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People get meaner when it’s hotter

August 2, 2013

drought_2398818bAs climate changes become more pronounced, violence among Earth’s human population rises dramatically, according to a recent study by scientists from two major U.S. universities. (Huffington Post)

Altered weather patterns resulting in drought, high temperatures and floods parallel increases in conflict, researchers from U.C. Berkeley and Princeton University wrote in the latest issue of Science magazine. Sixty incidences of historic weather circumstances and resulting human behavior were incorporated into the study results.

Excessive heat appears to be the biggest malefactor, and has negatively affected the behavior of people in 27 modern societies analyzed by the researchers.

“We found that a one standard deviation shift towards hotter conditions causes the likelihood of personal violence to rise four percent and inter-group conflict to rise 14 percent,” UC Berkeley’s Marshall Burke, the study’s co-lead author, wrote in a release.

Burke said he hopes the results “shed new light on how the future climate will shape human societies.”


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Great, how many of our tax dollars went for this “study”?


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Another dubious study attempting to promote global warming and the idea that heat waves cause violence. Of course, ice and snow causes people to stay inside by themselves, and street violence is curtailed, but it’s the lack of contact with other people that is the real factor in nonviolence, not the snow and ice.


Another dubious idea promoted by Bill McKibben, the environmentalist, is that illegal immigration from Mexico into the US helps prevent global warming. McKibben says that while the average American has a larger carbon footprint than a person living in the developing world, bringing more immigrants to America would likely reduce their tendency to have higher birthrates, thereby creating less carbon-producing people.


Sure, Bill, let’s deplete our water, land, forests, etc. and take in all the high birth rate poor Catholic families in the world. Why not educate these people in their own countries and lower the birth rate there (which would lower the poverty rate and reduce global warming). Or better yet, let them immigrate to China where birth rate is controlled–one child per family.


This ” heat causes violence”does not take many factors into account–such as humidity, density of population, alcohol consumption. It is interesting. ” But the results also fit with a sociological rather than psychological explanation. According to so-called Routine Activities Theory, many forms of violent crime are functions of social opportunity, and increase when more people spend more time outside. When it becomes so hot that people retreat inside, crime rates fall”.


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Funny, the sun can cause this but apparently it cannot be the cause of climate change…


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Couldn’t have anything to do with the economy being in the toilet and circling the bowl. The disparity between the haves and the have nots becoming greater by the day. Politicians and their minions, the media, fanning the flames of racial hatred. The government successfully interjecting it’s claws into every aspect of our lives and at every possible instance looking for a way to squeeze more out of us. Naw, it’s gotta be climate change.


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Heat causes violence. Same point Camus makes in “The Stranger.”


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Two thumbs down?? Have you ever read “The Stranger?” I think Camus pretty much sums up the whole thing quite nicely: “All that heat was pressing down on me and making it hard for me to go on. And every time I felt a blast of its hot breath strike my face, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my trouser pockets, and strained every nerve in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me.”


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Bakersfield.


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There seems to be a big push to place “global warming” in the minds of us all before the midterms. The media and the press are desperate to give the democrats a shot at the house in November 2014. They can’t tout the failing economy and they don’t dare bring up national security. So they will try to bury the Obama scandals with fear. Fear of an unproven scientific theory. The planet is not getting warmer…look it up for yourselves.


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Nowhere can this meanness trend be seen better than in the comment boards of news sites like this.


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…and suffering fools makes people mean too


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Increased violence when it’s hot outside! Who has the energy to get violent when they’re overheated. A hot body temperature doesn’t equate to a ‘hot head’ in my experience. Triple digits in Atascadero means I ain’t moving much and neither is anybody else that I’ve noticed.


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I think different people deal with heat differently. One can be impatient to the point of being easily irritable without needing extra energy. I find that heat makes me short-tempered a bit — which is why I live in the 5-cities area where there is a lot less of it. I could easily see that others like me would react similarly. Perhaps enough to make the study results fairly accurate. That said, one study can’t prove an over-riding theory about the effects of climate change (whatever the source) on worldwide human behavior patterns.


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