UPDATE: WUWT commenter P Wilson points out one single map that refutes this entire theory, see below the “read more” at the end of the post. – Anthony
To add to the Numberwatch big list of things supposedly caused by global warming, there’s now an oddball “irrefutable” (their words) story circulating around the net since Friday from Craig Anderson, a psychologist from Iowa State university known for video game violence studies, shown at left.
A Google News search reveals a number of news outlets picking this story up. The source for all these stories seems to be this one article in Newswise:
Researchers Present Study on How Global Climate Change Affects Violence
In that article, they cite it as:
Released: 3/19/2010 1:00 PM EDT
Source: Iowa State University
Problem is when you go to Iowa State to look for the source of the press release, it can’t be found. For example look at the Iowa State News site at: http://www.news.iastate.edu/ it is not listed on the page, nor if you look at the release page http://www.news.iastate.edu/releases/ page. Or do a search using their search engine.
On that search I found a vignette done apparently on Feb 26th, but no official Iowa State news release. Here’s the meat of the vignette, which looks like it was written for an internal newsletter:
He found that increases in average annual temperature or global warming, has an increasing effect on murders and assaults in this country, even after controlling for a variety of other factors.
“For every one degree increase in average temperature, we can expect an increase of 4.58 additional murders and assault cases per every 100,000 people,” Anderson said.
“There are obviously other factors involved,” he continued. “I would never claim that temperature alone would be the main factor that causes violent crime to be higher. However, there is now considerable evidence from a variety of sources that suggesting that high temperature is one cause that contributes to violent behavior, including violent criminal activity.”
Note to Anderson: correlation is not causation
Iowa State’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences news page also does not list the story about Anderson’s claims on global warming driving increased violence. I did find a mention that Anderson has a paper in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science but the latest 2010 edition is apparently not online.
It appears Anderson may have done his own press release, because I certainly haven’t been able to find any evidence that Iowa State official made any sort of news release of Friday March 19th, as cited by the “ground zero” Newswise story.
It is odd that Iowa State doesn’t have any official release. Maybe something will turn up Monday at the Iowa State News site.
In the meantime, his last offical news release on video games and violence gets a thorough drubbing from Techdirt:
===================================
from the except-for-the-details dept
excerpt:
So it seems a bit ridiculous for anyone — especially a professor who has been solidly on one side of the debate for many years, to stand up and claim that he has conclusively shown that violent video games make kids more “aggressive” (found via Slashdot). First, note the choice of words: not violent, but aggressive. Iowa State psychology professor Craig Anderson, who has already staked his reputation on saying that violent video games have a negative impact on kids, isn’t about to back down. He claims that he went through 130 studies and concluded that the support is unequivocal:
“We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method — that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal — and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects,” said Anderson, who is also director of Iowa State’s Center for the Study of Violence. “And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.”
Of course, reality is a bit more fuzzy. The same journal that is publishing Anderson’s new paper is also publishing a commentary from other researchers who disagree and suggest that Anderson has a pretty bad selection bias problem. But the biggest problem — as we noted above, is that all of these “violent video games are bad” studies seem to show incredibly weak effects that don’t appear to be significant in any meaningful way. As the commentary shows:
Psychology, too often, has lost its ability to put the weak (if any) effects found for VVGs on aggression into a proper perspective. In doing so, it does more to misinform than inform public debates on this issue.
Meanwhile, just last year, two Harvard Medical School professors also went through a whole bunch of different studies on violent video games and came to the exact opposite conclusions as Anderson did. It found little actual evidence to support Anderson’s claims, and found significant problems with research suggesting there was a serious link between violent video games and actual violence. Among that report’s findings:
- In the last 10 years, video games studies have been overwhelmingly popular compared to studies on other media.
- Less than half of studies (41%) used well validated aggression measures.
- Poorly standardized and unreliable measures of aggression tended to produce the highest effects, possibly because their unstandardized format allows researchers to pick and choose from a range of possible outcomes.
- The closer aggression measures got to actual violent behavior, the weaker the effects seen.
- Experimental studies produced much higher effects than correlational or longitudinal studies. As experimental studies were most likely to use aggression measures of poor quality, this may be the reason why.
- There was no evidence that video games produce higher effects than other media, despite their interactive nature.
