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      The Association of Ambient Temperature and Violent Crime

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          Abstract

          It is controversial if global warming will result into increased crime and conflict rate, and no causal neurobiological mechanisms have been proposed for the putative association between ambient temperature and aggressive behavior. This study shows that during 1996–2013, ambient temperature explained 10% of variance in the violent crime rate in Finland, corresponding to a 1.7% increase/degree centigrade. Ambient temperature also correlated with a one month delay in circannual changes in peripheral serotonin transporter density among both offenders and healthy control subjects, which itself correlated strongly with the monthly violent crime rate. This suggests that rise in temperature modulates serotonergic transmission which may increase impulsivity and general human activity level, resulting into increase in social interaction and risk of violent incidents. Together, these results suggest that the effect of ambient temperature on occurrence of violent crime is partly mediated through the serotonergic system, and that a 2 °C increase in average temperatures would increase violent crime rates by more than 3% in non-tropical and non-subtropical areas, if other contributing factors remained constant.

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          Most cited references36

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          Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate.

          It has been proposed that changes in global climate have been responsible for episodes of widespread violence and even the collapse of civilizations. Yet previous studies have not shown that violence can be attributed to the global climate, only that random weather events might be correlated with conflict in some cases. Here we directly associate planetary-scale climate changes with global patterns of civil conflict by examining the dominant interannual mode of the modern climate, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Historians have argued that ENSO may have driven global patterns of civil conflict in the distant past, a hypothesis that we extend to the modern era and test quantitatively. Using data from 1950 to 2004, we show that the probability of new civil conflicts arising throughout the tropics doubles during El Niño years relative to La Niña years. This result, which indicates that ENSO may have had a role in 21% of all civil conflicts since 1950, is the first demonstration that the stability of modern societies relates strongly to the global climate.
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            Climate not to blame for African civil wars.

            H Buhaug (2010)
            Vocal actors within policy and practice contend that environmental variability and shocks, such as drought and prolonged heat waves, drive civil wars in Africa. Recently, a widely publicized scientific article appears to substantiate this claim. This paper investigates the empirical foundation for the claimed relationship in detail. Using a host of different model specifications and alternative measures of drought, heat, and civil war, the paper concludes that climate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict. Instead, African civil wars can be explained by generic structural and contextual conditions: prevalent ethno-political exclusion, poor national economy, and the collapse of the Cold War system.
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              Temperature and aggression: ubiquitous effects of heat on occurrence of human violence.

              Outlines 5 models of the temperature-aggression hypothesis: negative affect escape, simple negative affect, excitation transfer/misattribution, cognitive neoassociation, and physiological-thermoregulatory. Reviews relevant studies. Aggression measures include violent crime, spouse abuse, horn-honking, and delivery of electric shock. Analysis levels include geographic regional, seasonal, monthly, and daily variations in aggression, and concomitant temperature-aggression effects in field and laboratory settings. Field studies clearly show that heat increases aggression. Laboratory studies show inconsistencies, possibly because of several artifacts. Specific models have not been adequately tested, but the excitation transfer/misattribution and cognitive neoassociation approaches appear most promising, whereas the negative affect escape appears the least viable. Suggestions for future work are made.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                jari.tiihonen@niuva.fi
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                28 July 2017
                28 July 2017
                2017
                : 7
                : 6543
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 2490, GRID grid.9668.1, Department of Forensic Psychiatry, , University of Eastern Finland, Niuvanniemi Hospital, ; FI-70240 Kuopio, Finland
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1937 0626, GRID grid.4714.6, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, , Karolinska Institutet, ; S-171 76 Stockholm, Sweden
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 1013 7965, GRID grid.9681.6, , University of Jyväskylä, ; FI-40014 Jyväskylän yliopisto, Jyväskylä Finland
                [4 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2314 6254, GRID grid.5509.9, , University of Tampere, ; FI-33100 Tampere, Finland
                [5 ]Unit of Primary Care, Helsinki University Central Hospital, and Department of General Practice, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsingin yliopisto, Helsinki, Finland
                [6 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 2490, GRID grid.9668.1, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, , University of Eastern Finland, ; FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland
                [7 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 2490, GRID grid.9668.1, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, , University of Eastern Finland, ; FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland
                Article
                6720
                10.1038/s41598-017-06720-z
                5533778
                28754972
                7e236e54-290c-48b5-a205-21990dd458d3
                © The Author(s) 2017

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 8 March 2017
                : 15 June 2017
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