[Debate] Fwd: Sad, but not a surprise: Climate cycles are driving wars

[Jai Sen]

Sunday, 28 August 2011

Further evidence that climate change is increasingly driving social  
conflict and causing war.
We urgently need to sit up and take notice – and act.

(FYI, this was precisely the subject of a workshop organised at the  
World Social Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, this past February, titled  
‘Confronting the Consequences of Climate Change : Conflict, War,  
Resistance, and Movement in the Coming Half Century – Looking Ahead :  
What Do We Need To Do ?’. Co-sponsored and co-organised by : CACIM  
(India), along with ABN - African Biodiversity Network (Kenya);  
Climate SOS (USA); GGJ - Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (USA); IEN  
- Indigenous Environmental Network (Turtle Island : Canada/USA); and  
NFFPFW - National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (India).   
For a discussion note prepared before the workshop, see http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=CACIM+at+WSF+2011.)

             JS

fwd

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Julia del Carmen Sanchez <julia.sanchez at tcktcktck.org>
> Date: August 27 2011 9:25:39 pm GMT+05:30
> To: Jai Sen <Jai.sen at cacim.net>
> Subject: Fwd: [CAN-talk] sad, but not a surprise: Climate cycles are  
> driving wars
> Reply-To: julia.sanchez at tcktcktck.org
>
> FYI...
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dietrich v. Tengg-Kobligk <EU at forumue.de>
> Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 5:58 AM
> Subject: [CAN-talk] sad, but not a surprise: Climate cycles are  
> driving wars
> To: "Mailingliste CAN-Talk (can-talk at listi.jpberlin.de)" <can-talk at listi.jpberlin.de 
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> one more piece of evidence that climate warming will possibly cause  
> very high “collateral damages” to innocent people.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dietrich
>
>
>
> August 24, 2011 7:52 pm
>
> Climate cycles are driving wars
>
> By Clive Cookson in London
>
> Researchers in the US have established the first strong statistical  
> link between climate and
>
> conflict in the modern world.
>
> El Niño, the cyclical warming of the equatorial Pacific ocean every  
> few years, doubles the
>
> risk of armed conflict breaking out in the countries affected,  
> according to analysis by
>
> Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.
>
> The study, published on Thursday in the journal Nature, concluded  
> that, between 1950 and
>
> 2004, El Niño played a role in 21 per cent of civil wars worldwide  
> and 30 per cent of those
>
> in countries directly affected by the cycle.
>
> Mark Cane, professor of climatology at Columbia, said that while  
> climate alone could not
>
> trigger warfare – many political, economic and social factors were  
> involved – “this is
>
> compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much  
> people fight overall.”
>
> The study focused on the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso), which  
> affects weather
>
> patterns across sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-east Asia,  
> Australasia and Latin
>
> America. The continents generally become warmer and dryer during the  
> El Niño phase and
>
> cooler and wetter during the opposite La Niña phase.
>
> Though historians have built up much evidence for the influence of  
> weather and climate –
>
> whether storms or long-term drought – on warfare and the fall of  
> civilisations, the
>
> Columbia researchers say theirs is the first to make a statistical  
> case for such
>
> destabilisation in the present day.
>
> The data included all civil conflicts known to have killed more than  
> 25 people in a given
>
> year: a total of 234 conflicts over more than half a century. For  
> nations affected by Enso,
>
> the chance of conflict breaking out is 6 per cent in an El Niño year  
> and 3 per cent in a La
>
> Niña year.
>
> Examples of festering conflicts that have blown up during El Niños  
> include Sudan (1963,
>
> 1976 and 1983); El Salvador, the Philippines and Uganda (1972); Peru  
> (1982); Angola,
>
> Haiti and Burma (1991); and Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia and Rwanda  
> (1997).
>
> The study does not investigate the mechanism by which climate feeds  
> conflict, though it is
>
> clear from the data that poorer countries are more vulnerable. “If  
> you have social
>
> inequality, people are poor and there are underlying tensions, it  
> seems possible that
>
> climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Solomon Hsiang, lead  
> author of the Nature
>
> paper. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a  
> living, he added.
>
> Nor does the research address directly the issue of long-term  
> climate change. There is no
>
> clear evidence about whether future global warming would intensify  
> or reduce the Enso
>
> fluctuations, though Prof Cane said a warmer world “would tend to be  
> more El Niño-like”,
>
> whatever happens to the cycle.
>
> Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, who was  
> not involved in the
>
> study, said the Columbia authors gave “very convincing evidence” of  
> a connection between
>
> climate and conflict, though he added: “People may respond  
> differently to short-run
>
> shocks than they do to longer-run changes in average temperature and  
> precipitation.”
>
>
>
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>
>
> ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
>
>
>
> Dietrich v. Tengg-Kobligk
>
> European Representative – Europabeauftragter
>
>
>
> NGO Forum Environment & Development
> Office Brussels:
>
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>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> CAN-talk at listi.jpberlin.de
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Julia Sánchez
> Director, Regional & National Campaigns
> Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA)
>
> Please note that I will be leaving the GCCA secretariat team as of  
> June 30th, so for all things related to GCCA please contact Paul  
> Horsman (paul.horsman at tcktcktck.org).
>
> For personal matters, you can contact me at julia.in.ottawa at gmail.com
>
>

______________________________

Jai Sen

jai.sen at cacim.net

NEW OFFICE ADDRESS : CACIM, G-5 Jangpura Extension (basement), New  
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RECENT EVENTS :

CACIM @ WSF Dakar, February 2011  - see http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=CACIM+at+WSF+2011



NEW PUBLICATIONS :

Jai Sen, ed, 2011a - Interrogating Empires, Book 2 in the Are Other  
Worlds Possible ? series.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Daanish Books

Jai Sen, 2010 – ‘On open space : Explorations towards a vocabulary of  
a more open politics’, in Antipode, Vol 42 No 4, 2010 (ISSN  
0066-4812), pp 994–1018.

Jai Sen, March 2010b – ‘Be the Seed : An Introduction to and  
Commentary on the government of Bolivia’s Call for a ‘Peoples’ World  
Conference On Climate Change And The Rights Of Mother Earth’’, @ http://cacim.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=64 
, http://www.choike.org/2009/eng/informes/7620.html, and http://www.zcommunications.org/be-the-seed-by-jai-sen 
.  Also available in Spanish @ http://www.choike.org/2009/esp/informes/153.html

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS  :

Jai Sen, ed, forthcoming (2011b) - Imagining Alternatives, Book 3 in  
the Are Other Worlds Possible ? series.  New Delhi : OpenWord and  
Daanish Books

Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds, forthcoming (2011a) – World Social  
Forum : Critical Explorations. Volume 3 in the Challenging Empires  
series.  New Delhi : OpenWord Books



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