Great, Just Great. Global Warming Might Make Cops (And Maybe You) Even More Trigger Happy.

A new study chronicles the link between warming and violence of all sorts at all levels from individuals to entire nations.   And that goes for cops too.

The Syrian conflict [triggered in part by severe drought] is just one recent example of the connection between climate and conflict, a field that is increasingly piquing the interest of criminologists, economists, historians, and political scientists. Studies have begun to crop up in leading journals examining this connection in everything from the collapse of the Mayan civilization to modern police training in the Netherlands. A survey published today in Science takes a first-ever 30,000-foot view of this research, looking for trends that tie these examples together through fresh analysis of raw data from 60 quantitative studies. It offers evidence that unusually high temperatures could lead to tens of thousands more cases of "interpersonal" violence—murder, rape, assault, etc.—and more than a 50 percent increase in "intergroup" violence, i.e. war, in some places.

"This is what keeps me awake at night," lead author Solomon Hsiang, an environmental policy post-doc at Princeton, said. "The linkage between human conflict and climate changes was really pervasive."

It's not just isolated hot days that spur increased violence; the study found increased conflict in warmer-than-usual periods over time spans ranging from an hour (in a controlled experiment where police trainees were stuck in rooms of different temperatures and asked to respond to a hypothetical aggressor; cops in the hot room were much more likely to fire their weapons) to thousands of years (in an anthropological study of how summer temperatures drove the collapse of ancient human settlements in northern Norway).

...The study also found general agreement amongst case studies that exceptionally high and low rainfall—particularly when it impacts agricultural production—can lead both to interpersonal and intergroup violence. But even looking only at scientists' projections for future temperature increases, the statistical rise in violent tendencies is significant enough, the study claims, that "amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change." In other words, it's something we might need to prepare for—just like rising seas or nastier wildfires.