"Tempers May Flare and Conflicts Rise as Climate Change Heats Up, Study Finds" PBS Newshour 8/7/2013
Excerpt
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Hot temperatures and changes in the climate are strongly linked to human violence. That's the conclusion of a new study recently published in the journal "Science." Researchers at Princeton and the University of California at Berkeley pored through data compiled in 60 studies from a variety of disciplines.
They found that even modest increases in normal temperatures or changes in rainfall increased conflict on all levels, both in ancient times and our own, in wealthy societies and developing ones.
Solomon Hsiang is the lead author of the study, and he joins me now.
Professor, I think we have become accustomed in recent years to observing how weather changes natural systems, whether it's waterways or migratory bird patterns or insect activity. But how do you measure, how do you correlate human behavior to temperature?
SOLOMON HSIANG, University of California, Berkeley: So, in recent years, a variety of research groups have assembled really useful data sets, where we have records of how many conflicts occurred in different locations.
In some cases, we're just looking at things like the FBI files that record how many assaults or rapes or murders happen in a U.S. county on a given day. And then what we do is we link that kind of data to historical data on the climate, so temperature, rainfall. And we try to understand how a change in the environment can lead to human response on the ground.
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