As the planet warms, floods, storms, rising seas and drought will uproot millions of people, and with dire wider consequences. Barack Obama, collecting his Nobel peace prize, said that climate change “will fuel more conflict for decades.”
He took the analysis not from environmental scaremongers but from a group of American generals.
The forecast is close to becoming received wisdom. A flurry of new books with titles such as “Global Warring” and “Climate Conflict”. Predicts that floods, storms, the failure of the Indian monsoon and agricultural collapse will bring “enormous, and specific, geopolitical, economic, and security consequences for all of us…the world of tomorrow looks chaotic and violent.”
Jeffrey Mazo, calls climate change an “existential threat” and fears it could usher in “state failure and internal conflict”.
Scientists preparing the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2013, are for the first time including a chapter on threats to human security.
Marshall Burke of the University of California, found that rising temperatures are indeed associated with crop failure, economic decline and a sharp rise in the likelihood of war.
Take the widely cited case of the war in Darfur, the UN secretary-general, described it as “an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change”. Darfur repeatedly suffered droughts. Clashes over grazing and then displacement of villagers were followed, by horrific war.
Between Kenya and Somalia in the past 60 years when grazing was abundant and fell during droughts. Hungry people were too busy staying alive, or too exhausted, to fight . . . .
A study of the short-term impact of hurricanes on Haiti and the Dominican Republic, suggests that the storms have grown more intense, and natural disasters usually produced short-term economic pain but no sign of increased political violence.
Earthquakes, too, tend to produce mixed outcomes. A Mexican quake in 1985 may have stoked an insurgency. But the tsunami of 2005 offered a moment for secessionists in Aceh and the central Indonesian government to co-operate. Climate change could indeed cause woes aplenty. That is all the more reason to be precise about them.
Source: Climate wars - economist
Date: 08 July 2010
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