ONE of Donald Trump’s 100 wackiest ideas is that climate change is a hoax fabricated by China to harm America.
“The
concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order
to make U.S. manufacturing uncompetitive,” Trump once tweeted.
He
later said, unconvincingly, that he had been kidding about China, but
he has emphasized that he does not believe in climate change and would
end serious efforts to prevent it.
That obstinacy confronts a new wave of research showing that climate change is much more harmful than we had imagined.
Until
now, the focus has been on rising seas, more intense hurricanes,
acidification of oceans, drought and crop failures. But new studies are
finding that some of the most important effects will be directly on our
bodies and minds.
A clever new working paper
by Jisung Park, a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard, compared the
performances of New York City students on 4.6 million exams with the
day’s temperature. He found that students taking a New York State
Regents exam on a 90-degree day have a 12 percent greater chance of
failing than when the temperature is 72 degrees.
The
Regents exams help determine whether a student graduates and goes to
college, and Park finds that when a student has the bad luck to have
Regents exams fall on very hot days, he or she is slightly less likely
to graduate on time.
Likewise,
Park finds that when a school year has an unusual number of hot days,
students do worse at the end of the year on their Regents exams,
presumably because they’ve learned less. A school year with five extra
days above 80 degrees leads students to perform significantly worse on
Regents exams.
The
New York City students in Park’s study do poorly on hot days even
though the majority of city schools are air-conditioned (perhaps in part
because the air-conditioning often barely works). Imagine the
consequences in hotter climates with less air-conditioning: The average
Indian now endures about 33 days a year above 90 degrees, and that is
forecast to increase by as many as 100 days by 2100.
“If
students in New York public schools are being affected by heat stress,
one can only imagine what it’s like for a student in Delhi,” Park notes.
Heat
affects our bodies as well as our minds: As temperatures rise, people
die. In India, a rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in average daily
temperatures leads to a 10 percent increase in the annual mortality rate. Even a single extra hot day leads to a noticeable jump in mortality.
Even
in the U.S., heat kills. A single day above 90 degrees increases the
monthly mortality rate by more than 1 percent, according to research by Olivier Deschenes and other economists.
We
just don’t function as well when the mercury goes up. When the
temperature rises above 85 degrees, Americans who work outside cut their
time in the heat by about an hour. Even in auto factories, most
presumably air-conditioned, a week of six days above 90 degrees reduces
production by 8 percent.
Perhaps more startling, rising temperatures seem to cause more violence.
“The relationship is really clear,” said Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the issue.
“Extremes in climate lead to more violence, more killing, more war,
more land riots in Brazil, more sectarian violence in India. It’s pretty
stunning how the relationship between climate and violence holds across
the globe.”
The starting point is that heat makes people irritable. Researchers have found
hot days linked to more angry honking in Arizona, and more road rage
and car accidents in Spain. Scholars have done the math and found that
on hot days a major-league baseball pitcher is more likely to retaliate
for a perceived offense and deliberately hit a batter.
“High temperatures,” that study finds, are “lowering inhibitions against retaliation.”
On
hot days, property crimes aren’t more common, but murders go up with
the temperature. Likewise, researchers find that police officers are
more likely to draw and fire their weapons during a training session
conducted on a hot day.
In
Tanzania in any season, elderly women are sometimes accused of
witchcraft and hacked or beaten to death. Professor Miguel has found
that unusual weather linked to climate change — either drought or heavy
rainfall — is associated with a doubling in the number of these “witch”
killings.
It appears that 2016 will be the hottest year
in recorded history, and each of the first six months of this year set a
record as the hottest ever — the hottest January, the hottest February,
and so on. But it’s not just that the mercury is going up;
fundamentally, we are creating a hotter world for which we humans are
poorly adapted.
So
it’s time for Trump — and all Americans — to re-evaluate. Climate
change isn’t a hoax, and it certainly isn’t a Chinese conspiracy. Unless
we act, we’re cooked!
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