What If Warm Weather Is Causing Wars?

Tempers flaring during heat waves is nothing new, but what does that scale across populations? Can unusually warm weather help cause wars?

A team of researchers at Columbia University’s Earth Institute have published a study in Nature suggesting that may, in fact, be the case: hot weather facilitates war. El Niño, long the friend of surfers and the bane of the rest of the sweaty masses, shows up every three to seven years along with higher temperatures and decreased rainfall. According to the study, El Niño (and its resultant climate effects) doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 tropical countries. The authors say it may have helped start a fifth of worldwide conflicts in the last 50 years.

“[If] you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” Solomon Hsiang, the study’s lead author, said in a release.

El Niño is a weather cycle produced by periodic warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific ocean, and affects weather patterns in just about every tropical and “sub-tropical” region on Earth. During the cool La Niña phase, rain is plentiful, while during the hot El Niño phase, droughts are more common.

The study correlated El Niño’s phase from 1950 to 2004 with the number of conflicts each year with more than 25 deaths. The final tally included 234 conflicts in 175 countries. Half the wars had more than 1,000 killed in action. The study adds modern evidence to theories that past civilizations collapsed from events stemming and building upon poor weather.

“The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale,” Hsiang said. “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’ This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now.”

In countries whose weather is affected by El Niño, the researchers found that the chance of a civil war breaking out during the La Niña phase was around three percent. During the El Niño phase, that rate was six percent. As a control, the team calculated the war rate of countries not affected by El Niño, which sat at two percent no matter the cycle’s phase.

Wars are triggered by a complex cascade of events that include political, monetary, and ethnic reasons. While the study doesn’t suggest that weather along can cause wars (which would be a pretty absurd premise), it does makes sense that inclement weather, like the droughts brought by El Niño, puts extra pressure on every one of those root causes.

“No one should take this to say that climate is our fate," coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said. "Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall. It is not the only factor—you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things.”

The study adds valuable evidence to theories that past civilizations collapsed from events stemming and building upon poor weather, but its implications for the future are even more compelling. With scientists generally agreeing that global climate change will lead to more frequent and more extreme weather events, which may have more of a hand in triggering conflicts. What’s yet to be seen is if lengthy climate changes can have similar effects on itchy trigger fingers.

http://motherboard.tv/2011/8/25/what-if-warm-weather-is-causing-wars

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