- Overall, effects were negligible, and we conclude that media violence generally has little demonstrable effect on aggressive behavior.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention. Dr. Anderson has apparently embraced a whole new type of science called “Human Thermodynamics”. Here’s an encyclopedia cover at the EoHT Wiki of which he is a member:
There’s even has an equation to quantify the human thermodynamic effect, nicely presented in a non-violent manner. From the EoHT Wiki main page:
Tattoo (or inking) of the Clausius inequality; photo by Marco Fantoni (March, 2008); an example of art thermodynamics. In the photo, showing a hand holding both a new and burnt match, “the hand represents the capacity of the human mind to analyze and understand natural phenomena [such as] the power and imperative of irreversibility.” [3]
He found that increases in average annual temperature or global warming, has an increasing effect on murders and assaults in this country, even after controlling for a variety of other factors.
“For every one degree increase in average temperature, we can expect an increase of 4.58 additional murders and assault cases per every 100,000 people,” Anderson said.
“There are obviously other factors involved,” he continued. “I would never claim that temperature alone would be the main factor that causes violent crime to be higher. However, there is now considerable evidence from a variety of sources that suggesting that high temperature is one cause that contributes to violent behavior, including violent criminal activity.”
UPDATE: WUWT commenter P Wilson shares this map circa 2009 and asks:
What does it show? Rather than Austrialia havin inexorable crime rate, the highest crime rates seem to be in relatively cool countries.
WUWT?
Indeed, according to the map, the top ten countries for crime are:
1. Iceland
2. Sweden
3. New Zealand
4. Grenada
5. Norway
6. England and Wales
7. Denmark
8. Finland
9. Scotland
10. Canada
With the exception of Grenada, all are cooler climate countries. So much for Dr. Anderson’s theory of heat in the form of AGW = crime.
Maybe that’s why Iowa State never published a press release, they were just too embarrassed to do so.
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Irrefutable statistics show that over 85% of all murders take place within 6 days of a new or full moon! These studies are robust. The science is settled. Something must be done. The time for action is here. We must institute a moon tax to pay for moving it into orbit around Al Gore or a similar planet.
Did you misread the study? I skimmed it and what it appears to say is the global warming STUDIES cause viloence. The more AGW studies that come out, the angrier people get. And there’s a positive feedback loop from the number of degrees the average study claims.
“For every one degree increase in average temperature, we can expect an increase of 4.58 additional murders and assault cases per every 100,000 people,” Anderson said.”
Your grasp of Science and Mathematics is breathtaking and only surpassed by your intuitive ability to press a sequence of calculator buttons to the point when you get bored and hit the equals sign!
Your logic and phalangic abilities when combined with your titled credentials indicate that your grant applications are frequently successful and inversely proportional to your understanding of common-sense.
Sir, as much as I admire your chutzpah, I find your intellectual honesty, strangely AWOL.
REPLY: That’s true, the murder rate at 90N is zero. 😉 – Anthony
You’re wrong. Polar bears kill anything that moves.
Volcano eruptions cause cold, famine, French revolutions, and death.
Global warming causes heat, famine, irritable bowel syndrome, and death.
No matter where you look, you’ll find science to prove it.
http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/countries-with-highest-reported-crime-rates.html
What does it show? Rather than Austrialia havin inexorable crime rate, the highest crime rates seem to be in relatively cool countries.
WUWT?
The thought of global warming catastrophe does lead to violence in the sense that some global warming loons are killing themselves and their families:
“Baby survives parents’ global warming suicide pact”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/7344329/Baby-survives-parents-global-warming-suicide-pact.html
Violins maybe?
Marlene Anderson (14:46:47) : “Do these researchers laugh behind their hands when they apply for funding and then present results that tie everything to AGW? Do they believe it themselves or is it the ‘open sesame’ for funding?”
Marlene, I am not kidding when I tell you that some time in the mid-1980’s a friend who was a graduate research student at Boston University laughed when I asked him about global warming, and said it was the best way to get funding for research projects at BU. That would have been around 1985, give or take a few years.
I remember it because (a) it is my first recollection of discussing global warming with anyone, and (b) his reaction surprised me.
Mr Nevada (15:15:47)
given the flat-downward global temperature trend over quite some years, it must something in the water. Actually, its the government propaganda machine and not what they put in the water.
sad story
“Michael (14:45:51) :
Man-made global warming causes Restless Leg Syndrome.
When I first saw the RLS commercial I thought it was a SNL parody. I still do. Why must we be assaulted with this BS 24/7/365? They are trying my patience. ”
Great, the ad as well as the commentary. BTW sodium chloride helps against muscle cramps and restless legs. But beware, it’s chemically identical to evil salt.
You can fool some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people some of the time. No, wait I meant. You can’t not fool all the people some of the time without sometimes getting mixed up.
Anyway, forget the words, think about the images. A half-fried and yellow-furred almost humanoid mammalian, claws desperately holding onto a rare ice-floater phantasises about a mythical food-source, tastes like swan, called penguin.
