"Lebensraum" said German Chancellor Adolf Hitler when he appealed to citizens for why they needed to expand.
A new computer simulation says climate change may have been a factor, and it could get even worse this century. The authors of the numerical model estimate between 3 percent and 20 percent of armed conflict risk during the last hundred years was caused by climate and that its influence will increase dramatically in the 21st century.
That's such a broad range it is meaningless but that doesn't stop them from positing that in a scenario with 4 degrees of warming, it could mean a 26 percent chance of a substantial increase in conflict risk. Even in a scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond 1850 levels, the target of the Paris Climate Agreement (already difficult since the world's top polluter, China, have exempted themselves from any discussion of cuts until at least 2030) the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13% chance.
Read: Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.
The authors used inputs like climate change-driven weather extremes and related disasters damaging economies, by ruining farming and livestock production and intensifying inequality among social groups. But how did they come up with it?
They didn't. I am all for mobilizing action on climate but if the science community circles the wagons around this, we can't be surprised if more people don't start to distrust climate claims, but also science around vaccines, agriculture, and everything else. Why accept anything if we accept this? It is ridiculous.
And it's in Nature. A journal that claims to be one of the top in the world published what is basically the plot of a post-apocalyptic video game.
Finding science consensus for a computer simulation based on estimates - use political scientists, economists and environmentalists
Experts disagree that climate has or will have any role in triggering wars or any armed conflicts so how did they get numbers to input? By instead asking political scientists, environmentalists, economists and other non-scientists to speculate about climate's influence on conflict in the past.
While I appreciate that Peace Research Institute Oslo, for example, does important work, they are not driven by empirical data. Unsurprisingly, they went ahead and agreed that climate has caused armed conflict in recent decades and co-authored the paper. Are we to accept climate change was responsible for the Russian winter of 1941?
Lacking any quantitative foundation, they still proceeded as if this was a legitimate model.
Churnalism - journalists are going to rewrite the press release, and then political groups will promote the media companies publishing that as authorities
Every week we are treated to an environmentalist insisting some new chemical is an endocrine disruptor or is causing cancer and biologists who don't mind getting their departments bombed by emails and receiving eco-terrorist threats on Twitter always ask the same question; what is the biological hypothesis?
There is no hypothesis of any kind here, they have no idea how or if climate led to wars or under what conditions. That's they key reason it should not be in a science journal. There is nothing to convince us the "iron dice" of World War I were caused by climate rather than a bunch of leaders, many related to each other, assumed they each knew what the other was thinking. Or that World War II was really about the weather rather than hatred of others and desire for resources.
Though the failures of the past are evident - when has UN peacekeeping ever worked? - the authors still insist we need world government police forces unless we all agree to go without air conditioners unless the sun is shining on our solar panels. What does it mean "diversity economic opportunities"? Who writes this stuff and thinks that is applicable in the real world. As if some African farmer with a plot of land is simply choosing not to diversity economic opportunity and just needs a White Savior at Stanford to tell them that.
