Goracle-approved fear mongering.
(HuffPo) — At the outset of his new book, “Tropic of Chaos” author Christian Parenti suggests that the violent death of Kenyan farmer Ekaru Loruman — and perhaps thousands of people like him living in the global south — arose not just from the proximate cause of a bullet in the head, delivered by a rival tribe amid a conflict over resources, but also from a toxic cocktail of poverty, Cold War militarization and climate.
He calls it a “catastrophic convergence,” in which large numbers of unemployed young men with ready access to weapons represent a tinderbox into which the match of global warming is thrown.
“You’ve already got a very volatile situation in these countries,” Parenti said in an interview. Throw on top of that that crop failures, disruptions in fishing — and even increases in grain prices and other vacillations in global trade — and the economic shock of global climate change in the developing world, he suggests, can prove explosive.
It’s not an entirely new idea, and numerous books and studies have sought to explore the complex connections between the environment and social friction. But the need to do so has gained increased currency — and urgency — not least because many climate scientists believe that the cyclical climate patterns driving weather in many of the world’s less developed regions will become more frequent and more intense as average global temperatures rise.
That notion helped inspire a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Indeed, what Parenti hypothesized anecdotally through Loruman’s story and profiles of myriad other conflicts brewing across the globe, the researchers attempt to quantify statistically — perhaps for the first time.
The analysis, to be published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveals a striking connection between global climate and civil conflict — though the underlying mechanism driving that connection remains something of a mystery. At the very least, the researchers suggest, the findings — and future analyses based on them — might provide an avenue for policymakers and humanitarian organizations to better prepare for years in which hostilities are likely to spike.