In The Blogs

Warming Drives Civil War in Africa

| Tue Nov. 24, 2009 5:11 PM PST

— The ruins of Birao, Central African Republic, 2007. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Guess what happens as climate warms in Africa? You get more war. About a 50 percent higher chance of war in unusually warm years.

Prior research has shown links between drought and conflict. But this is the first comprehensive study to finds strong links between civil war and temperature in Africa.

The reason seems to be mostly about food. African crop yields are extremely sensitive to even the smallest shifts in temperature—only 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) is enough to drive crop failures and that drives people to start killing each other.

(You think the same thing couldn't happen here?)

So where's Africa headed? Combining historical temperature trends with climate forecasts, the researchers predict a 54 percent increase in armed conflicts by 2030. That's an additional 393,000 war deaths if future conflicts are as deadly as current conflicts.

The paper is important enough that it's been made open access on PNAS.

The researchers' conclusions? On the eve of Copenhagen, lead author Marshall Burke of UC Berkeley told the BBC:

"Our findings provide strong impetus to ramp up investments in African adaptation to climate change by such steps as developing crop varieties less sensitive to extreme heat and promoting insurance plans to help protect farmers from adverse effects of the hotter climate."

Want to calculate how much your Thanksgiving turkey is contributing to civil war dead in Africa? A recent study estimated Britains' annual turkey dinners add 51,000 tons of C02 to the atmosphere each Christmas. That's the equivalent of 6,000 car journeys around the world. Or some unknown number of war dead.

Seitan turkey, anyone?

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Julia Whitty is the Environmental Correspondent for Mother Jones. Her latest book DEEP BLUE HOME: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean will be out in July. For more of her stories, click here.

Comments

Global warming drives civil

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Nov. 25, 2009 7:27 PM PST.

Global warming drives civil war? OOOOHHH Booogie Booogie! That's so scary. I guess we'd better slit our collective throats so we won't cause global warming.

Global warming is a hoax. A scheme spawned by a bunch of one worlders who want to control the planet. The leaked emails prove the science is bad, as if anybody with half a brain needed the emails to prove it.

Obama is ready to promise a 17% carbon emissions cut for you and me. That should create plenty of jobs and give the economy a nice big boost.

Obama's acceptance of the hoax and his forcing us to pay for the hoax may cause a civil war.

Once again, thanks to Julia

Submitted by Marcelle2 (not verified) on Thu Nov. 26, 2009 11:21 AM PST.

Once again, thanks to Julia Whitty for bringing this news forward. It's unfortunate that the more mainstream media don't work on stories like this one; hence the nay sayers with their heads in the sand about global climate change and its real life effects. Yes, it can be hard to read enough news to make informed decisions about where we really stand on issues--bit it's vitally important to democracy and the world. Anyway, poor Africa, and unfortunately, poor us, too pretty soon.

You think it's about food?

Submitted by avannavon on Fri Nov. 27, 2009 9:53 PM PST.

No joke, it IS about food. And hot dry years produce less food than hot wet years. You can say the same about COLD dry years, because in case the facts have missed you, that's what has been going on for the past decade --the earth is cooling and drying. The decrease in atmospheric water vapor means that the deserts get hotter during the day and colder at night--which is what has been observed. It's not "global warming" causing the phenomenon---it's the global drying and the loss of atmospheric water vapor. Same thing with the ice fields---they aren't "melting" any faster, they aren't getting new snow pack.

The food situation in Africa is desperate. It always is. And famines breed wars. But don't try to tie it to "global warming", because the empirical facts tell us that global warming isn't happening. Tune into the Hadley CRU scandal rocking Britain and see for yourself. We've just witnessed another gigantic "plausible science" hoax in the tradition of Silent Spring and The Population Bomb.

It doesn't help that African leaders can't seem to behave

Submitted by Marshabar on Sun Nov. 29, 2009 2:31 PM PST.

themselves. The dark continent, as it was known before the PC gag was shoved down our throats by the left, is in need of light. Africans have been enslaving and destroying each other for millenia. Dry seasons don't help, but neither do murdered husbands and sons, burnt crops and stolen food aid.

Yes it's a world of misery over there. It's kind of nauseating to see warmers warming their souls over it though. Disgusting to see them co-opting that human tragedy to stoke their own furnace of deceit.

Oh how you care about the poor dying Africans! Best save your precious tears though, you may not be able to produce them for much longer with all the drying going on.

Consider donating some of your own personal money to charity for the Africans if you care so much. I do. And I don't need the government to take my tax dollars and 'redistribute' them according to it's progressive lights after syphoning off the lion's share either.

Africa is already a pretty

Submitted by jeux ds (not verified) on Mon Nov. 30, 2009 12:56 AM PST.

Africa is already a pretty warm place. Any increase in temperature will result in a reduction of the arable land. Since most people in Africa are poor farmers, the reduction in the arable land will result in conflict increase.