Myself and Zachary Jacobi did some research for a post that we were going to call “Second-Order Effects Make Climate Change an Existential Threat” back in April 2019. At this point, it’s unlikely that our notes will be converted into a post, so I’m going to link a document of our rough notes.
The tl;dr of the doc:
Epistemic status: conjecture stated strongly to open debate.
It seems like there is a robust link between heat and crime (at least 1%/ºC). We should be concerned that increased temperatures due to climate change will lead to increases in conflict that represent an existential threat.
We assumed that:
Climate change is real and happening (Claim 0).
Conflict between humans is a major source of existential risk (Claim 1).
Tessa researched whether increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations would make people worse at thinking (Claim 2).
She concluded that there is only mixed evidence that CO2 concentrations affect cognition, and only at very high (i.e. indoor) concentrations.
If you are concerned about the CO2 → poor cognition → impulsivity/conflict link, worry about funding HVAC systems, not climate change.
Zach researched whether heat makes people more violent (Claim 3).
They concluded that “This seems to be solidly borne out by a variety of research and relatively uncontroversial, although there is quibbling about which confounders (alcohol, nicer weather) play a role. On the whole, we’re looking at at least 1%/ºC increase in crime. The exact mechanism remains unknown and everything I’ve read seems to have at least one counter-argument against it.”
The quality of the studies supporting this claim surprised both of us.
We did not get around to researching the intersection of food scarcity, climate change, and conflict .
I don’t know if anyone is still planning to research the relationship between (global) warming and increased aggression, but Ifoundalotofstudiesthatlinkthetwo. It’s unclear whether the relationship is linear or curvilinear and it might be that with enough heat the aggression actually decreases. While the literature is very robust in confirming this link, it strangely doesn’t reach a consensus on what causes an increase in temperature to increase aggression.
Myself and Zachary Jacobi did some research for a post that we were going to call “Second-Order Effects Make Climate Change an Existential Threat” back in April 2019. At this point, it’s unlikely that our notes will be converted into a post, so I’m going to link a document of our rough notes.
The tl;dr of the doc:
The rough notes represent maybe 4 person-hours of research and discussion; it’s a shallow investigation.
Thanks a lot for this. Strongly upvoted.
I don’t know if anyone is still planning to research the relationship between (global) warming and increased aggression, but I found a lot of studies that link the two.
It’s unclear whether the relationship is linear or curvilinear and it might be that with enough heat the aggression actually decreases.
While the literature is very robust in confirming this link, it strangely doesn’t reach a consensus on what causes an increase in temperature to increase aggression.