Climate change is fueling extremism, raising tempers along with temperatures, the British Medical Journal reported Monday.
Climate change is fueling extremist violence in many parts of the world, in part because human activity is amplifying storms, droughts and heat waves, according to a British-based medical journal. This is the conclusion at least one British university has reached using a statistical model.
The study, “Assessing the impact of climate change on social conflicts,” published Sunday in the influential BMJ, relies on a statistical model that considers the effects of temperature, precipitation, and drought on crime levels.
British researchers “gave this climate-conflict model to a panel of 1,827 climate science practitioners from more than 30 countries, and asked them to judge its credibility,” and determine whether its results are plausible, by using online voting, the journal reported.
Using their own climate model, they decided that a more probable explanation is that heat and extreme weather events are the biggest causes of violence in the world, BMJ reported.
The researchers found that the average annual death rate from climate-related violence was 8.6 people per 100,000 people compared to more than 33,000 people per 100,000 for all violent deaths worldwide.
In recent years, the journal reported, “war has been the deadliest of all violent threats to the global population.”
Scientists can find reasons for why people do what they do, but “do not yet know what is causing the violent conflict that has become the dominant feature of our globe,” according to the BMJ.
“The study suggests that there may be a link between global warming and the violence that has become an endemic feature of our world,” Robert Pollin, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University, told the BMJ.
The BMJ reported the findings from a study on a study on a study conducted by the British government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) on the causes of crime. The study was conducted by researchers at Lancaster University, the University of York, Stirling University, the University of Stirling, and Lancaster University, and their findings were reported for the BMJ.
The study
