Disasters Climate Change: Is Warming Helping Cause Civil Wars by Bryan Walsh | @bryanrwalsh | September 8, 2010 | + Tweets. What do Marshall Burke and Halvard Buhaug know about titling their papers? Last year, Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled "Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa," which summarized the argument quite well. Then on September 6, Buhaug, a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Civil War in Oslo, published a new paper titled "Climate Not to Blame for African Civil Wars." So what we have is an academic civil war over the role climate changes play in African civil wars. Who's right? In his paper, Burke argued that higher temperatures as a result of climate change could lead to a 54% increase in armed civil conflict in Africa by 2030, according to the scenarios produced by most climate models — enough to lead to 393,000 extra battle deaths. The paper's logic was straightforward — Burke and his co-authors looked at trends in civil conflicts in Africa between 1981 and 2002 overlaid with temperature data, and found that for each 1 C rise in temperature above the norm led to a 4.5% increase in the likelihood of conflict in the same year. The researchers reasoned that warmer temperatures could disturb agricultural productivity — crucial in Africa, where farming can make up as much as 50% of gross national product — which would then impact economic well-being, one of the key drivers behind civil conflict. While Burke and his colleagues warned that climate change would be far from the only cause of growing civil conflict in Africa, they concluded that "the negative consequences of warming on conflict in 2030 appear to outweigh the potentially offsetting effects of strong economic growth or continued democratization." A warmer Africa would be a more violent one. Halvard Buhaug disagrees, to put it mildly. In his just-published PNAS paper, Buhaug found little historical connection between rising temperatures and civil conflict in Africa — pointing out that the last 10 to 15 years had been relatively peaceful on the continent, even as temperatures kept rising. Looking through much of the same data as Burke and his colleagues, Buhaug could see little evidence that temperature had much influence either way on the intensity of conflict — and that we simply didn't know enough about the subject to make realistic predictions about the impact further warming could have on war, as Buhaug told the BBC: Climate variation in Africa does not seem to have a significant impact on the risk of civil war. If you apply a range of different definitions of conflict and different ways to measure climate variation, most of these combinations will not show up as being related to each other. Much of the dispute comes down to dataset — Buhaug believes Burke's study may have been skewed by how his team decided to code "civil wars." (Burke's study defined a "civil war" as any year that experienced more than 1,000 deaths due to an intranational conflict, which might exaggerate the effect of long-running but relatively low-intensity civil wars.) Burke disagrees, telling Quirin Schiermeier of Nature that Buhaug "made some serious econometric errors that undermine his results. He doesn't do a credible job of controlling for other things besides climate that might be going on." The reality is that the data surrounding civil conflict itself is difficult to classify, and seems too superficial to build climate predictions on, as Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told Nature: Even if the data and methods were up to the task — which they aren't — the 'causal noise' would still be too high to distinguish the still rather weak climate signals in civil wars.That doesn't mean that a changing climate and warmer temperatures won't have a destabilizing effect on already vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa. It's an article of faith for everyone from the U.S. Department of Defense to the Central Intelligence Agency to the British Foreign Office — I myself took a trip this summer to the oil-ravaged wetlands of Louisiana with Iraq War veterans worried specifically about the national security effects of warming. But there's a big difference between reasonably positing that a more unstable, warmer and more disaster-prone climate could increase the chances for conflict, and saying that global warming will mean 393,000 extra Africans dying in 2030. In the short term at least, conflict will be driven by population growth, by economic problems, by political factors — and the most effective way to protect vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa is by addressing those factors first, beyond merely dealing with carbon emissions. Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth puts it well: With the global population cresting in the coming decades, our exposure to extreme events will only worsen. So whether or not nations decide to deal with the emission of greenhouse gases, there's an urgent need to "climate-proof" human settlements. That means building roads in Pakistan and reservoirs in Malawi that can withstand flooding. And it means no longer encouraging development in floodplains, as we've done in areas around St. Louis, which were inundated in the great 1993 Mississippi deluge. In the end, there are two climate threats: one created by increasing human vulnerability to catastrophic weather, the other by human actions — especially the emission of warming gases — that inexorably shift the odds against today's extreme weather becoming tomorrow's norm. Without addressing both dangers, there will be plenty of regrets. But conflating them is likely to breed confusion that doesn't produce solutions. Related Topics Articles: http://iwanabitch.com/blogs/entry/Nike-tilbud-christian-louboutin-tilbud-kriminalitet-roundup-ud http://www.bitesneats.com/members/home