Forbes magazine has attributed a whole new list of negative effects to “climate change,” including lost productivity, violent crime, and “cognitive decline.”

Climate change has become the bogeyman responsible for all the world’s ills, from racism to mass migration, but in its new article, Forbes has arguably taken climate hysteria to a whole new level.

Citing economist Marshall Burke, Forbes writer Jeff McMahon says that climate change “has already cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion,” but this is only the tip of the iceberg, since “that cost will rise to $5 trillion by 2050.”

Mr. McMahon goes on to list eight “unexpected” effects of climate change, the first of which is “lost productivity” since “economic output falls in hot years as compared to cooler years.”

Closely related to lost productivity is “cognitive decline,” which means that “people perform office tasks less effectively, and kids learn less and score worse on standardized tests” when it is hot out.

“Hot temperatures literally make us dumber,” McMahon says, again citing Mr. Burke.

Third on the list of surprising side effects of climate change is “violent crime,” due to the fact that “crime spikes during heat waves.”

Statistics show that “violent assault, sexual violence, and homicide all increase on days or months where temperatures are above normal,” McMahon asserts.

Not only violent crime toward others, but also “suicide” can be blamed on climate change, McMahon continues, going so far as to prophecy that “future warming could lead to tens of thousands of additional suicides in the US by mid-century.”

In his remarkable essay, Mr. McMahon proceeds to credit climate change with a rise in “civil unrest,” “immigration,” economic “inequality,” and even “insurance collapse.”

The list of ills supposedly caused by global warming boggles the mind.

Cosmic disasters such as a slump in coffee production, devastating hurricanes, a drop in the population of Hawaiian monk seals, and the decimation of migratory songbirds have all been blamed on climate change.

Last year, songwriter Stevie Wonder said that climate change had caused the cancer that killed iconic soul singer Aretha Franklin.

In 2008, veteran Loch Ness monster hunter Robert Rines gave up his search for Nessie after 37 years, saying that the trail had gone cold.

The monster had probably been killed by global warming, Rines concluded.

In the future, it may be easier for climate alarmists to write articles enumerating the shrinking list of societal evils not caused by climate change, although at the rate they are going, that list will soon effectively reach zero.

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