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Debates over political responses to climate change tend to concern large effects, such as preventing the submersion of large and heavily populated coastal cities and preventing the loss of economically vital cropland. A group of researchers from Harvard and MIT, however, have noticed at least two effects that hotter and wetter weather has on a very personal scale.
The group, led by Dr. Nick Obradovich, found that hotter and wetter weather led to fewer traffic stops and food safety inspections. The problem with this observed trend, is that those are just the weather conditions that typically lead to increased rates of traffic and food safety violations.
Regarding police stops, the group found that police were less likely to make traffic stops in wet and hot weather, even when controlling for counties with warmer average temperatures, wherein officers might encounter a higher number of infractions that are unrelated to the warmer average weather. While the paper is vague on the specific effects of weather on events like traffic stops, Greg Spengler, a deputy constable for Medina County, Texas, offers some insight into the safety hazards of inclement weather.
“When it’s raining, it’s more dangerous to be standing on the side of a slick roadway and the side of the road is muddy, so getting the patrol car stuck is a major concern.”
Then there is the flooding. “Our area has a propensity for flooding and people tend to think that you can drive through low-lying areas, which you then have to protect until barricades can be put in place.”
Libby Thoma, a food safety auditor for HEB and SQF,in San Antonio, Texas, comments that some inspections may be more susceptible to weather variations than others. Industrial food processing plants that fall under USDA jurisdiction, she says, generally employ on-site USDA inspectors, which makes these plants robust to inclement weather. Smaller establishments such as restaurants, hotels and hospitals, however, are generally inspected by outside representatives of the FDA or other local health services.
It makes sense, she says, for these places to see a reduction in audits that vary with the weather. “Inspectors don’t want to be out in bad weather any more than anyone else does.”
The authors of the study point out that climate change is set to increase the number of severe weather events, creating more opportunities for public health hazards related to driving conditions and food safety. While much climate change news relates to its effects on a much larger scale, it is important to understand small-scale effects such as these.
An understated strength of the paper’s analysis is that it demonstrates a measurable effect of weather on public health, which can be dealt with by local governments regardless of their stance on climate change. Actions taken by local governments to mitigate the effects of extreme weather on highway and food safety stand to not only save lives, but to foster trust and confidence in government institutions on a critical local level, without regard to long-term future weather trends.
A potential knock-on effect of this research is that by making changes in weather understood in a very personal way, people may also come to understand climate change in more personally relevant ways.