As much as the WWF pushes its self-seeking, greedy and anti-human-other-than-WWF sponsors as the saviour of the planet, they are to morality as the Nigerian Bank of Trust and Probity are to Free-trade!
So the vulcanos are in principle reducing violence?
Who could know! Maybe that is what ended the viking era?
hehe
Thanks to P Wilson (not me) for the map. However as a citizen of New Zealand I would question whether the information re crime rates is correct. While this is not exactly a crime free paradise, to suggest that NZ (or Canada, for that matter) has a higher rate of crime than, say, South Africa or even the USA, flies in the face of all the other evidence I am aware of.
We typically have about 60 murders a year in NZ, in a population of about 4 million. I’m not sure how many murders the average US city of that population has, but I’m sure its more than that.
The statistic is for “reported crime”, whatever that means. In New Zealand the arrest statistic are artificially inflated by many thousands of minor Marijuana busts, most of which result in no significant sentence. This doesn’t really make us a hotbed of crime.
May of the warmer countries would have low “reported” crime, I suspect, because there is no trustworthy authority to report crimes to.
Garry (15:20:25) :
I fully believe it and it ticks me off just thinking about it. I don’t know whether I’m angry or just discouraged. One has to wonder what scourge might we have conquered if only the research funds were available but weren’t because it was all spent on AGW. Do we blame our dimwit politicians, our complicit media or the corrupt climate science industry?
Good example of why psychologists should be kept out of criminology.
I’m reminded of a National Post article a few weeks ago. The moderator of the United Church had a tearful meltdown because of her fears for all the millions dying from CAGW and Canada didn’t pony up at Copenhagen. She wrote a tearful letter to the government (and presumably phoned a reporter at the Post) beseeching them to save all these dying people.
I’m told there’s a lot of people suffering vicarious trauma from the frightening scenarios being described by the IPCC and their cadre of climate scientists. Now add in more of the sterling research in the article above and the faint of heart must be nigh onto throwing themselves off a bridge in despair.
Did you stop for even a second to question the provenance of this map? It is completely insane to think that Iceland has the highest crime rate in the world – laughable beyond belief. If you know anything at all about the world, you know that Scandinavia is extremely safe. I find it appalling that you would promote this obviously nonsensical map as somehow supporting your point of view.
You guys need to compare to the global anomaly to see the correlation!
@ur momisugly Peter Wilson (15:49:15) :
You are correct to focus on the “reported” crime aspect of the statistics. The notion that this has anything to do with actual crime or violent crime or serious crime is ludicrous. What common elements do
Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Grenada, Norway, England and Wales, Denmark, Finland, Scotland, and Canada
share? Deference to authority, trust in civic institutions like the legal system, social attitudes that mix a kind of polite concern for neighbours with a lack of interest in getting directly involved.
These are societies that are more likely to report crime, not experience it.
Put it this way. Make a list of countries where if you lost your wallet, you would be most likely to get it back with nothing missing. How strongly would it correlate to the above list?
Thought so.
Curiosly, in Argentina crime rates and violence have been increasing exponentially during the years temperature averages have been going down steadily.
One friend of mine moved last week to a new “safer” and “classy” neighbourhood and as he does not a gun he’s been already assaulted in his new home three times in the last four days. My advice was: “Don’t buy a gun: buy three”.
Perhaps it is because South Americans don’t like cool weather and enjoy hot days when cold and delicious beer can send us to paradise… 🙂
Did the “scientist” mentioned at the end of the study that “more studies are needed…”, and he volunteered to keep researching –if adequate funding was availabe?
Mark Wagner (14:17:31) :
are not most episodes of societal upheaval during times of cooling/famine?
Yes, and as the good times come to an end, the greed goes off the scale, making things even worse.
Question: What bad thing isn’t made worse by global warming? I’ve seen global warming blamed on everything from more acne to World War 4 (apparently, global warming is so bad that it skips World War 3). So it seems like the shorter list to these eco-crazies would be a list of what isn’t made worse by global warming.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Steve Goddard (13:46:12) :
All those murders in Chicago and Detroit must be due to the warm weather.
That’s the UHI effect. As soon as you enter any large city from the countryside, the murder rate goes up anywhere from 22.90 to 45.80 per 100,000 people. If you have to commute into a city for work, the government should mandate that you be given hazardous duty pay.
Don’t go to work! Stay at home, you’ll live longer!
To repeat my comment from the ‘CO2 Domes’ item : Is there some kind of competition to see how much AGW believers will stomach without actually employing any intelligent thought?