The troubling ways a heatwave can warp your mind

17 August 2020
Zaria Gorvett

"It was July 1988. Across the United States, the land was simmering in the warmest summer on record. City dwellers swarmed onto beaches, electricity use was higher than ever as people cranked up the air conditioning and the freeways were lined with broken-down, overheated vehicles. Ice lollies melted before they could be eaten.

"But something else was happening too.

"In fact, 1988 wasn’t just a year of record-breaking sunshine, but also record-breaking violence. There were an unprecedented number of murders, rapes, armed robberies and assaults – around 1.56 million of them. Could there have been a link between the weather and the general trend for violence?

"People have suspected that warm weather can alter our behaviour for centuries. The idea is embedded into our very language – we talk of tempers 'flaring', 'incandescent' rage, getting 'hot under the collar' – and Shakespeare described 'mad blood stirring' in the oppressive heat of a Verona summer back in 1597.

"The earliest studies into the phenomenon emerged in the late 19th Century, coinciding with the first reliable crime statistics. According to one analysis, offences against people tended to peak in the summer months, while crimes against property were found to be more common in the winter.

"Since then, the evidence has been piling up.

"Every year, as the mercury rises, we undergo a collective transformation. Some of the symptoms are relatively minor – people are more likely to honk their horns when they’re stuck in traffic; the police usually notice a spike in disorderly behaviour; and we’re less likely to help strangers out.

"But others are more disconcerting.

"The global heatwave of 2018 – which led to widespread #droughts and unusually high numbers of Arctic #wildfires; drove reindeer to Finland’s beaches; and even shrunk a mountain in Sweden – was also associated with some alarming human occurrences. In the UK, there were a record number of 999 calls, with one police officer commenting that the public react 'very strangely' to that kind of weather. In some areas, police reported that calls were up 40%.

"Of course, this is all heavily anecdotal – and there are plenty of alternative explanations for these individual incidents. But the wider correlation appears to be supported by a weight of academic research from around the world.

"In the UK, between April 2010 and 2018, there was 14% more violent crime at 20C than there was at 10C. In Mexico, there is more organised crime in warmer weather – and some academics suspect this is because it creates a 'taste for violence'. In South Africa, scientists have discovered that, for every degree that the temperature goes up, there is a 1.5% increase in the number of murders. In Greece, one study found that more than 30% of 137 homicides reported in a particular region occurred on days with an average temperature of more than 25C.

"Similar patterns involving violent crime and heat have also been observed Sub-Saharan Africa, Taiwan, the United States, Finland, and Spain… the list goes on. In all, the effect has been demonstrated in hundreds of scientific studies."

Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200817-the-sinister-ways-heatwaves-warp-the-mind

The #Corals That Survive #ClimateChange Change Will Be Unrecognizable

They have endured so much, and to endure this, they’ll have to adapt dramatically.

By Marina Koren
August 28, 2024

"Earth belonged to the corals first. And over hundreds of millions of years, they proved themselves remarkably good at adapting to each new version of the planet. As other groups of organisms dropped out of existence, corals endured so many catastrophes that their history reads like a biblical tale of resilience. Through #extinctions mass and minor, through #volcanic eruptions #and asteroid strikes, the corals survived.

"And for tiny marine animals, they managed to exert tremendous force on the planet’s landscape. Corals have raised whole islands into existence. They are the natural guardians of #coastlines; they sustain an estimated quarter of known #MarineLife. If the reefs ringing the #Maldives die, an entire nation could erode into the sea. Humans live in these places because corals exist.

"The Earth that humans evolved on, in other words, is a coral planet. Today, the animals provide #ecosystems that support the livelihoods of about 1 billion people. They are so fundamental to life as we know it that scientists wonder if one way humanity could discover alien life is by detecting the signature of fluorescent corals in the shallow waters of another planet. Corals are also, famously, being devastated by climate change. Even in a future where they survive in some form, their transformation could make our own experience of this planet profoundly different.

"The earliest corals emerged about 500 million years ago, roughly alongside plant life on land. But the modern version of coral reefs appeared a short 4 million years ago, around the time our human ancestors began to walk upright (give or take a few million years). When researchers try to rescue suffering corals, carefully cutting pieces away and transporting them to aquariums, they’re visiting underwater metropolises that are thousands of years old. Despite all that corals have been through, given how fast conditions on Earth are changing, life has likely never been quite as stressful for them as it is now, according to the coral experts Bertrand Martin-Garin and Lucien Montaggioni in their book, Corals and Reefs.

"Earlier this month, scientists reported that #Australia’s #GreatBarrierReef is sitting in water that, in one decade, has become hotter than at any other point in the past 400 years. #Caribbean coral colonies are still reeling from the havoc of last year’s historic #MarineHeatWave. Around the world, extraordinarily hot ocean temperatures have plunged corals into one of the worst #CoralBleaching events in recorded history—they’re expelling the #algae that live in their tissues and turning a ghostly white. Corals can survive bleaching, if conditions improve. But the longer they remain without that algae, the more likely they are to die.

"'These are strange days on planet Earth,' Derek Manzello, a coral-reef ecologist and the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, once told me. The planet used to give corals hundreds of thousands of years to adjust to a new reality; #HumanActivities—the burning of #FossilFuels but also #overfishing and #pollution that have brought on #GlobalWarming—have introduced a rate of change more dramatic than anything else in the geological record. “If we wanted to kill all reef-building corals on the planet, it would be hard to imagine a collection of activities quite as pointed and effective as what we’ve arrived at,' Stuart Sandin, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me."

Read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/08/earth-corals-climate-change/679636/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

Archived copy:
https://archive.ph/GF6tp