Climate change is not just killing people. It's already making people kill each other.
by David Atkins
It's not just the increasingly frequent and potent natural disasters. Climate change is also already making people kill one another:
US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war.
The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.
Marshall Burke, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: "This is a relationship we observe across time and across all major continents around the world. The relationship we find between these climate variables and conflict outcomes are often very large."
The researchers looked at 60 studies from around the world, with data spanning hundreds of years.
They report a "substantial" correlation between climate and conflict.
This stands to reason, of course. That's why the Pentagon is worried about climate change as one of its key policy concerns:
One of the Pentagon’s top strategists said climate change is fundamentally altering how the Defense Department (DOD) evaluates future conflict areas.
Daniel Chiu, the deputy assistant secretary of DOD strategy, said climate change has the Pentagon thinking about impacts on global food and water scarcity, mass migration and the potential for those issues to ignite clashes around the world.
“How we at the Department of Defense need to think about it — not again because we desire any of those to come about — but, frankly, so we can play our part in preventing those types of negative scenarios from emerging in the future,” he said Thursday at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Chiu said climate change presents challenges that are not of the “traditional military-on-military, state-on-state” variety.
Climate change will generate greater need for humanitarian and disaster-relief aid, Chiu said. He referenced extreme weather events that are intensified by rising sea levels and warmer waters associated with climate change.
That means the DOD needs to engage in more collaborative efforts with other nations and nongovernmental organizations, he said.
Right now, climate change is seen as a niche issue that only "those climate people" care passionately about. But soon it will begin to shadow over every single other policy debate until nothing can be discussed without taking it into account. It's will soon go from niche issue, to major issue, to the only issue that matters.
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