I didn’t make that up:
Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 30,000 murders, 200,000 cases of rape, 1.4 million aggravated assaults, 2.2 million simple assaults, 400,000 robberies, 3.2 million burglaries, 3.0 million cases of larceny, and 1.3 million cases of vehicle theft in the United States.
The idea is simple and clean of course – warmer temperatures are associated with more criminal activity, and since climate change means a warmer planet it is “reasonable” to expect more bad stuff to happen when the planet gets warmer. But warmth does NOT cause any of these things. When you guys turn on the heat in your house during the winter and come in from outside, do you start beating your spouse? The paper indicates the pathways from temperature to crime, but citing the correlations says nothing about how easy or difficult it is to mitigate the problem.
Finally, for your thought, suppose you take this paper seriously. How do the results compare to the impact of US migration patterns on robbery, rape, assault, theft, etc? This map provides a glimpse of what has been happening over time:
Obviously the sun has a stronger gravitational pull in the evenings, which is slowly dragging the Mean Center of Population west.
Wow. I have no words. Well, at least it is from a school of Public Policy, so it’s not entirely surprising. This was someone’s dissertation?? They actually got away with saying that climate “change”…caused…crime? Climate related crime? What is climate related crime? A snowball fight gone wrong? This analyses is so weak, I can’t believe someone bothered with it. He controls for nothing at all, other than time. I guess demographics, economic factors etc aren’t important in crime.
I think the next step is to write a paper of how short skirts cause rape. I’m sure the association will be just as great as temperature.
This is known from criminal justice statistics and the easy explanation is that in a temperate climate with four seasons, in the warmer months, everyone is out more. People are on the street to be victimized – including automobile thefts, larceny from a vehicle, etc.; and they leave their homes unoccupied, often with windows open. The problem of violence against women is related.
In a classic study from Australia by John Braithwaite, the seemingly counterintuitive fact that unemployment correlated with a decrease in crime focused on crimes against women. When the general economy expands, employment opportunities for women are more common. Leaving the home, women are victimized going to and from work.
Global warming may well lead to more sexual assaults – in temperate climates, ceteris paribus, as the economists say: all other things being equal; i.e., if no other behaviors change. People might find more shelter indoors to escape the heat, for instance.
Michael E. Marotta, I believe the Saudis have found a solution to this problem of women getting raped because of jobs and going outside in short skirts. I believe this is why we have seen an increase in conversions to Islam in America; its due to global warming.