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Wow, Dems will link anything to this....
Global warming isn't just going to melt the Arctic and flood our cities?it's also going to make Americans more likely to kill each other.
That's the conclusion of a controversial new study that uses historic crime and temperature data to show that hotter weather leads to more murders, more rapes, more robberies, more assaults, and more property crimes.
"Looking at the past, we see a strong relationship between temperature and crime," says study author Matthew Ranson, an economist with the policy consulting firm Abt Associates. "We think that is likely to continue in the future."
Just how much more crime can we expect? Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099, climate change will "cause" an additional "22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft" in the United States.
Ranson acknowledges that those results represent a relatively small jump in the overall level of crime?a 2.2 percent increase in murder and a 3.1 percent increase in rape, for instance. Still, says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, those numbers add up to "a lot of victims" over the course of the century.
www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/climate-change-murder-rape
Global warming isn't just going to melt the Arctic and flood our cities?it's also going to make Americans more likely to kill each other.
That's the conclusion of a controversial new study that uses historic crime and temperature data to show that hotter weather leads to more murders, more rapes, more robberies, more assaults, and more property crimes.
"Looking at the past, we see a strong relationship between temperature and crime," says study author Matthew Ranson, an economist with the policy consulting firm Abt Associates. "We think that is likely to continue in the future."
Just how much more crime can we expect? Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099, climate change will "cause" an additional "22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft" in the United States.
Ranson acknowledges that those results represent a relatively small jump in the overall level of crime?a 2.2 percent increase in murder and a 3.1 percent increase in rape, for instance. Still, says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, those numbers add up to "a lot of victims" over the course of the century.
www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/climate-change-murder-rape