Climate Change Driving War?

New submitter Stirling Newberry writes "You may have heard of The Great Moderation (PDF), which argues that business cycles have become less volatile over time, and the Green Revolution, a set of initiatives that led to increased global food production. These, it has been argued, have led to a marked decrease in war across the world. But not so fast, says a study in Science. It may well be that periods of war, past and present, can be linked to changes in climate: 'The most direct way in which extreme climate shifts influence human society is through agriculture, Zhang says; a falling supply of crops will drive up the price of gold and cause inflation. Similarly, epidemics can be exacerbated by famine. And when people are miserable, they are likely to become angry with their governments and each other, resulting in war. But golden ages rise out of these dark periods, the team argues. For instance, a 100-year cold period beginning in 1560 caused shortened crop growing seasons. The researchers found a causal linkage with a decline in average human height by nearly an inch during this period, and the century was rife with disease and conflict. But the world began to warm in 1650; when Charles II was crowned king of England in 1660, the coronation sparked the Enlightenment era in Europe.'"

Comments

There is no relevance in between Charles II

[unity100]

and age of enlightenment. First, age of enlightenment doesnt start well into 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

second, precursors of age of enlightenment that are recounted in the above article were already there, starting with early pioneers like erasmus, and going into spinoza, long before charles ii and 1660.

please dont make up ahistoric shit to back up loose arguments.

Re:There is no relevance in between Charles II

[Stirling Newberry]

The terms "Enlightenment" and "Age of Reason" are not so precisely demarcated, many scholars use a long age of enlightenment to mean from the 1650s forward, and others divide into two. This is part of the "lumpers/splitters" problem, that some people like small units, others like large ones. The Wikipedia article takes the lumpers point of view, but that isn't universal. However, it is generally believed in history that the Peace of Westphalia and the coming of absolutism and the "age of Reason" are linked, and that while there were precursors to this, in the form of say King James I of England's The True Law of Free Monarchy and the policies in France, that the turbulence of the Thirty Years War was the trigger for a more general change. So why that war happened, as it did, is an important question, if climate was part of that answer –and more broadly, if climate fluctuations show a correlation to political events, then it changes the notion of what historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists need to study and include in their works. Never again will an author be able to wave their hand and dismiss as anecdotal accounts of climate, because now we have better ability to reconstruct. And if climate isn't a factor, then that too is something that needs to be shown, not just assumed.

In terms of climate and history, for a long time there have been observations of linkage between historical periods and climatic events, one of the most famous of these is the period of reduced growing periods known as the "Little Ice Age" and the destabilization of the medieval order on Eurasia. Another more specific one is the relationship between the volcanic eruptions of the 1770's and 1780's and cold snaps that led to poor harvests as a contributing factor to the fall of the ancien regime. Franklin speculated at the time that the eruptions were leading to cold, and Talleyrand famously quipped that "we are all dancing on a volcano," in reference to the problems of the ancien regime in France and poor harvests which were driving inflation in food and social instability.

However, until recently there were not good paleo-climate reconstructions. Paleo-climatology is a fundamentally computational discipline – it is computers and algorythms by which chronologies are constructed and pieced together: from dendrology, that is trees, ice cores, and other "proxies" for climate. The survey linked to is one of the first, but by no means the last. This is important because much of history has been outside of a real test of theories as to why what happened. As computational climatology matures, it provides a challenge to the dominant view in history, economics, and sociology, that internal factors drive history and events, and a way to apply scientific measurements. Since chronology, and dates, are often "floating" – that is, we don't really know what certain dates in the past were, only our best guesses, it means that instead of arguments over texts, we are getting measurements, and ultimately facts, to determine when events occured. If you see a date before about 1300 BC in a history text, assume it is approximate, simply because our understanding of what dates were is based on reconstructions. That is best guesses.

One of the most important examples of how this matters is in the coming of what is now called the "Neo-lithic Revolution." For a long time it was seen as an internally driven event, however, recent discoveries show that "The Younger Dryas" coincided with the explosion of domestication of plants and animals, but also how many of the first domestication events: figs, rye, dogs, and perhaps goats, were not in the present warm and stable climate era, but in the colder but relatively stable Younger Dryas period. Perhaps, and one has to say perhaps, what later became agriculture started not because it was a good deal, but because times were harder, but more consistent, and the peoples around the world started domestication because it was a cushion when hunting and gathering were not e

Re:Yes, of course

[KeensMustard]

Oh bull poop. Ever looked at a map? Noticed how much land mass is currently useless for growing in Russia, Canada, etc? Warm things up a bit and we will lose some land and gain some.

Maybe you should try looking at a globe rather than a map imaged from a Mercator projection. Then you will see that areas in the high (and low) latitudes are far smaller than you believe.

Secondly you might want to think about how fertile the soil in siberia would be - currently this soil is frozen in permafrost, and covered in pine forest. Neither condition is conducive to soil fertility. If the permafrost melts (releasing it's methane) then Siberia will be an infertile, poisonous swamp.

Anyway, this is the second Warmer story today, this is getting silly. This isn't dkos... or it least it wasn't.

Does this topic make you uncomfortable?

Re:Climate Wars

[Black Parrot]

FWIW, both the US military and the US intelligence community have, in official reports, identified climate change as one of the biggest threats to national security that the US will have to deal with this century.

What is going to be bad, IMO, is that the shift in temperature zones is gong to turn some of the agricultural "haves" into "have nots", and vice versa. Some people are going to fight that change - with guns.

On a side note, the latest Scientific American has an article about the discovery of large deposits of rare elements in Afghanistan. My first thought was, "Oh, boy! That's really going to help stop all the fighting."

Re:Yes, of course

[timeOday]

The Russian drought last year, which triggered them to ban grain exports, lead to higher food prices, especially in importer nations such as the middle east. High food prices in large part triggered the Arab Spring, in which a handful of governments were overturned. So, it is arguable whether this premise is even a prediction, or simply a predicted continuation of recent events.