Two new studies warn that a hotter world will be a more violent one | Hacker News Reader

Two new studies warn that a hotter world will be a more violent one

washingtonpost.com

29 pointscsomar18 comments

I hope it’s ok to be skeptical. Human behavior seems like quite a hard thing to predict.

And mammals did thrive in the Paleocene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_The...

(I’ll show myself out)

"The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. ... Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C."

I hope we're wrong, but having this happen during a couple of hundred years together with massive human species invasion, seems to be quite another scenario.

The disintegration of Western civilization and the crumbling of the American Empire could lead to an uptick in violence as ideological conflicts increase as these groups either compete for power or simply survival. Pointing to heat seems almost like exploiting a politically convenient correlation.

A hypothesis is not a study.

This suggests you didn't read the article or the linked studies.

Extrapolating from these "studies" to this headline is ridiculous, and the effect sizes were tiny anyway. The hypothesis in the headline and the "warnings" they give (do they even mention global warming in the studies?) are not supported by the phenomenon studied.

Good lord, this is such awful science, it shouldn't be on Hacker News. This website is supposed to be somewhat robust against complete garbage.

> To help suss out cause and effect, the authors analyzed Los Angeles’s daily crime data while controlling for two key factors: whether public schools were in session on a given day and overall traffic volume on the region’s highways (a proxy for total social activity in the city).

I note that they did not try to increase violence and then measure whether the temperature went up in response, which is the true way to suss out cause vs effect.

I dunno that they needed to do a whole study....they could have just watched Do The Right Thing

Or Mad Max and Waterworld.

Or Idiocracy.

You can't seriously recommend Waterworld.

Why not, it's better than the real USPS

You're probably thinking of The Postman (1997)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119925/

But it has Dennis Hopper on a jet ski

the sage view of Ray Bradbury

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9945791-more-murders-are-co...

These are the types of "studies" that drive even more people to skepticism when it comes to climate change and even science in general.

What are your criticisms of the studies?

They don't know some unknown and probably unknowable number of the variables at play and the variables they do know that don't know to the degree of precision that they pretend to.

This is like studies that pretend to measure intelligence with IQ tests. They don't know what they're measuring but they have a faulty system to measure it that produces a number that's more a joke then any reflection of reality.

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