Study Links Climate Change And Violence, Battle Ensues

摘要

In many large cities, police know that a hot summer will be a busy time, as murder and mayhem spike with the temperature. Some social scientists say that the same pattern could hold globally. Along with wilted harvests and a loss of biodiversity, they say, climate change could lead to escalating violence. Now, a study published online this week in Science tries to quantify the increase Based on dozens of published studies correlating extreme weather and human conflict, it concludes that warmer temperatures and more extreme rainfall patterns could boost interpersonal violence by 16% and group conflicts in some regions by 50% by 2050."We were conservative and the result is still clear," says econometrician Solomon Hsiang, the paper's lead author, who will soon join the University of California, Berkeley. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, who has studied climate change and conflict since the 1990s, agrees. "This study, precisely because it's an extremely carefully done meta-analysis, will push the debate a big step forward."