A History Lesson on Climate Change

The second part of my post on Climate Refugees and Resource Wars will have to wait until I return from a sojourn away from home/computer/reference sources. In the meantime I want to share an article I found browsing the morning's news. Stephan Faris, whose piece on the violence in Darfur as possibly the first climate-change related major conflict of our time, The Real Roots of Darfur, I referenced in the first installment, has written an interesting little piece following up on his original essay. Asking the question: Did Al Gore deserve a Nobel Prize for his work on global warming? He explores not only what is happening today......

Other early hot spots for warming-related conflict are likely to be in
sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, or the Caribbean—places where institutions are weak, infrastructure is deficient, and the government is incompetent or malevolent. The crisis in Darfur has already stretched into Chad and the Central African Republic. Nomads from Sudan, spillovers from Sudan's desertification, are pushing deep into the Congolese rain forest. In Ghana, nomadic Fulani cattle herdsmen, forced by the expanding Sahara desert into agricultural lands, are buying highpower assault rifles to defend their animals from angry farmers.

Climate-change conflict is even spreading into the Arctic, where normally pacific Canada and Norway have joined the United States, Russia, and Denmark in a five-way tussle over mineral and shipping rights unlocked by the melting ice. Thus far largely symbolic, the conflict could take a more serious turn as the waters warm and military traffic increases. Norway and Russia already face each other down over fish in the Barents Sea. And Canada and Denmark take turns pulling up each other's flag on Hans Island, a stretch of icy rock the size of a football field. These countries may be arguing over small fries right now, but what happens when oil is at stake?

...he also gives us that a look back through the last thousand years that shows how quickly even a mild, natural shift in the climate can produce a period of cataclysmic violence. Using the work of David Zhang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who researched China's dynastic archives for records of war and rebellion and compared them with historical temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The results of this research are fascinating, and would seem to hold a lesson we would be well advised to pay attention to now. As he concludes his musing:

We may not yet know with certainty what this means for conflict in the world—in terms of where, when, and if fighting will break out. But the evidence is mounting that climate change will lead to more and longer-lasting wars. Do we really want to wait for the data to pile up?

Technorati Tags: climate change, conflict, Darfur, Nobel Peace Prize, Stephan Faris

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