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)
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Mike M says: August 3, 2013 at 6:14 am “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.”
Ah yes, It Takes a Village:, by Hag Xlinton, to raise a violent idiot. It takes an intact and effective family to raise a human child.
About the armed society, Robert Anson Heinlein’s quote is “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life”, from his 1942 Beyond This Horizon.
Are they trying to imply that peoples in warmer climates are more violent and those in Northern climates less violent?
You don’t understand. The violence is there; it’s just hiding, waiting for a chance to come out and show itself.
I am now living in Phoenix and our summer temperatures range from 100 to 118 degrees. In the heat of the day you see few people out on the street because the natives and adjusted their life style. Under normal conditions life is finding the next air conditioner and spending as little time as possible outside. If you have to work outside, you start at first light and work till noon or one and then quit for the day. People will wander out again when the sun is low in the sky for about an hour.
This means few people are in the open where a crime can be committed against them and the few that are work with a crew where they can watch out for each other. You will still see crimes around night clubs but I blame that more on drugs and alcohol than on climate.
When winter comes around you will see people working in their yard during the day and often people will relax on the front porch because they are tired of staying inside all summer and want to enjoy the outdoors. Just the reverse of northern climate where it’s to cold to go outside in the winter but summer is when you get out and about.
I have seen reports about crime dropping in the north when some of the big snow storms hit because the criminals didn’t want to go out in the weather. I think more study needs to be done on the subject.
Wherethereishope. says: @ur momisugly August 2, 2013 at 8:29 pm
Every single time there is a global warming claim it is proven wrong when compared to relevant data, no exceptions, this is getting ridiculous.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Why do you think they are now resorting to Argument from Intimidation. Calling us ‘Flat Earthers’ Mental Defectives and even going to the extend of having the head of the US Department of Interior, Sally Jewell: [saying] ‘I Hope There Are No Climate Change Deniers In The Department Of Interior’
From John Kehr (The Inconvenient Skeptic)
It certainly is not about science when they won’t debate or even show the data and methods but instead threaten your livelihood if you do not Kiss A…
“even slight spikes in temperature and precipitation have greatly increased the risk of personal violence and social upheaval throughout human history:”
===
I believe that would also cover terrorist attacks…
….which were always way down in hot weather
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/americanattacks.htm
Janice Moore says: @ur momisugly August 2, 2013 at 8:40 pm
quoting: John Eliyas, August 2, 2013 at 7:36 am
… Studies like this have been going on for 50 years. While in graduate school we looked at studies trying to correlate heat waves and violence, know what we found? When it gets warm people commit crime, up to a point and then it tapers off. Why? Cold weather is not conducive to the hassle of leaving shelter to commit said crime. When it warms up, people come out of their “caves” and commit crimes. If it gets really, really, hot, like some of the NY heatwaves of the 70′s, crime goes down as people become lethargic and don’t want the hassle.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I work outside doing kid’s entertainment at festivals and such. If the temperature is below ~ 45F forget it, or if above ~90F forget it. At ~$4.00/gal for diesel you can be sure I have been tracking this type of data for years because I am not about to work all day in the hot or the cold only to lose money.
In NYC there has been an extraordinary reduction in violent crime during the past 20 years despite all the alleged warming and “extreme” weather events. Although, people do tend to get a little cranky when it’s hot.
NYC has the best police force anywhere, but I don’t suppose these “researchers” would consider anything like good law enforcement as part of their study.
Idiots.
I think there must be something to it Anthony. I bet if you checked on murder rates they’d be highest in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East. And lowest in western Europe, Canada, Alaska, and parts of East Asia. Unless there’s something else at work here that I’m missing.
Since the subjects of violence and gun control came up together on this thread, it just occurred to me that there is a biological case to be made for arming everybody with a handgun or some lethal weapon, does not matter what kind.
Disclaimer: I do not own a gun and never had to use one to defend myself, and I have so far been neutral on the issue of gun control. I only built and used guns for entertainment when I was young. But I know how violent behavior is moderated in different animals, including our closest relatives.
