(Radio Iowa) – A new book from researchers at Iowa State University asserts that hotter weather brought on by climate change can make people more aggressive. Lead author Andreas Miles-Novelo, an I-S-U psychology graduate student, says decades of studies demonstrate how hotter temperatures alter the way people around the globe think and interact with each other. “We have lots of data that shows the hotter parts of the year, hotter years, hotter days of the year, hotter times, you find more reports of violent crime,” Miles-Novelo says, “so I suspect that will hold true. Whether or not it will be noticeable on any sort of level yet here in the United States, I’m not sure.”

In the book “Climate Change and Human Behavior,” the authors show how hotter weather and more frequent and severe weather events can influence individuals and groups, escalating political unrest, civil war and other forms of violence. The research finds people who are uncomfortably hot perceive others as behaving aggressively, which raises the odds of a hostile confrontation. Police officers are sworn to uphold the law but they’re still human and may be swayed by steamy weather.  “There’s a really great study that I talk about in the book where they put cops in different training simulators and in one of the training simulators, they bumped up the temperature in the room,” Miles-Novelo says, ” and they found that the cops were more likely to shoot an innocent suspect than in the condition where the room was more of a comfortable temperature.”

It’s asserted that climate change brings more extreme and frequent droughts, wildfires, floods and hurricanes, and people everywhere will be at higher risk to fall victim to crime, hunger and poverty. Still, he says it appears too much hot weather can actually chill heated aggression levels. “For average temperatures, that’s going to be when it’s lowest,” Miles-Novelo says. “When it starts to get uncomfortably hot, then you start to see those aggressions tick up, but then there’s a certain point where it gets too hot, where you have to conserve so much energy and so many resources because of the threat of overheating that you’re not actually likely to go out and do something because you need to stay somewhere.”

The opposite is also true, he says, as aggression levels rise when it gets uncomfortably cold, but once it gets exceptionally frigid, the focus is on finding shelter. With hot weather and a worsening drought in the forecast, all is not lost. Miles-Novelo says proactively addressing challenges now could help to stave off some of the long-term troubles they predict for the future.