Readers surely recall the wild claim yesterday made by researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley who reported in the journal Science that even slight spikes in temperature and precipitation have greatly increased the risk of personal violence and social upheaval throughout human history:
Claim: 2°C temperature increase will make people angry
Dr. Indur Goklany writes:
Regarding climate change and violence, here are a couple of slides you should link to on WUWT. Apparently, during the “hottest decades” as some claim the 1990s and 2000s have been, U.S. homicide rates dropped!
Figs. 1 and 2: Source: Claude Fischer, A Crime Puzzle, http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/05/02/a-crime-puzzle/, May 2, 2011
Fig. 3: Indicators of homicides per 100,000 population in England, thirteenth to twentieth centuries. Note: Each dot represents the estimated homicide rate for a city or county for periods ranging from several years to several decades. Source: Michael Eisner, Long Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime based on Gurr (1981)
It seems that real world data doesn’t support the conjectures from the hallowed halls of academia.
Related articles
- Scientists say global violence could rise with global warming (upi.com)
- Hot and bothered: Climate warming predicted to increase violent conflicts | @BobOHara & @GrrlScientist (theguardian.com)
- Climate change linked to violent behaviour (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
- Youth homicide rate hits lowest mark in 30 years (onlineathens.com)
- Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak (ritholtz.com)
- Gun Homicide rates are actually down, not up (buyashotgun.wordpress.com)
Chicago is a special case. Only criminals have guns in Chicago and they also write the laws.
The homicide rates dropped because many states adopted concealed carry. Studies and even a book (More Guns, Less Crime: John Lott) using FBI crime data show this from 1977 onwards. Also the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act created an FBI maintained system in 1994 for instantly checking the backgrounds of potential firearms buyers in an effort to prevent felons, illegal aliens and some other risky folks from obtaining guns.
Maybe next it will be that warming causes the cost of war to go up.
Latest: Harvard Kennedy School – Linda Bilmes on U.S. engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan: “The most expensive wars in US history” 4-6 trillion
http://fcnl.org/blog/2c/calculating_the_true_cost_of_war/
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/bilmes-iraq-afghan-war-cost-wp
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-28/world/38097452_1_iraq-price-tag-first-gulf-war-veterans
“Every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.” Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003, Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert
Here’s a version of the Jacobs paper “THE DYNAMICS OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR : EVIDENCE FROM WEATHER SHOCKS”
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10739.pdf
“5.2 The Effect of Weather on Crime
Criminologists have long recognized that weather has a powerful influence on criminal activity,
suggesting it might serve as a plausible instrument to identify the relationship between crime rates over time. Here we examine the relationship between weather and crime in our data.
Table 3 examines the relationship between weather and violent as well as property crime using
the baseline set of controls described above. The dependent variable here is the number of incidents in a jurisdiction-week divided by the average number of weekly incidents in that jurisdiction over the entire sample period, so that the coefficients on the explanatory variables can be interpreted roughly as a percent change in the outcome. Looking first at columns 1-4, we see that weather – particularly temperature – is strongly correlated with violent crime. Column 1 indicates that a ten degree increase in the average weekly temperature is correlated with about a 5 percent increase in criminal activity. Precipitation, on the other hand, is associated with reductions in criminal activity. An increase in average weekly precipitation of 1 inch is associated with a 10 percent reduction in violence. These effects are highly significant—the F-statistic of joint significance is over 200.”
These are the authors referenced the graph http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/59922.php?from=245789
I wish academics would stop just parroting off ideas without checking. Most of SE Asia has some of the lowest violent crime rates in the world (excluding PNG). Its hot and humid too. The reason is cultural, nothing to do with temperature.
I wonder if they’ve noticed the increased death rate of elderly Brits in the winter months of recent years. Not likely as it is off message. Is there anything so disgusting as a climate hysteria alarmist?
Some still do not understand , such ‘science’ by press release is NOT fact dependent.
Therefore attacking it on factual grounds may make you feel good it may even be sound science , but once the lie is up and running it has little affect.
