As is the case with nearly every aspect of climate chaos, meeting the Paris goals will not save us from this bloodshed, in fact far from it; even an astonishing, improbable effort to limit warming to two degrees would still, by this math, result in at least 40 percent, and perhaps as much as 80 percent, more war. This, in other words, is our best-case scenario: at least half again as much conflict as we see today, when few watching the news each night would say we are enjoying an abundance of peace. Already, climate change has elevated Africa’s risk of conflict by more than 10 percent; in that continent, by just 2030, projected temperatures are expected to cause 393,000 additional deaths in battle.
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“Battle”—the word feels like a relic when you come across it. In the wealthy West, we’ve come to pretend that war is an anomalous feature of modern life, since it seems to have been retired as fully from our everyday experience as polio. But globally, there are nineteen ongoing armed conflicts hot enough to claim at least a thousand lives each year. Nine of them began more recently than 2010, and many more unfold at smaller scales of violence.
That all of these counts are expected to spike in the coming decades is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I’ve spoken to has pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change, the Pentagon issuing regular climate threat assessments and planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming. (This is still true in the Trump era, when lesser federal outfits like the Government Accountability Office deliver grim warnings about climate, too.) The drowning of American navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, and the melting of the Arctic promises to open an entirely new theater of conflict, once nearly as foreign-seeming as the space race. (It also positions the country primarily against America’s old rivals the Russians, now revived as adversaries.)
Given the right war-gaming cast of mind, it is also possible to see the aggressive Chinese construction activity in the South China Sea, where whole new artificial islands have been erected for military use, as a kind of dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world. The strategic opportunity is clear, with so many of the existing footholds—like all those low-lying islands the United States once used to stepping-stone its own empire across the Pacific—expected to disappear by the end of the century, if not before. The Marshall Islands archipelago, for instance, seized by the U.S. during World War II, could be rendered uninhabitable by sea-level rise as soon as midcentury, the U.S. Geological Survey has warned; its islands will be underwater even if we meet the Paris goals. And what is taken down with them is quite scary. Beginning with the bombing at Bikini Atoll, these islands were ground zero for American atom bomb testing just after the war; the U.S. military has only ever “cleaned up” one island of radioactivity, which makes them the world’s largest nuclear waste site.
But for the military, climate change is not just a matter of great-power rivalry executed across a transformed map. Even for those in the American military who expect the country’s hegemony to endure indefinitely, climate change presents a problem, because being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. And it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming—a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began to accelerate when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil. From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster. According to one assessment, thirty-two countries—from Haiti to the Philippines and India to Cambodia, each heavily dependent on farming and agriculture—face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest from climate disruptions over the next thirty years.
What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics: when yields drop and productivity falls, societies can falter, and when droughts and heat waves hit, the shocks can be felt even more deeply, electrifying political fault lines and producing or exposing others no one knew to worry over. A lot has to do with the forced migration that can result from those shocks, and with the political and social instability that migration often produces; when things go south, those who are able tend to flee, not always to places ready to welcome them—in fact, recent history shows, often quite the opposite. And today migration is already at a record high, with almost seventy million displaced people wandering the planet right now. That is the outbound impact; but the local one is often more profound. Those who remain in a region ravaged by extreme weather often find themselves navigating an entirely new social and political structure, if one endures at all. And it is not just weak states that can fall at the hands of climate pressures; in recent years, scholars have compiled a long list of empires buckled, at least in part, by climate effects and events: Egypt, Akkadia, Rome.
This complex calculus is what makes researchers reluctant to assign blame for conflict neatly, but complexity is how warming articulates its brutality. Like the cost to growth, war is not a discrete impact of global temperature rise but something more like an all-encompassing aggregation of climate change’s worst tremors and cascades. The Center for Climate and Security, a state-focused think tank, organizes the threats from climate change into six categories: “Catch-22 states,” in which governments have responded to local climate challenges—to agriculture, for example—by turning toward a global marketplace that is now more than ever vulnerable to climate shocks; “brittle states,” stable on the surface—but only by a run of good climate luck; “fragile states,” such as Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh, where climate impacts have already eaten into trust in state authority, or worse; “disputed zones among states,” like the South China Sea or Arctic; “disappearing states,” which they mean literally, as in the case of the Maldives; and “non-state actors,” like ISIS, which can seize local resources, such as freshwater, as a way of applying leverage against the nominal state authority or the local population. In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.
This complexity may also be one reason we cannot see the threat of escalating war very clearly, choosing to regard conflict as something determined primarily by politics and economics when all three are in fact governed, like everything else, by the conditions established by our rapidly changing climate. Over the last decade or so, the linguist Steven Pinker has made a second career out of suggesting that, in the West especially, we are unable to appreciate human progress—are in fact blind to all of the massive and rapid improvements the world has witnessed in less violence and war and poverty, reduced infant mortality, and enhanced life expectancy. It’s true, we are. When you look at the charts, the trajectory of that progress seems inarguable: so many fewer violent deaths, so much less extreme deprivation, a global middle class expanding by the hundreds of millions. But again, that story is about the wealth brought by industrialization and the transformations of societies by newfound wealth powered by fossil fuel. It is a story written largely by China and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the developing world, which has developed by industrializing. And the cost of much of that progress, the balance come due for all the industrialization that made middle-class-ness possible for the billions of people in the global south, is climate change—which we are, ironically, far too sanguine about, Pinker included. Worse still, the warming unleashed by all our progress heralds a return to violence.