Shifts in climate change are strongly linked to human violence around the world, according to a comprehensive new study released Thursday by the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University.
The research, which was published in Science, examined 60 previous studies from all major regions of the globe. The results suggest that changes such as drought, flood and high temperatures strongly correlate with spikes in conflict.
Researchers noted examples including increased domestic violence in India and Australia, assaults and murders in the United States and Tanzania, ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia, land invasions in Brazil, police violence in the Netherlands and civil conflicts throughout the tropics.
The biggest culprit: higher temperatures. Out of 27 modern societies studied, all 27 showed a positive relationship between higher temperatures and violence
"We found that a one standard deviation shift towards hotter conditions causes the likelihood of personal violence to rise four percent and intergroup conflict to rise 14 percent," UC Berkeley's Marshall Burke, the study's co-lead author, wrote in a release.
If the study's calculations are correct, a global temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius could increase intergroup conflicts (such as civil wars) by over 50 percent. And, as Climate Central notes, projections estimate that temperatures will make that jump by 2040.
The Huffington Post
Robin Wilkey
The way it is shaping up, the social, political and economics cost of global warming and its consequences is going to be staggering, on the order of tens of trillions$ foreseeably, if not hundreds of trillions over time. This is the clock we need, instead of the "debt clock," which is meaningless propaganda.
The way it is shaping up, the social, political and economics cost of global warming and its consequences is going to be staggering, on the order of tens of trillions$ foreseeably, if not hundreds of trillions over time. This is the clock we need, instead of the "debt clock," which is meaningless propaganda.
4 comments:
"shifts in climate change are strongly linked to human violence "
Right, I would point out that even with more just economic policies among we humans, we humans are still going to be up against these types of real forces that we largely cannot control or influence very much...
Let's not make it harder on ourselves by screwing up the economics and thereby screwing each other in addition...
This world is hard enough on us...
rsp,
Explains why we are relatively sedate here in Canada.
Trillions and trillions...really?
Scientific American: A release of methane in the Arctic could speed the melting of sea ice and climate change with a cost to the global economy of up to $60 trillion over coming decades, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.
And that is just one factor. Add in the populated land that is in the process of being submerged, scarcity of water, etc. and the figure mounts up fast — in trillions globally.
I'm suspicious that there are no benefits being tallied to offset these trillions.
Perhaps it would be more sensible not to include cost estimates.
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