Again with the "climate wars"!
Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 12:04AM 
The Economist bemoaning the flurry of new books predicting climate wars.
Yet surprisingly few facts support these alarming assertions. Widely touted forecasts such as for 200m climate refugees in the next few decades seem to have been plucked from the air. Little or no academic research has looked at questions such as whether Bangladeshis displaced by a rising sea would move a series of short distances over a long period, or (more disruptively) a greater distance immediately.
And yet the next edition of the IPCC report will have a chapter exploring this issue. A recent conference in Norway explored the issue. What was proposed was pretty weak.
The hardest evidence for a link so far comes from a team led by Marshall Burke of the University of California, which studied African wars from 1980 to 2002 and found that rising temperatures are indeed associated with crop failure, economic decline and a sharp rise in the likelihood of war. It predicted a “50% increase” in the chance of civil war in Africa by 2030.
But that claim is now heavily revised, since researchers redid their sums to take account of the more peaceful period of 2002-08. Others say that political and other factors such as ethnic conflict and outside intervention are far better indicators of the likelihood of fighting.
Take the widely cited case of the war in Darfur, the western region of Sudan. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described it as “an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change”. Environmental problems have probably worsened the Darfuris’ dreadful plight, offering grist to those who call climate change a “threat multiplier”. Average rainfall in the region fell abruptly (by a third or more) in the early 1970s and Darfur repeatedly suffered droughts. Clashes over grazing and then displacement of villagers were followed, from 2003, by horrific war.
Yet the connection is elusive. Roughly three decades elapsed between the rain stopping and war starting. Many other factors—political, ethnic, demographic and economic—conspired to stoke violence. Those were specific to Darfur, whereas the sharp drop in rainfall hit the whole Sahel, without intensifying conflict elsewhere.
Another commonly cited example is violent competition for scarce grazing between nomadic herdsmen in the Horn of Africa. Yet a study of fighting among pastoralists on the border between Kenya and Somalia in the past 60 years (presented at the conference) showed instead that conflict worsened when grazing was abundant and fell during droughts. Hungry people were too busy staying alive, or too exhausted, to fight. By contrast, when rains made herdsmen’s lives easier, they could release surplus young labour for the violent sport of raiding other groups.
Honestly, this all sounds like a bunch of academic pinheads looking to create fear out of thin gruel. We just have a hot topic and a lot of people chasing money. Predicting 50% higher chances of civil war in Africa simply on the basis of global warming, while ignoring the obvious commodity and connectivity boom going on, is just silly. It is reductionism to an absurd degree, something modern political science is amazingly adept at pursuing.
Reader Comments (1)
I recommend the work of Thomas Homer-Dixon on this topic. I've found his writings careful; worried but not apocalyptic. He's published academically in the area of resource and environment scarcity and conflict, as well as his last two books aimed at general audiences.