photo credit: sergis blog

Few weeks back the heat really started to kick in and made it rather unpleasent to go around the city. It became practically impossible to walk few steps outside without breaking a sweat, literally. The interesting thing is, though, that it was not just the temperature that increased. Also the people got more hot-headed as well.

With more heat, or at least so it seemed in our neighborhood, became also more arguing, shouting, insulting and even on some occasions physical fighting. People tended to get annoyed a little bit easier, and in some cases it did not seem much that finally made them lose their temper. True, I do  not know for sure if it was the heat that made all this, but the two phenomenons coincided timewise almost perfectly.

I took a deeper look into the topic and find out that there was actually some research that pointed to the same direction. It has been shown that people tend to lose their nerves easier when put into a hot room, as well as that within the US cities with hotter climate had a higher violent crime rate. Others say that the heat factor might not be that significant after all, but admit that is not insignificant either. Furthermore, it makes common sense that when you are thirsty and have your clothes glued on you because of sweat and feel anxiety as well as uncomfortable and tired it can be very little that push us to explode.

I suppose the good news is that every heat wave has its end. However, as noted in the link above, with global warming that heat is going to get even hotter and more common. The trend therefore is that due to rising temperatures there is going to be an increase also in losing temper, which leads to more quarreling, more arguing, more fighting and in the worst case more violence and even killings.Having said that, it is not hot climate alone that leads to this, things like poverty and lack of opportunities (among many others) can be seen as equal culprits as well. However, maybe it should be taken into consideration that in crime fighting cooling down weatherwise could be one part of the solution.

If nothing else, more air-conditioning might help also, even though only temporarily, more air-conditioning would likely end up meaning more energy consumption and more climate change. Thus, it just might be that all we can do is to get ready and used for the unpleasent neighbor to become a little bit more unpleasent, the rude client becoming even more rude and watching our back few times more often when walking in the street.

Tags: aggressive, global warming, heat, temper

Category: Future trends

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback link can be found here.