Mother Jones Does Not Let The Facts Change Their Story, Especially When It Involves Global Warming.

Report: Global Warming to Cause 180,000 More Rapes by 2099

"Global warming isn't just going to melt the Arctic and flood our cities — it's also going to make Americans more likely to kill each other."

That's the opening paragraph of an article in the liberal political magazine Mother Jones, reporting on a "controversial" new study.

But the magazine gives no indication whether it is taking the study seriously, or having some fun with its seemingly outrageous conclusions.

"Looking at the past, we see a strong relationship between temperature and crime. We think that is likely to continue in the future," said study author Matthew Ranson, an economist with the consulting firm Abt Associates, whose study was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Using global warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099 climate change will "cause" an additional 22,000 murders in the United States, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft.

Ranson said property crimes go down when temperatures drop, in part because people would be more likely to close windows, and go up with warmer weather. Also, "warmer temperatures increase the frequency of social interactions, some small percentage of which results in violence."

Ranson also said research has shown that as temperatures rise, people tend to become more aggressive.

Andrew Holland, a senior fellow for energy and climate at the American Security Project, told Mother Jones that the study appears to be "tailor-made for a headline," but that "on further analysis, I don't know what it tells us."

And the Climate Depot website points to Bureau of Justice statistics showing that "the number of rapes per capita in the United States has plunged by more that 85 percent since the 1970s," and asks: "If warm weather causes more rape, why the significant drop in the U.S. rape rate since the 1970s?"