Is There a Link Between Weather and War?

Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang and Edward Miguel argue that climate change could increase violent group conflicts by 50 percent in the next 50 years. But I take strong issue with their starting point for this rise: “a planet already awash in conflict.”

As Ross Douthat notes in his column on an adjacent page (“War, What Is It Good For?”), the world is actually “more at peace than at any point in human history … with fewer invasions, fewer war crimes, fewer massacres than in the past.”

Starting from today’s low levels, a 50 percent rise over 50 years hardly registers. After all, world total battle fatalities jumped 65 percent just in 2011 to 2012 because of Syria, but remain less than one-fifth of the average level of the 1980s.

Source: Is There a Link Between Weather and War? – The New York Times