A Study Claims Global Warming Could Cause 180,000 More Rapes by 2099

Interesting study which forecasts violent crime rates over the next 89 years, in a warmer world. Some of the relationship between rates of crime and higher temperatures make sense. Warmer temperatures allow for people to be outside and interact more socially, and create opportunities for violent crime more so than in colder temperatures. But there is also a theory that higher temperatures may make people more aggressive. Click title for link to article. Be sure to check out the graphs.

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.
Ranson acknowledges that those results represent a relatively small jump in the overall level of crime—a 2.2 percent increase in murder and a 3.1 percent increase in rape, for instance. Still, says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, those numbers add up to "a lot of victims" over the course of the century.