Angry Planet - Fragility, War, Genocide and Climate Change

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

The phrase climate change was originally created to soft-pedal global warming. A hotter planet doesn’t sound good, but, hey, climates change all the time - from winter to summer and back again.But it turned out to be an accurate description for what’s really going on. Deserts are drying, wet places are getting wetter. Crops are dying, and so is livestock and in some places it’s increasingly unsafe to go out during the day?So, how is this affecting human conflict? The assumption is that climate change will make things worse, but how much worse?To tell us, we have Stanford Professor Marshall Burke, who has studied the issue extensively and written numerous papers on the subject.Recorded 10/22/20Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You have Turks with Turkey. Historically, increases in U.S. food aid into some countries have actually increased conflict rather than reduce conflict. And one of the stories there is that the food aid actually doesn't go to the people that's intended to. Some of the times it gets siphoned off, and that's used actually to fund conflict operations.

I would say that finding is a little bit disputed, but it does make you think that the type of aid or assistance that's delivered is pretty important. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which, this world has never seen before. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Golt. The phrase climate change was originally created to soft-pedal global warming.

A hotter planet doesn't sound good. But hey, climates change all the time, from winter to summer and back again. But it turned out to be an accurate description of what's really going on. Deserts are drying, wet places are getting wetter, crops are done, dying, and so is livestock. And in some places, it's increasingly unsafe to go out during the day. So how is this affecting human conflict? The assumption is that climate change will make things worse, but how much worse? To tell us, we have Stanford Professor Marshall Burke, who has studied the issue extensively and written numerous papers on the subject. Professor Burke, thank you for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. Happy to be here.

So what do you see going on out there? You've actually studied this. Are things getting worse? Yeah, so we have studied this, and actually many scholars have become pretty interested in this question around the world. So maybe the place to start is in what we would call the stylized facts. If you just look at the data and ask, do you see a relationship between changes in climate variables? And here we often mean changes in rainfall patterns or particularly changes in temperature, warmer temperatures. And we look to see, is there a relationship between those climate variables? climate variables and various types of conflict outcomes around the world.

When we studied this, we've really cast a wide net. When we talk about conflict, we've thought of everything from group level conflicts. These are civil conflict, civil war, the iconic types of conflict that we think about, all the way down to individual level conflict, violent assault, homicide, that sort of thing. And what we find when we study this is, yes, we do see a very consistent relationship between, in particular, warmer than average temperatures and increases in various types of conflict around the world. And we see this for individual level conflict, homicides in the U.S., and we see it for these larger organized conflicts, civil conflicts, in sub-Saharan Africa. I remember reading a Ray Bradbury story a long time ago that dealt with murder and just how hot it was in New York City.

And I think he was talking about like 95 degrees was the perfect temperature to kill people. 96, you're too hot, you get lethargic, 94, you still let things go. Are you talking about something that's a little similar to that? It is pretty similar. And I think on some level, it's at least somewhat intuitive. At least me personally, if it gets really hot out, sometimes I'm a little more irritable, a little grumpier. And so none of this research would suggest that hot temperatures turn us all into murderers. What it says is that on the margin, when temperatures increase, A few more people are irritable enough, more angry, enough to commit crimes on an individual level. On a more organized conflict level, again, what it says is hotter temperatures don't turn everyone into guerrists,

but at gorillas as in GUER, people fighting in conflicts, enough people might be willing to join an insurgency for there to be a meaningful uptick in the amount of organized conflict that we see. It goes beyond just heat, though, right? think about places like South Sudan where like the nature or the conflict is seasonal and that conflict tends to be based on like when the rains come and when it becomes almost impossible to have conflict. So is that part of it too? What are the other things that are factors here besides just heat? Yeah, that's right. Changes in rainfall patterns can also play an important role. If it's too wet, it's as you said, it's hard to fight to wage war, right? And you literally,

South Sudan is a great example. Parts of South Sudan become pretty impassable. in the wet season. Rainfall also has a role to play through agriculture. So it's been shown that droughts, so very low rainfall periods can also induce conflicts. People who lose their main source of livelihoods might be at least a little bit on the margin. A few people might be more willing to join conflicts to make ends meet. This has been the classic economic story that's been told that links these changes in climate to conflict outcomes. So what's new? I guess that there have been droughts and they've forced people to do things that they don't normally do. But with climate change, are things changing? Is there an overall more of a frenzy? So for a while, conflicts seem to be

trending down around the world. And this was true in both group level conflicts and in individual level conflicts. Homicide was going down. Conflicts after the early 90s seem to be trending down. And so that was a really hopeful sign. And books were written about this. And I think there's a lot of hope. We've seen, I would say, a pretty dramatic reversal of those trends, at least in terms of group conflict. We've seen both small scale and large scale conflicts on the increase around the world and be pretty high in the last decade. And so whether that's driven by climate change itself and the warming that we've seen, I think that's hard to say definitively. But again, what the historical evidence would say, and I think say pretty clearly, is that