Silly me. I thought it was the other way around. Wasn’t lack of food a principal cause of the French Revolution, courtesy of Laki (volcano in Iceland) and the following Napoleonic wars (Dalton Grand Minimum)? Didn’t the great 17th Century 30 year wars in Europe happen in the early part of the Maunder Minimum? Wasn’t the Arab Spring sparked by food riots in the Middle East because the price of bread doubled due to wheat crop failures at the start of the new (current) grand minimum?
And even in the last Century I thought that the both the world wars were fought in relatively cold periods in Europe – at least compared to European temperatures later in the Century.
I guess it all depends on our perspective – or lack of it.
Murder Rates per 100 000 population
New Orleans 2012 54
Detroit 2012 53
USA (overall) (most recent) 9.1
Singapore 2012 0.9457
Darwin 2011/12 murders, 2011 pop’n 13.27
Cabot Cove 12 years 149.0 (source: wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder,_She_Wrote)
Make of that what you will!
As we travel jointly down the dusty road of life (ok, gimme a break, I’m just trying to add a little drama here) may I humbly (no, I’m not Obama) ask my fellow travelers from our renowned institutions of Princeton and Berkeley some additional questions about this, um, research concerning violence and global warming.
Will a 2 degree rise in average global temperature contribute to more hanky panky between the sexes, and will such hanky panky cause an increase in the number of people who will be entering their prime crime years approximately 18 years from now?
If the foregoing postulated 2 degree rise in temperature is abated by thoroughly impossible to achieve carbon reductions will the increase in inhabitants in their prime crime years be abated by … skip it.
Will the prognosis for crime rates in the future, from global warming, in the future, be only accessible by gazing into a crystal ball, and if this crystal ball is hazy, is it best polished by multiple pieces of rectangular green paper sporting complex line drawings of Benjamin Franklin or even more noble historical figures that rubes like me never get to see?
Will a 2 degree rise in temperature cause the word ‘jihad’ to form a chemical reaction with complex self-actuating carbon molecules or doesn’t a temperature change really make any difference to that at all?
Is more than one word necessary to describe precisely how much you know about human nature and if more than one word is necessary can your research team explain why that is so?
Is it really that easy to describe human actions simply through numbers?
Allied with the foregoing question: If human behavior was really simple enough to merely predict it through numbers, for chrissake how would us extraordinary simpletons then be smart enough to even know that?
What I have learned over the years is that when dealing with Warmists’ claims about the future – always, always look to the past and present as a guide. Whether it’s Arctic runaway amplification, global runaway warming, extreme weather trends, shriveling lizards, extinction threats, declining fauna, corroded shells, bigger birds, impotent or deaf fish, shrinking sheep etc. As a rule of thumb Warmists are usually making stuff up to fit an agenda and to get more continued, lavish funding.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
There’s more burglaries in warm weather as (if there’s no aircon) people leave their windows open and opportunists climb through. There’s also more rioting when the weather is warm and dry, as who wants to take to the streets when it’s cold and raining?
Generally, though, warmer climate means better agriculture, full tummies and happy people. This ‘study’ is yet another attempt to put something in the list of negative impacts from rising temperatures and to aid the “something must be done” political argument. Bin it.
Trends in armed conflicts, see graphs. Even global democracy is on the rise while autocracy has been declining.
http://www.systemicpeace.org/conflict.htm
So the recent global warming and the ‘HOTTEST DECADE ON THE RECORD’ hasn’t done much. It’s almost as warm as the Holocene Climate Optimum and Roman Warm Period (according to jai mitchell). 🙂
So,by extension, people in warmer climates are angrier and more prone to crime than those in colder climates?
Years ago in a statistics class we learned the risks of confusing correlation with causation. The example given was personal crime increases in warmer seasons. The reason? More people are out and about on warm days and are more accessible to criminals.
I don’t think it is the large number of guns which reduces gun crime in America. I think it is decriminalising shooting people that reduces gun crime in America. I am not anti-gun, I owned 55 the last time I counted.
You just know that when you read a claim like this that it is going to be complete garbage as it pretty much goes against the grain of everything we know. The warm period of history have always been periods of relative stability – Romans, Renaissance and of course the current modern situation. If you start with an objective to “prove” a link between climate change and violence, no doubt some data somewhere can be tortured enough to give you what you want to hear.
