There’s been a lot of headline news lately about the slew of civil unrest from places like Somalia to Libya. Is there an underlying cause to all of these events? Some scientists think that there is. According to a recent article published in the International Business Times there is a direct correlation between climate changes and violent uprisings. Here’s a clip from the article (to read the rest, click here):
“The reports explains tropical countries affected by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation are twice as likely to suffer internal unrest compared to the phenomenon’s cooler, wetter counterpart, La Niña.
The authors of the study cite the civil war and famine that is devastating countries like Somalia as a typical example of what happens when a climate swing causes drought, increasing pressure on societies that are already living in very precarious conditions.
The study, published in the journal Nature, focuses on a naturally occurring pattern of climate change, but observations led the authors to expose the violent consequences human-caused warming can have.
But its authors say there is a disturbing lesson about violence driven by human-induced warming, which is expected to bite deep in coming decades.
“What it does show and show beyond any doubt is that even in this modern world, climate variations have an impact on the propensity of people to fight,” says Mark Cane, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
“It’s difficult to see why that won’t carry over to a world that’s disrupted by global warming.””
Let’s take a stand together in fighting the untold effects of climate change!