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Here's an article on it:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/01/us/climat ... e-violence" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Surprised I couldn't find a topic thread on it. I apologize if there already is one somewhere.

Anyway, first thing I thought when I heard about it is, "No WAY anybody could infer that any particular climate change will cause violence." And buried deep within the linked article is this statement:

In fact, it's impossible to prove that any particular war or act of violence is the direct result of climate change. There are certainly other factors that cause and insight violence of all kinds.

But that's not going to stop most people who hear about this study from thinking they've shown that climate change causes an increase in violence. And this happens all the time with this climate change thing. If you really look you can find a qualifier somewhere about how they really can't say this causes this or that causes that. Like, as I've written before, if you really look you can see in the IPCC Physical Science Basis report that they can't unequivocally attribute climate change to any particular cause including human activity. But they've darn sure created the impression that you can.

Also, when I first heard about this, wondered if one could say that more violence is going on now than was going on during World War I or World War II. You know, like when tens of millions of Russians and Germans were dying in the Eastern theater of World War II and hundreds of thousands of civilians were being wiped out in bombing raids.

Economic conditions might play a role to if folks are more stressed out, but I guess that's also the fault of climate change in the minds of some scientists. How did this paper even get into Science?

Pwns wrote:Economic conditions might play a role to if folks are more stressed out, but I guess that's also the fault of climate change in the minds of some scientists. How did this paper even get into Science?

My own belief is that its conclusions flatter the philosophical orientation prevalent among the Journal's Board of Reviewing Editors as well as of the outside referees (probably 2 of them) they sent it to for "peer review.

I know nobody believes me but I'll say again that I think the idea that journal "Peer Review" is an objective quality control process is one of the biggest hoaxes foisted upon the general public out there.

The other thing is that among the selection criteria is that papers "be of strong interdisciplinary interest or unusual interest to the specialist." That right there is "asking for it" in terms of introducing subjective selection.