On another topic, the seemingly unstoppable avalanche of new angles on things we need to worry about is never ending. See link below on how we need to worry that the shapes of our mountains will now be changing more quickly. Seriously, its unbelievable that they could somehow torture a piece of irrelevant research about how glaciers help limit erosion of mountaintops into something we might need to worry about.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23553094
If somebody uses a valid observation as a base for unwarranted, erroneous, nonsensical or malicious claims, it does not make the observaton itself less valid.
This must be the reason Sweden has become one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to rape, since most of them are done in the hot summertime.. Silly me, I thougt it was the import of moslem gangs that make our streets unsafe for both women and men.
To be fair, when it comes to rape, the statistics is a bit inflated because anything can be rape these days. Just look at what happened to Assange.
Dude, look at the murder rate in Oxford. No wonder Inspector Morse was kept so busy! 🙂
Violence is largely driven by culture.
It is certainly true that famines (caused by global cooling) have caused violence.
In history, global cooling, and resulting crop failure and famine, was much more likely to cause violence than was warming. It sickens me to see the sheer volume of bad scholarship dedicated to trying to bolster the CAGW theory.
From Rational Db8 on August 2, 2013 at 8:58 pm:
404 – not found
Try http://www.steubencourier.com/community/blogs/steuben_courier_town_square_blog/x1683319441/Bringing-a-Gun-to-a-Knife-Fight-A-Discussion-on-Gun-Violence-Homicide-and-Statistics instead. Looks like (by the full URLS) a Steuben Courier blog entry is now to be found on the blog’s separate site.
Make special note of this footnote, you should have included it in your quotes as the notation was given (bold added):
John R. Lott, Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (3rd. 2010, Chicago), maintains http://www.johnlott.org/, where he posts,
“Instructions for Obtaining John R. Lott’s Raw Data: Most of this data involves STATA 7.0 data sets. The reason for using this is that the county level data involves a much larger set of control variables than can readily be handled by other statistical packages. The data sets can be obtained by clicking on the following links which will take you to the download page:
Chapter 6: MVPS Paper Data Chapters 7 and 8: Safe Storage, Gun Shows, Assault Weapons Data Appendix 1: Crime Data 77-00 Data Appendix 2: Magazine Sales Data 2002 Survey on Defensive Gun Use Data General Discussion of the 1997 and 2002 Surveys Debate_over_Stanford_Law_Review Confirming More Guns, Less Crime
All of the Above Sections
When calculating the whole of gun violence and population, do not forget to factor in the state. There are many countries that outlaw guns. Person to person murder by gun might be lower, but the states in question have killed millions of citizens over the decades without fear of reprisal.
During a recent discussion of why the crime rates down down while the prison population goes up, it was clearly pointed out that there are studies that show, at least for the USA, that the crime rate is mostly dependent on the 18-24 year old demographic. The long term drop in the US crime rate that began in 1991, some 18 years after the SCOTUS ruling on Roe v Wade made abortion legal throughout the US, which created a permanent drop in the 18-24 year old demographic.
It’s easy to have a drop in crime when there are fewer of the persons most likely to be dimwitted enough to try it.
Trying to tag climate trends to this same phenomena is a moot discussion not worthy of federal grant money.
Nothing brings out agreement in a WUWT discussion like linking together Global Warming and gun control issues. 🙂
CommieBob says: “Violence is largely driven by culture.”
Wrong. Violence is part of human nature. Different cultures are variously successful in suppressing it.
michaelwiseguy says:
And a huge increase in violent rape in Australia since they banned guns. (I think I read it’s now 3X the USA rate and climbing?) Banning guns to law abiding citizens is primarily a war on women and a war on the weak in general; a war on those least likely to be able to defend themselves without a gun.
Neo says: August 3, 2013 at 5:26 am “It’s easy to have a drop in crime when there are fewer of the persons most likely to be dimwitted enough to try it.”
Amen to that. Criminals don’t grow on trees, ~somebody~ has to raise them. When you look at where the highest crime rates occur it becomes obvious which political party is responsible for policies that foster immoral behavior and criminality.