‘Study: Global Warming Will Cause 180,000 More Rapes by 2099’
2nd March 2014
Mother Jones lives up (down?) to its fine, fine reputation.
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.
This is the sort of pseudo-science that our ‘progressive’ ruling class swallows without a tremor.