Hotter climates really are linked to hotter tempers.

A new study, published Thursday in Science, proves that human conflict is linked to hotter climates. The University of California-Berkley (UCB) researchers based their study off of 60 previous ones of the same subject.

They determined, with the way the planet has been heating up, risk of human and intergroup conflict could increase at least 50 percent by 2050.

"It does change how we think about the value of avoiding climate change," said Solomon Hsiang, lead study author and researcher at UCB. "It makes us think that avoiding climate change is actually something we should be willing to invest more in."

According to the Los Angeles Times, the researchers quantified the future risk of conflict by taking many distant examples, such as road rage, ancient warfare and Major League Baseball. They also took instances of interpersonal violence, such as rape, murder and domestic abuse.

"We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict ... across all major regions of the world," the researchers concluded.

Based on the World Climate Research Program in Geneva, the research team assumed a climate increase of four degrees Fahrenheit. The study also assumes humans will do little or nothing to adapt to rising temperatures.

One study analyzed by the UCB researchers looked at massive amounts of traffic data in Phoenix, Ariz. to see if drivers without air conditioning were more likely to honk in anger. Another study analyzed baseball statistics to see if MLB pitchers were more likely to hit a batter with a pitch in hotter temperatures.

"The result is alarming," said study coauthor Marshall Burke, a UC Berkeley graduate student who specializes in how climate change affects food security. "However, if we get our act together and we mitigate future climate change ... the effects will be much smaller."

The researchers said they could not come up with a definitive cause, but were able to speculate. Hsiang said hotter climates take a toll on agrarian societies and their economy, causing higher temperatures to be linked to anger. The team said their intent was to call attention to it and cause more research in the future.

"We like to compare it to smoking," Burke said. "In the 1930s scientists were figuring out there was this really strong relationship between smoking and lung cancer, but it wasn't for many decades after that they figured out the precise mechanism that links smoking to lung cancer."