The boiling frog effect: Global warming delays emotional impacts of air pollution in warmer climates

Climate change, air pollution, and extreme weather interact in complex ways that impact emotional states of populations. These dynamics are crucial in effective health planning and risk profiling, however, remain poorly understood in real time contexts, hampering timely responses by governmental agencies. Here we conduct a long-term large-scale investigation of the synthetic and lagged effects of environmental stressors on expressed sentiment, as a proxy of emotional states and subjective wellbeing, derived from over 850 million geotagged tweets using natural language processing across the continental United States from 2016 to 2022. Our spatiotemporal Bayesian hierarchical model, optimized with a distributed lag non-linear algorithm, reveals that combined exposure to air pollution and heatwaves produces significant lagged effects on sentiment, with the population in warmer climates showing more gradual emotional responses than those in colder regions. This evidence corroborates the 'boiling frog effect' - a metaphor implying how populations adapt to environmental stressors in ways that delay emotional responses. These findings provide empirical, spatially explicit support for the long-established environmental psychology conjectures including Environmental Stress Theory and Adaptation Level Theory. Our results offer tangible pathways for wellbeing related interventions, climate adaption strategies and public health emergency response systems in the face of increasing global environmental challenges. SYNOPSIS.