Economics
Blame Global Warming for Your Bad Attitude
Climate change is making us angry. It may also cause more assaults, murders, and even poor math grades for your kids.
People cool off in a fountain during a heat wave.
Photographer: Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP via Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
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.