Climate Change Not Linked To African Wars
Excerpts from: Quirin Schiermeier, Nature News, 6 September 2010
In his popular 2008 book Climate Wars, the US journalist and military historian Gwynne Dyer laid out a daunting scenario. Climate change would put growing pressure on fresh water and food over the coming century, he wrote, triggering social disorder, mass migration and violent conflict.
But is there real proof of a link between climate change and civil war — particularly in crisis-ridden parts of Africa — as many have claimed?
No, says Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway. In research published today [this week] in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he finds virtually no correlation between climate-change indicators such as temperature and rainfall variability and the frequency of civil wars over the past 50 years in sub-Saharan Africa — arguably the part of the world that is socially and environmentally most vulnerable to climate change. “The primary causes of civil war are political, not environmental,” says Buhaug.
The analysis challenges a study published last year that claimed to have found a causal connection between climate warming and civil violence in Africa. Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, reported a strong historical relationship between temperature and the incidence of civil war. They found that the likelihood of armed conflict across the continent rose by around 50% in unusually warm years during 1981-20022. Projected future warming threatens to offset the positive effects of democratization and eradicating poverty in Africa, they warned.
…
Burke maintains that his findings are robust, and counters that Buhaug has cherry-picked his data sets to support his hypothesis. “Although we have enjoyed discussing it with him, we definitely do not agree with Halvard on this,” says Burke. “There are legitimate disagreements about which data to use, [but] basically we think he’s made some serious econometric mistakes that undermine his results. He does not do a credible job of controlling for other things beyond climate that might be going on.”
Buhaug disagrees vigorously. “If they accuse me of highlighting data sets in favour of my hypothesis, then this applies tenfold more to their own paper.”
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NeilT says:
September 10, 2010 at 6:09 pm
This whole thread and all the others around it are a distraction from the main show today. The near total collapse of the ice up in the Arctic.
YET, now it doesn’t fit WUWT theories of “regrowth”, it is not to be mentioned.
So handle me……
That Arctic is not the main show, never was. Maybe to you it is, that’s your choice.
WUWT is a forum (blog) , not a theory machine.
The man (Goddard) admitted he missed too high. That makes him better than his critics, because you won’t get that from warmists like Hansen or Gore, Mann etc.
The Global Sea Ice is not going anywhere, irregardless of which hemisphere dominates.
There never was any threat to it, and the last time the 31 year average Global Sea Ice Max Area attained & average Min Area were hit was 2008, barely 2 years ago, and 1 year after the much mislauded 2007 catastrophic melt.
Non-crisis over in 1 year.
NeilT says:
September 10, 2010 at 6:09 pm
This whole thread and all the others around it are a distraction from the main show today. The near total collapse of the ice up in the Arctic.
So how’s about it. A WUWT article on the state of the Arctic, the predictions on this site and how completely wrong they were.
Then an honest “we got it totally wrong” to start the ball rolling.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/29/sea-ice-news-20/
Two weeks late and you won’t hold your breath? How brave you must feel!
Dyer… back away from the quantitative analysis. Too late – it just blew up in your face.
From: NeilT on September 10, 2010 at 6:09 pm
From Wikipedia’s Pebble Bed Reactor entry:
There is a longer PBMR entry.
There was no experimental pebble bed reactor shut down for safety reasons, as the demonstration plant was never built. Anti-nuclear green groups harangued the company, drove off potential investors and customers, and now what is left of the company merely exists to simply exist as a corporation while preserving intellectual property such as patents and retaining key personnel, in the hope it will eventually get funding.
Thus once again, nuclear power technology wasn’t even given a chance before anti-nuclear activists shut it down, then declared victory over an inherently unsuitable and dangerous energy source. Go Renewable, or else!
Now you have been handled. Now I have to wash my hands. Next time I’ll wear gloves. Are you allergic to latex?
Everyone knows that it’s hotheads who start wars. What’s new?
The ultimate sticky issue that must be addressed in any peace between Palestinians and Israelis is that of “water” but nothing indicates that any environmental issue short of lack of land has anything to do with this conflict.
DaveF
Steve Goddard put in a “well it looks like it’s going to go just below my prediction”.
Then goes on to waffle about how it’s getting colder dahdedahdedah.
YET in the following two weeks not only did Steve submit a revised 5.1M SQkm estimate into search but the extent dropped to 4.7.
How wrong do you have to be before you admit it????
Oh and the global sea ice one won’t wash. It’s dark in the Antarctic, it’s sunny in the Arctic and the Antarctic sea ice almost completely disappears every single year.
Kadaka
Both the wiki article and this news clip dismiss the fundamental point that these PBMR reactors use graphite as the damping medium. It was the graphite damping medium in Chernobyl which exploded.
Chernobyl was a cheap, quick and dirty reactor design created by the USSR to produce large quantities of weapons grade material. When Chernobyl blew up the west trumpeted the fact that they didn’t use this kind of Graphite core an so were not at risk of the same kind of accident.
These groups may have had an agenda but they were absolutely right. Just because they are the 3rd world does not mean we can experiment on them with unknown and, potentially, dangerous designs.
I wash my hands every time I leave this site. And the keyboard. But it has to be done…..
There are numerous natural cycles, including war and climate cycles (Edward R. Dewey, Cycles – The Mysterious Forces That Trigger Events, Hawthorn, 1971). To assert a connection between climate and war is typical of the religious ramblings of the global warming faithful.
This daily barrage of global warming nonsense will make interesting reading in the decades to come as we are dragged into the completely predictable Landscheidt Grand Solar Minimum dictated by planetary mechanics. Prepare to freeze your butts off for at least the next 60 years. Prepare for agricultural failure and the famines that will certainly follow. Little Ice Age II has begun. And CO2 is powerless to stop it.
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From: NeilT on September 11, 2010 at 11:07 am
Nah, the fundamental point you were making is how unsafe pebble bed reactors are for which you highlighted a South African one getting shut down for safety reasons as an example. Now I could say you outright lied about that, but I realize how easy it is for the gullible to be misled by eco-propaganda misinformation so I’ll let it pass.
Magnesium is a dangerous metal. Once heated until it ignites (autoignition temperature 630°C in air), it burns with an intense heat (3100°C) and is dang near impossible to put out. I saw the result at a local car dealership when a vehicle with a magnesium block engine caught fire. The fire crews really had no choice but to let the fire burn itself out, and the heat really did a number on the pavement underneath. Yet we still make car parts with magnesium, and many other things as well.
You’re trying to blame a material, graphite, as somehow inherently dangerous solely because it is used in a reactor, without accounting for everything else in the system including the design and safety features.
This is how it goes with people with an agenda. Their facts are wrong, what they say has happened and will happen doesn’t match up with reality. They will even say and do things that outside observers can recognize as foolish, that in hindsight they may agree are foolish, that really only made a situation worse. Yet despite all that, they remain certain they are absolutely right!
Yeah well, when you throw mud and dribble slime you should expect you’ll have to clean up yourself and the things you touch.
☺
Curiousgeorge says: September 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Why, yes, man!
Did you know that General Patton knew the layout of places he entered as victor in WWII because he remembered them from a past life? This side of Patton is well-documented. And more.