Climatic Influences on Human Action/Reaction

Observably, intra-tribal violence, clan conflicts, and high rates of social crime are far more common on the African Continent, and in the Middle East than elsewhere in the world. Africa, that vast continent of ongoing strife and disaffected interaction between competing and warring tribes, never seems to be able to modulate the high-pitched level of its discontent. Most of Africa remains undeveloped in fundamental social welfare, science and technology, manufacturing and general living standards.

They seem forever to teeter on the edge of dysfunctionality. 

The Middle East is little different, and until the discovery of a plenitude of fossil fuels sitting under the sands of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, just waiting to be dredged up above ground and refined for the purpose of hauling Europe and North America into the 20th Century through their establishment of negotiated extraction with those oil-rich sheikdoms and kingdoms now wealthy beyond imagination but without those natural resources as backward and stuck in poverty as Africans.

The world of Islam, in general, seemed destined to simply remain mired in the past, satisfied with a religion that demanded much of the faithful -- the wholesale surrender of personal choice and individuality that serves as a damper to any kind of social, public, scientific, technical, artistic advances following on a too-brief period of brilliant artistic achievement and scholarship. Oil revenues served to grease the spokes of the wheel that turned backwardness into the power of wealth.

That aside, nothing appears to have changed in either place to pacify and civilize the tense-set emotions and lavish passions of inhabitants of either the Middle East or Africa to live in some semblance of harmony with their neighbours. The issues of territorial advantage, to amend nature's oversight in lack of sufficient water for agricultural production and a shortage of arable land enough to share with everyone persisted.

Now, some anthropological-social-environmental answers appear to have presented themselves to a team of researchers. Who point to the collapse of the Mayan civilization as an example of humankind's inability to persevere, make practical choices, live in peace with one another, invent ways that a critical lack of nature's fundamentals could be compensated for with good planning, as a prime example.

We are being warned: as the world upon which we live and depend becomes steadily warmer with climate change, temperamental humans will become ever more edgy, confrontational, demanding and ill-tempered. Is that a surprise to anyone? Famously, don't tempers fray and doesn't patience ebb when we are hot and bothered? A question hovers: does critically cold weather exact a different, more worrying-type, absent regression/aggression reaction from us?

Aggressive acts like the commission of violent crimes and the waging of wars are set to become more frequent, more predictable, as a result of each added degree of warmth to test human resilience and fortitude, study results warn. Sixty studies related to historical collapses of past empires, recent wars, violent crime rates and lab simulations testing police responses during tense moments when they tend to make use of force, were analyzed.

Extreme weather -- either very hot or dry -- results in increased violence. "When the weather gets bad, we tend to be more willing to hurt other people", remarked University of California, Berkeley economist, Solomon Hsiang, lead author of the study which was published online by the journal Science. Heat turns us into social cranks. These were not social behaviourists but a team of economists who put together a formula predicting risk of violence increasing with extreme weather.

No word on whether opposite extremes -- insufferable, freezing cold, hail, ice storms -- impacts in similar ways. In war-torn parts of equatorial Africa, the study concludes, every added degree Celsius or so increases the likelihood of conflict between various groups by a whopping 11% to 14%. A formula worked out for the United States claims that for every increase of 3-degrees Celsius, violent crime rises between 2% to 4%.

A clear disparity in incidence and type of crime/violent reaction. Which still leaves a question: do some societies marking entire continents remain more susceptible to these external influences to visceral emotions and reactions than others who live in societies which have long since adapted to a more pacific lifestyle over time, and thus present as less likely to regress to a more primal mode of behaviour?

Temperatures in much of North America and Eurasia are likely to increase by the aforesaid amounts by roughly the year 2065 through the influence of carbon dioxide pollution increases -- according to a separate study also published in Science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will address the issue of impacts on war when considering the impacts of global warming when it updates their worldwide study.

Or so we are academically informed.

Cooling tempers?: Chinese crowd a pool at a water park in Suining, in Sichuan province, during a heat wave July 27. | AFP-JIJI