Historically, climate shifts are occasionally identified as triggers for conflicts, such as the 1789 French Revolution, for example, by wrecking harvests and driving hungry peasants to the city. But now a recent study published in the journal Nature concludes that a definite link between climate change and conflicts exists today, reports Richard Ingham at Agence France Presse. It says tropical countries affected by the notorious El Nino weather event are twice as likely to be hit by internal unrest compared to the phenomenon’s cooler, wetter counterpart, La Nina. The civil war and famine gripping the Horn of Africa is a typical example of what happens when a climate swing causes drought and overstresses an already fragile society, say its authors. And this, say the authors, is a disturbing lesson about how violence could be driven by man-made warming, which is expected to bite deep in coming decades. Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia University in New York says that “What it does show beyond any doubt is that even in this modern world, climate variations have an impact on the propensity of people to fight.”
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