Study challenges the idea of global warming wars

John Burns

Al Gore got a Nobel peace prize, in part, for helping to prevent war by highlighting global warming and helping to slow it. In fact, climate change is not likely to cause conflict in the future, according to a study co-authored by Professor Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute (Esri) in Dublin.
The conclusion challenges predictions made by the likes of Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, and John Reid, the former British defence secretary, who have forecast that future conflicts will be caused by rising temperatures. Earlier this year Clinton told her Senate confirmation hearing that climate change is a security threat. “At the extreme, it threatens our very existence,” she said. “But well before that point, it could well incite wars of an old kind over basic resources like food, water and arable land.”
Tol’s study concludes that, if anything, it’s lower temperatures that cause conflicts, and even this link has weakened since the industrial revolution. “This implies that future global warming is not likely to lead to war between European countries,” says the study, published in the Climatic Change journal.
The Esri research professor and a colleague, Sebastian Wagner, investigated the relationship between war in Europe and the continent’s climate between the years 1000 and 2000. They took information on conflicts from warscholar.com, and mapped them against temperature and rainfall records that have been kept throughout Europe since 1500. For earlier centuries, they used indirect information about climate derived from sources such as tree rings and the growth pattern of corals.
The further back they went, the greater the correlation between war and weather. “This confirms the agricultural hypothesis,” the study says. “Agriculture became progressively less important over the period, because of economic development, and agriculture became less dependent on weather, because of improved cultivation methods and better fertilisers.”
The closest link was found between 1300 and 1650, the most violent period of the millennium. “Europe gradually cooled and then warmed over the millennium, while conflict worsened and then waned,” they say.
The finding that periods with lower temperatures in the pre-industrial era were accompanied by violent conflicts is similar to a conclusion reached about China by Professor David Zhang at the University of Hong Kong. He deduced that food scarcity was the reason why more wars were fought during colder periods.
“We do not believe that people fight to keep warm,” Tol and Wagner say. “Rather, temperature and precipitation are proxy variables for agricultural production.”
The authors note that while “scenarios of climate-changeinduced violence can be painted with abandon”, this is because there is “very little research to either support or refute such claims”. Previous studies suggest that resource scarcity is at most a contributory factor rather than a direct cause of war, the study says..
They admit it is possible to imagine a scenario in which climate change leads to battles. Reid predicted, in a speech in 2006, that rising temperatures would lead to declining natural resources, and inevitable clashes over arable land, clean water and energy.
These apocalyptic warnings are based around prolonged droughts in areas such as the Horn of Africa, followed by mass migration in search of clean water. Tol and Wagner argue that this isn’t likely, however. “Drought is only a real problem for the poor; a scenario like this would happen only if warming and drying outpace development,” their study says. “If not, food imports or desalination may be the preferred options. Drought is also a slow-onset disaster. It may exhaust people before they move. Poor and exhausted people are unlikely to take up arms, and if they do, they are probably not very effective. The human suffering would be substantial nonetheless.”
A more plausible scenario of climate change leading to war would be a rapid rise in sea level in a large delta in Asia or Africa. Such coastal plains are usually fertile, and well-populated. Rising sea levels could force people to move to higher ground, setting off conflicts inland.
“In West Africa, for instance, the situation is already so tense that additional refugees are unlikely to do any good — the coasts of Cameroon, Gabon and Nigeria are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise,” the study says.
“However, these impacts will not be on today’s world. Sixty-six years ago, western Europe was at war. In 2075, south Asia and west Africa may be stable and prosperous.”