Global Warming gives new meaning to "A Heated Argument" and more Adverse Human Effects

Climate change isn't only affecting water supplies, strengthening storms, creating more weather extremes, melting glaciers faster, rising sea levels quicker and creating more drought and flood events, it's also making humans more violent. Thus says a new study.  Global Warming gives new meaning to "A Heated Argument."    Here's an Excerpt of a story from Science News How extreme heat from climate change distorts human behavior...

As temperatures rise, violence and aggression also go up while focus and productivity decline

By Sujata Gupta, SCIENCE NEWS , AUGUST 18, 2021  

Physiologically, people’s bodies aren’t built to handle heat beyond wet bulb temperatures — a combined measure of heat and humidity — of around 35° Celsius, or about 95° Fahrenheit (SN: 5/8/20). Mounting evidence shows that when heat taxes people’s bodies, their performance on various tasks, as well as overall coping mechanisms, also suffer. Researchers have linked extreme heat to increased aggression, lower cognitive ability and, as Tewari and colleagues showed, lost productivity.

With rising global temperatures, and record-breaking heat waves baking parts of the world, the effects of extreme heat on human behavior could pose a growing problem (SN: 6/29/21).

Heat tends to make people more irritable, says Anderson, whose findings appeared in the 2000 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. And as a result, “they tend to just perceive things as being more nasty when they’re hot than when they’re comfortable.”

(Graph:  Fueling crime:  Researchers have long known that people can become more aggressive when overheated. A new study looking at crime data in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2017 shows that violent crime rises when temperatures exceed a pleasant 65° to 70° Fahrenheit. SOURCE: K. HEILMANN, M.E. KAHN AND C.K. TANG/J. OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS 2021. CREDIT: C. CHANG) 

STUDY IN PRISONS- Economists Anita Mukherjee of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Nicholas Sanders of Cornell University looked at rates of violence across 36 correctional facilities from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2010. Overall, each facility averaged about 65 violent acts per year. But the pair found that on days above around 27° C (80.6 Fahrenheit)— which occur about just over 60 days per year — the probability of violence among inmates rose 18 percent.

STUDY IN STUDENTS - Park looked at scores for almost 1 million students and about 4.5 million exams from 1999 to 2011. That analysis, appearing March 2020 in the Journal of Human Resources, found that students who take the exam on an approximately 32° C (89.6 Fahrenheit) day are 10 percent less likely to pass a given subject than if they had taken that exam on a 24° C (75.2 Fahrenheit) day. ( reported in the May 2020 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy)

FULL ARTICLE: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/extreme-heat-climate-change-human-behavior-aggression-equity?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=latest-newsletter-v2&utm_source=Latest_Headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest_Headlines