Climate Change Sparks Wars and Depopulation
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that during the Little Ice Age, as temperatures decreased, the number of armed conflicts rose, and population declined as a result of famine and war.
Scientists believe that studying past climate change can help to predict future changes, but also it can help in understanding social changes and future conflicts that may arise because of scarce food resources.
Today we do not face a new ice age, but climate changes occurring in the opposite direction, and the resulting changes in agricultural patterns across the earth could stimulate the same kinds of conflicts that occurred in the past and that were so devastating to human kind.
As part of the study, Peter Brecke, Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, assembled a large database recording 4500 wars, and other information correlated to those wars. The study builds on earlier work by David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong. Earlier research looked at China only, but more recently scientists have expanded their studies to Europe also.
War is correlated to climate change because climate change affects land fertility, creating food shortages, changes growing seasons, and manipulates water supply. Such changes can cause local conflict on the level of farm to farm disputes over water, or they can create regional conflicts, one country invading another country, or even invasions from other regions altogether. Governments have a difficult time coping with such climate changes.
The period studied was from 1400 to 1900. Historical records, tree ring growth, oxygen isotopes taken from ice core samples, and from Coral skeletons, were used to correlate temperature change to wars. The U.S. Institute of Peace assisted in the study.
When temperatures dropped there was turmoil and conflict; when temperatures rose there was relative peace. Stressed periods showed that war occurred twice as often than during less stressed periods. During war periods populations also declined. For example during the 17th-century, when temperatures dropped worldwide, populations in Europe and Asia declined. During warmer periods, population increased.
Scientists stress that extreme global warming will have the same effects that extreme cooling had, at least in terms of its social impact.
Scientists discovered that once food prices reached a certain level wars broke out. This is an important finding, because with global warming certain areas of the world will no longer be able to produce food as efficiently as before.
What it comes down to is that when resources are scare people fight over them.
War and Climate, George Inst. Technology
Published by Mark Saga
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2 Comments
Post a CommentI think it's an interesting concept. There will always be war, it's human nature but I can see the frequency being affected by climate, it only makes sense, scarcer resources means people start looking in other places for what they need. If their neighbor has what they want and won't share...
That's got to be the most idiotic study I've ever heard in my life. You can't take something as wide and expansive as war, with all the variables involved, and simply try to apply a single variable to it. It's a logical fallacy to its maximum. Just because the world got cold and there was an increase in wars, doesn't mean that the two are relative to one another. I mean, what else could contribute to the wars and famine? Well, more than half the population of Europe had just been wiped out by the Black Plague, the entire world was restructuring based on the shaken up social classes, the Ottoman Empire was finally making headway in its long sought after attack on the West, and the Mongol Empire was consistently pushing deep into Europe. The cultic obsession with climate change is really getting frightening when people are going to try to play around with historical facts in order to get their agenda across.