More Global Warming Fear-Mongering

This time war is being blamed on global warming.

(HuffPo) — At the outset of his new book, “Tropic of Chaos” author Christian Parenti suggests that the violent death of Kenyan farmer Ekaru Loruman — and perhaps thousands of people like him living in the global south — arose not just from the proximate cause of a bullet in the head, delivered by a rival tribe amid a conflict over resources, but also from a toxic cocktail of poverty, Cold War militarization and climate.

He calls it a “catastrophic convergence,” in which large numbers of unemployed young men with ready access to weapons represent a tinderbox into which the match of global warming is thrown.

“You’ve already got a very volatile situation in these countries,” Parenti said in an interview. Throw on top of that that crop failures, disruptions in fishing — and even increases in grain prices and other vacillations in global trade — and the economic shock of global climate change in the developing world, he suggests, can prove explosive.

It’s not an entirely new idea, and numerous books and studies have sought to explore the complex connections between the environment and social friction. But the need to do so has gained increased currency — and urgency — not least because many climate scientists believe that the cyclical climate patterns driving weather in many of the world’s less developed regions will become more frequent and more intense as average global temperatures rise. Read more here.