Have you ever been hot and angry, otherwise known as hangry? If so, was your rise in temperature the result of global warming? It may have been, and it might’ve even caused you to hate people — and to speak about it.
Such is the case, according to a professor at Columbia University.
Adjunct Senior Scientist Dr. Anders Levermann recently participated in a prejudice-protesting paper for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. In it, Anders asserts climate change correlates to hate speech.
Evidently, unless you’re at a very comfy temperature, you might unleash language that a growing number of Americans seem to believe isn’t protected by the Constitution — or, at least, shouldn’t be.
Trust the science — and the paper:
Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12-21 degrees Celsius (54-70 ?F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behavior across the USA, a new study finds. Analyzing billions of tweets posted on the social media platform Twitter in the USA, researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found hate speech increasing across climate zones, income groups and belief systems for temperatures too hot or too cold.
Light, be shed:
This indicates limits to adaptation to extreme temperatures, and sheds light on a yet underestimated societal impact of climate change: conflict in the digital sphere with implications for both societal cohesion and mental health.
Here’s how Potsdam Institute scientist and doctoral researcher Annika Stechemesser puts it:
“Detecting hate tweets in more than four billion tweets from U.S. users with our AI-algorithm and combining them with weather data, we found that both the absolute number and the share of hate tweets rise outside a climate comfort zone: People tend to show a more aggressive online behavior when it’s either too cold or too hot outside. … We see that outside the feel-good window of 12-21?C (54-70?F) online hate increases up to 12 percent for colder temperatures and up to 22 percent for hotter temperatures across the USA .”
What constitutes “hate speech”? There’s doubtlessly room for interpretation; but per the paper, it’s “discriminatory language”:
In defining hate speech, the researchers were guided by the official UN definition: Cases of discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender or other identity factor.
Bottom line, as laid out by Anders:
“Even in high-income areas where people can afford air condition and other heat mitigation options, we observe an increase in hate speech on extremely hot days. In other words: There is a limit to what people can take. Thus, there are likely limits of adaptation to extreme temperatures and these are lower than those set by our mere physiological limits.”
And, of course, these extremes are being caused by humanity.
As for “hate speech,” the accusatory term is contemporarily thrown like snowballs — which, we were previously told, we wouldn’t have for long because of global warming. Now the sultry designation has been converted to “climate change” in order to include both heating and cooling due to manmade climatological calamity. And before all that, of course, we were warned of the coming ice age.
Like an apocalyptic asteroid, we appear to be hurling toward a climate in which hate, ecological atrocity, racism, and phobia are all being rolled into one. Consider the book by British journalist Jeremy Williams, Climate Change is Racist. In July, a University Melbourne professor announced via an article that “Climate change is white colonization of the atmosphere.” In 2019, The Ecologist declared, “Climate change is environmental racism.” That same year, Democratic presidential hopeful Juli?n Castro decried racist white weather. In April of last year, Nickelodeon schooled kids of the “environmental racism” of pig farming. And even within the climate movement itself, there’s a problem: A piece for Climate Change News insists, “As a non-white activist, I was excluded from Greenpeace publicity. This was not an isolated incident, and the movement needs to change.”
We’ve got so much racism and hate and phobia, perhaps we deserve to be hot. Or cold — take your pick, haters.
On the bright side, at least our non-hateful weather warriors are working toward a fix:
-ALEX
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