It doesn’t take a PhD to see that climate affects our lives. Anyone who lives far enough from the equator can tell just by opening the closet.

It takes a lot of scientists, however, to reveal how climate affects us—particularly as our climate changes. Sure, there’s prolonged heat and drought in some places, persistent floods and storms in others—all the ways we’ve learned to see global warming (though some still reject the science). But an exhaustive review of almost 200 different studies reveals not only the extent of those predictable changes but also how we humans are reacting to climatic wallops. The results are troubling.

Richard Moss, senior scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute, calls the study essential to making clear the everyday price of climate change. Moss, who led the climate division of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and contributes to the National Climate Assessment, said “it’s always been a challenge in some of our national conversations.”

Thinkers at least as old as Aristotle asked how climates shape societies, the authors of the new analysis note. The trouble with answering that question in a thorough manner is that scientists would have to measure pretty much everything all the time. This new super study, published Thursday in the journal Science, shows that scientists have become extremely clever at drawing conclusions by combining data they have with novel statistical approaches.

In their analysis, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley deployed these tools to assess the societal consequences of climate change. They lend support to earlier conclusions on how it’s slowing global economic growth (by 0.25 percentage points every year) and has raised the risk of conflict in Africa (by 11 percent since 1980). But there are other, less predictable impacts as well. 

1. What an “adaptation gap” looks like
One thing science has brought to agriculture is a more precise understanding of how crops perform at specific temperatures and at vital stages of their growth cycles. If any country can insulate itself from the shocks of warming, it’s probably the U.S. Yet even among American farmers, studies have concluded that plenty of adaptation are needed, particularly in the South. The chart below left shows that the South and Central U.S. have a greater sensitivity to higher temperature than in the North—possibly in part a function of crop insurance distorting incentives to adapt. The chart on the right projects corn behaving somewhat similarly in both slow and fast warming scenarios.

“It's a big mystery,” said Solomon Hsiang, who along with Tamma Carleton authored the new paper. “In some locations, we see really high levels of adaptation, and in other places we see nothing.”

2. Heat disrupts human reproduction
Higher temperatures affect human sexual behavior, the researchers found. Birth rates drop nine months after heat spells, bouncing back reliably nine months after the heat breaks. In this case, the adaptation is a delay, rather than a decline, in regular patterns.

A decline in births nine months after hot spells tends to be followed by a rebounding rise in average births.

3. More storms may mean more infant mortality
Cyclone damage is bad enough, leaving poor communities broken and without resources to recover. In the Philippines, data suggest that in the months after a major storm, female infant mortality leaps. In the post-storm dislocation, when the local economy is thrashed and everything and everyone needs help or attention, infant girls may receive among the least of it. The infant-female mortality rate is twice as high in families where there is an older sibling, and twice as high as that in families where the older sibling is male, Hsiang said.

The mortality rate of female infants rises dramatically in the months after the Philippines faces a tropical cyclone.

4. People secretly hate heat
It’s easy to imagine that warmer weather might make people happier. After all, summer brings beaches and bikes, and hiking and barbecues.

That may not be the case, according to a 2014 paper [pdf] that analyzed a billion Twitter posts and scored them across a happiness index. Above 70 degrees Fahrenheit or so, the mood of Twitter users changed, evidenced in part by an uptick in profanity. The difference in user happiness scores during 60F to 70F weather and 80F to 90F weather was similar to the difference in people’s moods on Sundays vs. Mondays.

A 2015 analysis of a billion tweets concluded that heat makes people upset, with a detectable uptick in profanity as temperature rose above about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

It may sound frivolous, but the Twitter study opens up a critical question for projections of economic damages from climate change...

Sunny_beach_babe wrote on Sep 9^th, 2016 at 7:21pm:


You mean like um.forgotten?

Now I understand his problem, I must apologise to him.

Sunny_beach_babe wrote on Sep 9^th, 2016 at 7:28pm:


I wish I had written that, pure poetry.
Excellent summary.

Unforgiven wrote on Sep 10^th, 2016 at 10:26am:


Have another go dopey, perhaps next time you can come up with something original and interesting.

ooh, vicious. Who coached you to say that?

Unforgiven wrote on Sep 10^th, 2016 at 6:59pm:


There are barbs? oh, well tell us about them, do.

With those dastardly impacts, why does Singapore have less violence, better education, better health? They are pretty damned close to the equator?

SINGAPORE - In the anonymous freedom of surveys, away from the glare of the National Conversation, more than half of us apparently do not want to be here.

A Mindshare survey carried out early this year found that 56 per cent of the 2,000-odd polled agreed or strongly agreed that, "given a choice, I would like to migrate".

Migration specialist Brenda Yeoh, dean of the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is not surprised and is hardly alarmed.

"The percentage would be much higher than the reality of emigration (because) then, there is the reality check (of) resources and emotional ties to family. So it shouldn't send the nation into a massive panic about 50 per cent of our population disappearing," she says.

Even so, there is a world of difference between actively wanting to be in Singapore, and simply being here because you can't be anywhere else.

If more than half of Singaporeans harbour some suspicion (no matter how idle or misinformed) that life elsewhere might be more relaxed, more enjoyable, more vibrant - just more - it does not bode well.

It does not help that for some, the vice of paucity continues to tighten in Singapore, heightening the contrast with the perceived abundance in other countries.

The Mindshare survey, for instance, showcases a large wedge of Singaporeans who increasingly feel themselves painted into a corner.

In Singapore's Consumer Price Index last year, the cost of housing rose 8.3 per cent year on year, a rate of increase bested only by that of the cost of transport - another national bugbear - at 11.9 per cent.

For the first time in the history of Singapore, a whole generation of wage earners face the chilling possibility that their lives are going to be worse than their parents'.

But 49 per cent of the respondents in the Mindshare survey agree or strongly agree that the Government is doing a good job running the country.

And the "vocal minority" theory is borne out, with only 8 per cent disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.

What bears further scrutiny, however, is the figure of 43 per cent who are ambivalent on the matter.

So, where does one go from here, literally? Will there be an exodus to the 5pm quitting times of Australia?

In June, there were 200,000 Singaporeans living abroad for at least six cumulative months in the previous 12 months, a 27 per cent increase from nine years ago, says the National Population and Talent Division.

The World Bank has higher figures, with almost 300,000 Singaporeans considered migrants in 2010. "The way I teach migration now has changed. I don't teach it as uprooting and settling (but) as a fluid to-ing and fro-ing," says Prof Yeoh.

It is a comforting thought that more people are not necessarily leaving for good, but what happens when the people you govern are no longer exclusively yours?

Most countries' policies, including Singapore's, have not kept up with this national fluidity. "My view is that we should give more credit to more flexible kinds of identities today. I have evidence to show people are able to cope with multiple identities," she says.

It is ironic, then, that in a time of malleable nationalities, the attitude towards foreigners has hardened.

And the perception of job scarcity is bemusing, given that Singapore has a lower unemployment rate than the countries Singaporeans are moving to.

Why then do people think they would like to be someplace else? Perhaps the National Conversation will clarify matters. It will not be easy - for as we ponder the nation's navel, we have to look past the fluff.

Unforgiven wrote on Sep 10^th, 2016 at 7:23pm:


Of course but nothing to do with the dreaded global warming.