, or go out into the heat when they shouldn’t.

Notice the use of the word ‘suggests’. Again, this is opinion not fact. Also, should the the last sentence not read the elderly forget to open windows, rather than forgetting to close them?

Rising temperatures have also been linked to an increase in stroke incidents and mortality.

As noted above, the increase in strokes is unconnected to the weather.

In one study that analysed stroke mortality data from 25 countries, researchers found that out of 1,000 deaths from ischemic stroke, the hottest days contributed two excess deaths. “That may not seem like a lot,” says Bethan Davies, a geriatrician at University Hospitals Sussex, in the UK. “But given that there are seven million deaths from strokes a year worldwide, heat may well be contributing to over 10,000 additional stroke deaths per year.”

She and her co-authors warned that climate change is likely to exacerbate this in years to come.

Another assumption the gullible will take as fact.

A disproportionate share of the burden of heat-related stroke will be in middle- and low-income countries, which are already most affected by climate change and experience the highest rates of stroke.

Wrong.

“Rising temperatures will exacerbate health inequalities both between and within countries and social groups,” says Davies. A growing body of evidence suggests that older people as well as those with a low socioeconomic position are at an increased risk for heat-related mortality.

PSI has published numerous article that reveal heart-related mortality has the same cause as the sudden increase in strokes.

A hotter world is also harming the neurodevelopment of the very youngest. “There is a link between extreme heat and bad pregnancy outcomes such as premature births,” says Jane Hirst, professor of global women’s health at Imperial College London in the UK.

What link?

One recent systematic review of the scientific research found that heatwaves are associated with a 26 percent increase in preterm births, which can lead to neurodevelopmental delays and cognitive impairments.

“However, there is a lot we do not know,” adds Hirst. “Who is most vulnerable and why? Because clearly, there are 130 million women who have babies every year, a lot of them in hot countries, and this does not happen to them.”

Too right there is a lot you don’t know, and the fact this is not seen in the hottest countries should be a red flag to this thinking, but just use the climate scapegoat every time. Its fine.

Excessive heat due to climate change may also put additional strain on the brain, leaving it more vulnerable to damage that can lead to neurodegenerative diseases.

There is that word ‘may’ again.

Heat also affects the barrier that normally protects the brain, making it more permeable and increasing the risk that toxins, bacteria and viruses can cross over into our brain tissue.

This could become more important as temperatures increase, as so too will the spread of mosquitos that transmit viruses that can cause neurological disease, such as Zika, chikungunya and dengue. “The Zika virus can affect foetuses and cause microcephaly,” says Tobias Suter, a medical entomologist at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. “Rising temperatures and milder winters mean that the mosquito breeding season begins earlier in the year and ends later.” (Read David Cox’s story on how the US’s mosquito season is already changing.)

This claim of increased mosquito activity due to warmer temperatures is, I’m afraid, a lie.

Here I include a partial transcript from the 2007 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle:

The IPCC claims that “Mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18C.”

Professor Paul Reiter, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on malaria and other insect-borne diseases. He was a member of the World Health Organisation’s Expert Advisory Committee, was chairman of the American Committee of Medical Entomology at the American Society for Tropical Medicine, and lead author of the health section of the US National Assessment on the potential consequences of climate variability.

He points out that mosquitos thrive in very cold temperatures, NOT in warm temperatures.

“…being extremely abundant in the Arctic. The most devastating incidence of malaria was in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s, there were something like 13 million cases a year, and something like 600,000 deaths. Archangel in the Arctic had about 30,000 cases, and about 10,000 deaths. It is NOT a tropical disease, yet these people in the global warming fraternity invent the idea that malaria will move northwards.”

I think that rather proves the point, does it not?

Heatwaves are capable of influencing a whole range of factors, from the electrical firings of the nerve cells to suicide risk, climate anxiety and even the stability of medication for neurological conditions.

‘Climate anxiety’ is not caused by ‘rising temperatures’, it is caused by media propaganda and by those instructed to promote the ‘climate emergency’ fantasy.

But exactly how rising temperatures affect our brains are still being investigated by scientists. Heat affects people in very different ways – some thrive in hot weather, others find it unbearable. “Different factors might be relevant for this differential sensitivity, and one of them may be genetic susceptibility,” says Sisodiya. Genetic variants could influence the structures of proteins that might render some people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Might, may, could and might. Again more supposition. And the idea some people ‘thrive in hot weather’? Shirley not.

“There may be thermo-latent phenotypes that will only become apparent when those environmental pressures are sufficient to bring them out,” he says. “What we’re seeing today in people with neurological disorders could become relevant for people without neurological disorders as climate change progresses.”

“…when those environmental pressures are sufficient to bring them out“. Are they not already? This contradicts what is being claimed above.

There are still other questions that remain to be answered too. For example, is it the maximum temperature, is it the length of a heatwave or the nighttime temperature that has the greatest impact? It may well differ for each person or by neurological condition.

But identifying who is at risk and why will be crucial to developing strategies to protect the most vulnerable. These could include early warning systems or insurance to compensate day labourers for lost wages due to extreme heat.

“The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced, when July 2023 was confirmed to be the hottest month on record. Climate change is here and it is intensifying. The era of the hot brain is just beginning.

Just because Guterres ‘announced’ it does not make it a fact. The UN is now arguably the leading source of climate misinformation on the planet. And where is this boiling he spoke of?

To me, this is nothing more than another misinformation platform to cause ‘climate anxiety’ among the indoctrinated, and promote the entirely political climate agenda.

A pop-up banner at the bottom of this article reads:

This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.

Notice there is no mention of where the funding for this website comes from, so I looked it up.

One part of the main BBC website says Global News Ltd is funded by ‘subscription and advertising revenues’, while another part says ‘…significant donors include the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, several UN agencies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…’

Bill Gates. Described by some as one of the most evil men in the world, and the same could be said of those running the UN.

The BBC Future article can be seen here bbc.co.uk

Bold and italic emphasis added

Header image: Shutterstock

About the author: Andy Rowlands is a British university graduate in space science and Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the 2019 climate science book ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘

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