There is a general pattern: predators are socially non-violent, while herbivores are usually extremely violent. Lion fights are not nearly as violent as bull fights. When two male cobras fight, you can’t even tell it’s a fight. It looks more like a sports contest: the one that stands taller on his tail is the winner. That’s all. You can easily imagine why it is so: animals possessing lethal powers would be wiped out in territorial and mating conflicts if they did not have innate prohibitions against using their lethal weapons in such conflicts. Humans, like bulls or rabbits, do not have such prohibitions. They fight each other violently, but death is an extremely rare outcome in such fights, so they can afford not to have a prohibitive instinct.
Now, very recently (in evolutionary terms), the man — a non-lethal scavenger — suddenly invented lethal weapons. Jolly good, that. Now we have food on our table. But we have not acquired any prohibitions against killing each other except for moral and cultural ones, which are very, very weak, as many have noted here.
So it seems like giving a lethal weapon to everybody is a more feasible way of suppressing violence than removing all weapons from all people, which, if it were possible, would return us to the perpetually brutal lifestyle of our ancestors.
Did any of these temperature/crime studies account for the availability of air conditioning?
Hello John Lott, maybe more guns, less suicide too? Lithuania 316 suicides (per million), 7 guns (per 100). USA 120 suicides, 90 guns. South Korea 317 suicides, 11 guns. Sweden 111 suicides, 31.8 guns. Slovenia 218 suicides, 13.5 guns. Kuwait 18 suicides, 24.8 guns. Japan 217 suicides, 0.6 guns. Belarus 229 suicides, 7.3 guns. …
As an exercise I matched up 96 countries from these two wiki pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country then I scatter plotted the numbers in Excel to reveal an astonishing number when I did a linear trend line for them, an R^2=0.0002 !
So much for the puking LIE that guns lead to more suicide. That R^2 says that guns are likely to have NOTHING to do with higher suicide rates. I’ll leave it to someone else to weight the numbers on populations so little countries aren’t wagging the dog like Nepal or Iceland, etc. but wouldn’t be surprised that people in countries with lower suicide are those with higher individual Liberty and just happen to incidentally have higher gun ownership for the same reason.
I saw a report the other day that contended that the murder rate in the US minus the 6 or 7 largest urban areas (literally removing only 10 zip codes) was about the same as Sweden’s. But those 10 zip codes had murder rates that make the worst third world countries look tame. All of these bad areas were run by gun control advocates.
Greg Scott says:
August 2, 2013 at 7:48 pm
“Obviously as violence goes up the reporting of violence goes down. We need a computer model to give us the real figures.”
Homocides are reported and every city gives regular homocide, robbery,breaking and entering etc statistics. Probably you are extrapolating from the well-known reluctance of news media to report sensational things like violent crime, global warming and the like. (sarc. off)
@michaelwiseguy
If your data in Australia were to be correct, then you would indeed be justified to claim that your absurd proposition applies to every society on Earth at any time in history because it would indeed explain the fundamental human requirement of weaponry in order to exist. But it isn’t and it doesn’t.
Not too long back there was a thread about how catastrophists “subtly” encourage radical beliefs among its troops. Ample proof was provided. Well, here we have people that believe creationism is scientific and folks that need a gun in order to get along. I don’t see a general condemnation anywhere.
I do recall reading an article about study a few years ago (before global warming was an active agenda) and it did document a temperature relationship to crime but it was not what you would think.
They found that “street crime” reached a maximum (in a given location) when temperature hovered near the mid 80’s and people were out and about and it was too hot to sleep comfortably so folks got irritable and short tempered.
At higher temps everyone stays cranky but they don’t go out and mix as much as it is too hot to do much especially if the nights are hot. They mostly veg out any place they can get some relief from the heat. Obviously in colder weather crime also drops as street muggers don’t like working in a cold rain any more than any other worker.
I bet if you plotted street murders in Chicago with temperatures at the time of the killing you would find such a single hump relationship, but unfortunately I don’t recall where I saw the study.
It was probably done in the early 1990’s or there about as I recall.
Hmm, so mind control via weather isn’t looking like a runner.
Well who’d have thought it.
But, looking at the graphs, can anyone tell me what happened in Oxford in the 1350s?
