Will global warming make us all more cranky?

In my latest thriller, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy, I postulate a descendant group of Nazis out to pick up where Adolf Hitler left off.  They are hoping to rise to power like they did in pre-war Germany following the constricting rules set forth by the Allies following World War I.  You will recall how the Treaty of Versailles, the principal treaty ending the war, obligated Germany to, among other concessions, make war reparations to nations harmed by the war.  As a result, the people of Germany were humiliated, demoralized, and beaten down.  It can be argued that these severe restrictions were the reasons Adolf Hitler’s promise of a invigorated Germany was so appealing to the masses.

My novel hypothesizes that Nazi descendants figure they can follow the same route to power as they did in the 1930s–by engineering a global environmental disaster.  As one of the characters in my novel states, “Sometimes the only way you can build a new society is to start from the ashes up.”  The idea that a situation identical to the one facing Hitler, a demoralized society, could once again be hijacked by ideologues is a bit far-fetched.  However, not so implausible is the assumption that society will react negatively to changes in our environment–and not just because of the damaging effects caused by droughts, floods, and the like.

An August 1 report from UC Berkeley summarizes results from several studies linking climate change to increased societal violence.  The climatic areas considered were temperature, rainfall, and drought.  Personal violence, intergroup violence, and institutional breakdown were looked at.  For temperature, 27 out of 27 studies of modern societies found a positive relationship between temperature and violence, with the higher the temperature, the more the violence.  Quoting Marshall Burke, the study’s co-lead author and a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics: “We found that a 1 standard deviation shift towards hotter conditions causes the likelihood of personal violence to rise 4 percent and intergroup conflict to rise 14 percent.”

What all of this means is that we need to think about more than the impact that climate change will have on crops, about whether Arctic ice will melt sufficiently during the summer to allow shipping, or about how rising sea levels will impact those living along shorelines.  The negative effect of climate change on our moods and psyches is one more reason that should make us realize that delaying any effort to mitigate the repercussions of fossil fuel use on Planet Earth is imprudent at best, and disastrous at worst.

Categorised in: White Thaw

This post was written by paulmarktag01