Climate change can fuel wars
economist.com
economist.com
Another lesser example being legal/political wrangling here in western US among states over Colorado River rights.
It'd be interesting to dig up some of those white papers / predictions and see how credible accurate their predictions like this were.
Not exactly the same thing as climate change but certainly connected.
The idea has been kicked around for decades, but now even some notable scientists have warmed up to the idea.
Even if parts of Calif are a desert, they become a fertile deserts with water.
I imagine some revenue sharing scheme could entice some of the states to send some water.
People can't drink money.
No need, there is a loophole. Bottled water companies are allowed to pull as much water from the watershed as they want and export it. Michigan charges a $200 per year permit fee. The water bottles are limited in size to be less than 5.7 gallons (21.5 liters).
Nestle bottles 5+ million bottles of water per day and sends it where ever they choose.
Someone could build a railroad loop at the edge of the watershed and have a circular train with millions of 5.7 gallon containers. Fill them up on one side, dump them into a pipeline system on the other. $200 per year.
> But not everyone’s land in the Fergana Valley is fertile. Overuse of water in upstream communities often leaves those downstream parched.
About 1,400 cubic meters of water is supposed to flow along Kok Tal’s irrigation canal each day, yet only half that volume emerges from the neighboring village – an isolated stretch of Uzbekistan surrounded by Kyrgyz territory.
“During the summer time, there are daily conflicts over irrigation water,” said Tynar Musabaev, executive director of the Central Asian Alliance for Water. “They are usually between villages, sometimes inter-ethnic and people have killed each other over irrigation water.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kyrgyzstan-water-climatec...
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-0005...
The Pentagon also has reports on climate change as national security risk.
The risk posed by climate change is that it will majorly disrupt economies and access to food and water. (Think widespread drought and famine). I find it strange that these experts draw a distinction between these factors.
And it's pretty straightforward: as water, arable land and other resources become scarcer, then groups facing severe shortages will fight over the leftover resources.
Maybe food will be less scarce... Maybe Congo will have more wars, but maybe by some random fashion, climate change will prevent some kind of world war iii.
Climate change is a disaster for the fauna and flora of the world. It will displace a lot of people. But anything more complex is impossible to say.
It's a disaster for the current flora and fauna, and social structures of the world. Something will follow, but on very different terms than what we have been used to.
To hazard a guess, the bias will be toward flora and fauna (including people) fighting to get in to, and defend shrinking habitable zones.
There is a theory that the desertification of the ancient Fertile Crescent, and subsequent dispersal of agricultural and pastoral societies and people, was the result of the their intense farming in a fragile environment.
Those people had a place to run to and carry on (the entire unknown-to-them world). No such escape hatch for us.
Do you consider humans to be fauna?