Climate change produces many victims, but now a new survey finds that it could increase the likelihood of war and unrest by as much as 56% between now and 2050. And this is a relationship – between these climate variables and conflict outcomes – observed across time and across all major continents around the world, says the study’s researchers at the University of California. Read More

Climate change makes people want to kill each other, survey says

New study finds global warming heats up tempers, could increase war and civil unrest. Drought plays a part, too.

By Deborah Hastings for New York Daily News (2 August 2013):

Global warming heats up more than the weather.

A new survey finds that climate change could increase war and unrest by as much as 56 percent between now and 2050.

“This is a relationship we observe across time and across all major continents around the world,” said Marshall Burke, one of the study’s researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.

“The relationship we find between these climate variables and conflict outcomes are often very large,” he said.

The survey was published Thursday in the journal Science.

It analyzed 60 studies on wars, violent crime and the collapses of historical empires. It also looked at lab simulations documenting what provokes police to open fire.

Researchers found that violence and civil unrest increased in correlation with rising temperatures and extreme weather.

Children in London cool off this week during a mini heat wave. A new survey finds global violence may increase by as much as 50 percent because of global warming.

Children in London cool off this week during a mini heat wave. A new survey finds global violence may increase by as much as 50 percent because of global warming.

“It does change how we think about the value of avoiding climate change,” said Solomon Hsiang, the lead author and researcher at the UC Berkeley.

“It makes us think that avoiding climate change is actually something we should be willing to invest more in,” he said.

Burke said the results “shed new light on how the future climate will shape human societies.”

He also said the study suggests that “a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by over 50 percent in many parts of the world.”

In the U.S., it would mean that for every increase of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the likelihood of violent crime goes up 2 percent to 4 percent.

The review also noted that historically, great upheavals tended to occur during periods of severe weather.

As an example, researchers noted that the collapse of the Mayan civilization occurred during unprecedented droughts about 1,200 years ago.

Source: www.nydailynews.com

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict

Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel

ABSTRACT

A rapidly growing body of research examines whether human conflict can be affected by climatic changes. Drawing from archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, and psychology, we assemble and analyze the 60 most rigorous quantitative studies and document, for the first time, a remarkable convergence of results. We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world. The magnitude of climate’s influence is substantial: for each 1 standard deviation (1σ) change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises 14%. Because locations throughout the inhabited world are expected to warm 2 to 4σ by 2050, amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Source: www.sciencemag.org