Last month, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, Nature published a Q & A with an anthropologist who studies the murderous motivations of Islamic extremists. He discussed socio-cultural factors and an allure to a radical ideology. That may help explain Islamic attacks against “infidels” in Europe and the United States, but then what’s driving suicide bombers in…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, a new climate change story line emerged in the media. The seeds for this narrative were perhaps sown ten years ago, when a worst-case scenario report commissioned by the Pentagon triggered breathless headlines about a research field known as “abrupt climate change.” Perhaps you saw the 2004 movie. The sensationalist portrayal of…Continue Reading…
In a column published today, a scholar challenges the legitimacy of the climate security frame and suggests it is distracting from the real climate concerns that need to be addressed. But before I get to that, some quick background. In recent months, a flurry of highly publicized papers have explicitly linked climate change to war…Continue Reading…
Climate security gets an airing today in a U.N. Security Council meeting. It’s not the first time the Security Council has taken up climate change. And wise heads, such as environmental security scholar Geoff Dabelko, offers some excellent pre-meeting context that puts the nascent climate security issue into perspective. The Guardian also has a nice story on the meeting’s…Continue Reading…
In the Guardian, Jules Boykoff takes stock of the seriousness with which national security experts inside and outside the U.S. military view climate change, a subject I’ve often take up here and elsewhere. As Boykoff drily notes: This isn’t a tree-hugging festival. It’s the US military and its partners making clear-eyed calculations based on the best…Continue Reading…
As I mentioned last week, I’ll be flagging my Frontier Earth posts in this space with a link. My latest, asking if security concerns can be an enduring focal point for climate and energy debates, is up. If you have any thoughts to share, please do so over there.
As I offhandedly mentioned yesterday, my biggest problem with the claim that global warming is a contributing factor to Egypt’s uprising isn’t that it’s parasitically opportunistic. It’s that it undermines serious, legitimate debate on the linkages between climate change, demographics, environmental degradation, poverty, and sociopolitical factors, such as built-up frustration over government repression. And that…Continue Reading…
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about global warming being a “conflict accelerant” in volatile regions of the world. That discussion, which I’ve explored in articles and various blog posts, (see here and here) is focused on the potential geopolitical ramifications of climate change-related disasters (such as more frequent and severe floods,…Continue Reading…
The Economist, in a rather one-sided article, is dubious about the increasingly touted link between climate change and human conflict. It’s true that the “climate wars” narrative is starting to take on a life of its own. I’ve even used the term as a headline in a post. But it’s also obvious (from the comment…Continue Reading…
Guess who’s asking the hard questions on climate science and policy. The U.S. military and geopolitical/security specialists. Earlier this week, an array of of defense, national security and climate experts took part in a conference hosted by the Scripps Oceanography Center for Environment and National Security. This was the symposium agenda and here’s the opener…Continue Reading…