Warming Impacts- Starvation

Warming Impacts- Starvation

The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands-if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem-and could lead to a Third World War-but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic. There is another part of the world with the same good soil, within the same latitudinal band, which we can use for a quick comparison. Canada lacks Europe's winter warmth and rainfall, because it has no equivalent of the North Atlantic Current to preheat its eastbound weather systems. Canada's agriculture supports about 28 million people. If Europe had weather like Canada's, it could feed only one out of twenty-three present-day Europeans. Any abrupt switch in climate would also disrupt foodsupply routes. The only reason that two percent of our population can feed the other 98 percent is that we have a well-developed system of transportation and middlemenbut it is not very robust. The system allows for large urban populations in the best of times, but not in the case of widespread disruptions to adapt to climate change. It is perilous to our own survival to ignore this critical creation."

Warming Impacts – War

Wars and the increase of civil wars in places like Africa are rooted in the increase of global temperatures.

Aldhous 9(Peter, The New Scientist “African conflicts spurred by warming;” Lexis)AQB

AFRICA is poised to experience a surge in civil wars, causing nearly 400,000 additional battle deaths by 2030 - all as a direct result of rising temperatures. This bold prediction is one of the most alarming results yet to emerge from attempts to discover how climate change will affect patterns of human conflict. It is already proving controversial. Previous attempts to model the effects of climate on patterns of conflict in Africa have mostly concentrated on rainfall. But now researchers led by Marshall Burke at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Lobell of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have studied both rainfall and temperature. They found that warming was much more strongly associated with civil strife than precipitation was (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0907998106). Burke and Lobell analysed data on the incidence of African civil wars alongside local temperature and rainfall measurements from 1981 to 2002. They found a strong relationship between spikes in temperature and the likelihood of civil war. Because climate models give fairly consistent predictions for warming across Africa, the researchers were able to forecast a 54 per cent rise in the incidence of civil conflict by 2030, resulting in an extra 393,000 combat deaths. The prediction assumes that global carbon dioxide emissions are not curbed in the short term. Other researchers agree that temperature changes may affect conflict, but some are sceptical that the effect will be as large as Burke and Lobell claim. "I'm just not convinced," says Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who has previously found a global link between increased conflict and the Little Ice Age, which lasted from around 1400 to the late 1800s. One issue is that the two-decade period studied by Burke and Lobell may have been unusually conflict-prone, amplifying the apparent effect of temperature. Cullen Hendrix, a political scientist at the University of North Texas in Denton, points out that some countries were destabilised when the superpowers withdrew aid to African dictators as the cold war ended. "This is probably going to wind up being the first salvo in a pretty significant debate," he says. "We're very willing to be proven wrong," says Lobell. But the link with temperature remained even after the researchers controlled for measures of wealth and democracy. "The result seems remarkably robust," adds Burke. If the link stands up under further scrutiny, policy-makers will need to know how warming triggers conflict. Burke and Lobell say the most likely explanation is that warmer temperatures reduce crop yields or other aspects of economic productivity, increasing social tension. But some studies have suggested that it's inherent in people to become more violent when the mercury rises. Rich nations can provide economic aid or share plant-breeding technologies that allow crops to withstand extremes of climate, says Hendrix, "but we can't change human nature".

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