Experimental theologians unleashing a plague of demonic possession, perhaps.
Ignore that last comment. I was mocking the idea that one parameter can explain something as complex as human behaviour… especially with regard to physical violence that many people are trained to restrain.
Yet, it occurred to me that such an outlier as Oxford in the 1350s is probably a measurement effect. Oxford was one of the most advanced research centres in the world at the time. If they decided to study the real world then they would have had a different methodology for crime recording tan everyone else.
Which is quite interesting.
@ur momisuglyKadaka, thanks for noting and finding an active link to the article. Honestly, I’m not worried about adding the footnote to an already long post, when I think pretty much everyone has heard the adage “lies, damned lies, and statistics” – and they also know that not all statistics lie, they in fact can often be quite accurate and useful.
@ur momisugly Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says: August 3, 2013 at 5:40 am
Thanks for the good chuckle!
From Txomin on August 3, 2013 at 11:12 am:
As you missed it while ranting, it was actually Mike M here who brought up Australia, in reply to michaelwiseguy’s comment.
From the Australian Institute of Criminology:
The data’s getting old, latest is circa 2007. In the climate wars, we have noted when certain (C)AGW-pushing organizations decide to stop updating certain stats and graphs when the facts stop supporting the narrative, especially when those facts actually refute it and them. Thus I wonder how bad it really has gotten in the past five years.
“But we have not acquired any prohibitions against killing each other except for moral and cultural ones, which are very, very weak, as many have noted here.”
Very, very weak? Look at how hard Western militaries have had to work to convince new recruits to kill soldiers on the other side. See Dave Grossman’s work on the subject, for example.
MarkG: It is an interesting observation highlighting the difference and a fair amount of disconnect between the act of killing (or any type of fighting) and the instinctive drive to do so.
I myself would face enormous trouble killing somebody following somebody else’s command, or even if the rationale for doing so were explained to me in a compelling way.
But I have no trouble killing my personal enemies who (let’s imagine, at this very moment) annoy me to the point of wanting to kill them, do something bad to my mate or my children — that kind of stuff. In such situations, I would have trouble restraining myself, and in fact, I’ve had incidents in my somewhat longish life when I was helpfully blocked from killing people by external force. I believe such restraint has cultural origins and is not natural.
I am not sure if it is specifically masculine behaviour; I don’t know how women respond to, and whether they even experience the urge to fight (I’m avoiding the word “aggression”, which is loaded with cultural connotations). But I can bet many of us males have experienced “tunnel vision” — the condition where your eyes stop scanning, leaving you with a dark field and only a small blurry opening in the middle, through which you can vaguely discern the face of your opponent. At the same time, you feel kilotons of energy building up in your fists. Sounds familiar? You’re in a fighting mode. That’s the condition I’m talking abut. I doubt any military, Western or not, know how to induce it in soldiers.
It is a very natural condition, though. Your opponent may be in the same condition, at the same time, and you get into a fight, just like bulls or rabbits do.
The new, specifically human element in this, is that if you happen to spot a substantial object within your grasp — a stick or a projectile of any sort — you grab it and it instantly makes you lethal. Biologically, it is a new element and our bodies don’t quite know what to do about it. We feel it’s not totally safe and not totally right, so we’re making efforts to regulate it in a number of ways. I maintain that these secondary regulations are relatively weak, compared to instincts or to a gun barrel aimed at you.
Many factors contribute to the rise in violence and crime. To grasp at warming as the culprit is ludicrous. So warming causes lying!!!????
Here’s a rather interesting look at the FBI count of crimes for the last 20 years. Violent crime is dropping, rape is dropping, murder is dropping, and other crimes are dropping.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1
Maybe we should say that “Global Warming” causes a drop in crime. ;-))
These people need to spend a year in Ketchikan, AK or La Push, Washington if they want to see weather related mood swings. Something about 120″/year of rain that will peel the hide off your soul. On the other hand every time I go to Reno or Las Vegas I see happy people spending crazy amounts of money and enjoying life. I’ll take Hawaii over Seattle every time.
Don’t use the FBI link! It will confuse people. Why compare observations to projections? 🙂