In years that were historically warmer than average, we see increases in types of conflict. And so that would suggest that the warming temperatures that we've seen have played a role in this increase in conflict that we've seen around the world. Can you give us a concrete example? What was a really bad year when it was real hot? One example that gets pointed to a lot on both sides of this debate. And I would emphasize there is some scholarly debate about the magnitude. of these effects, where do they apply for particular conflicts? And we can talk about those examples. But one example that gets brought up a lot is the Syrian conflict, right? Prior to the start of the Syrian conflicts, we saw a record drought or a five-year, very warm and dry period throughout Syria.

And many, much in the sort of case study literature argues that this contributed to, it wasn't obviously the sole cause, but it contributed to the ensuing large-scale conflict civil war we saw in Syria starting about 2011. That highlights something I think is really important here. It's not just that you get hot and you get angry, right? There are secondary effects to climate change that make conflict more palatable to people. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, that's exactly right.

The intelligence of the military community have actually studied this pretty extensively. And the word they use is climate is a threat multiplier, right? it can take existing threats or existing causes of conflict and amplify their power. And I think that is a good way to think about it. None of this research that I'm talking about suggests that climate is the only cause or the most important cause. What it does suggest is it can amplify a lot of the underlying things that cause conflict. This could be economic disputes. This could be other sorts of grievances.

This could be inequality. Changes in climate can amplify, again, these underlying facts. factors in ways that contribute to the conflicts that we see. Does it get to a point, though, where changes in the climate become a little bit more easily connected? So, for example, if we feel that a five-year drought, 10-year drought, fires what's happening in California, if we feel those are connected to climate change, global warming, and there are a conflict going around, do we, in that? area, do you think we cannot say there is a connection or is that too much?

It's a great question. So we can go back to the Syria example. So there's been nice work in the climate science community saying that the drought that we saw in Syria was made much more likely by climate change. So again, we can't say climate change caused that drought. We can say climate change made that drought much more likely. And the research we've done would say that drought then makes conflict much more likely. So there's this causal chain that goes through. You increase the probability of one thing. That increases the probability of something else. And so you're combining probabilities. And so it's a probabilistic statement. But yeah, I think we would say that increases in temperature, given what we know, have likely contributed to the rise in conflict that we've seen.

So I guess I'm trying to think towards the future, since it doesn't look like, and please feel for you to disagree with me about this because you would know better. but it doesn't look like climate change is going in the other direction any time soon. So is this something that you study partially to look into the future as well to do any predictive work? We do. We end up doing some sort of heroic predictive work. And the way that goes is in two parts. One is to, again, use historical data. So a backward-looking part that uses historical data to tell us what's the historical relationship between increases in temperature, changes in rainfall, and

conflict. And then from climate science, we have projections of what happens, what might happen, what's likely to happen in the future. And we're very certain that temperatures are going to increase that's already happening. We can measure that clearly. It's going to keep happening in the future. And so based on that, we can say, okay, if the future world responds to these changes in temperatures, as has the world that we live in right now, we can then project forward. Okay, conflict is going to go up by 10%, 20%, depending on where you look in the world. So we do make those projections. The important assumption in those projections is that the future world is going to look something like the current world, that in the future people are going to respond as they have in the recent past changes in temperature. And of course, that's something we can't know.

That's the sort of projection. So where are the flashpoints going to be, do you think? So that's a great question. And I would say that's one where our research is not well positioned to answer. Again, if we think in the threat multiplier sense, what are the best predictors of where conflict happens now? A great predictor is have you had conflict in the past? That's one of the best predictors. Economic factors seem to be good predictors as well, at least on average. And so I think what our evidence would suggest is climate is likely to amplify, most amplify the risks in places

where there has been use in conflict, in places where economic resources are low. But beyond that, I think this research is going to struggle to pinpoint specific places where conflict is going to break out beyond those sort of broad brush factors. So it is then, sounds like, to me, COVID in a way, where it is this thing that amplifies stuff that's already happening. It's something that just turns the pressure up on everything and accelerates things. It's not necessarily the direct cause. I think that's right. I think that's the right way to think about it. It's the thumb on the scale for conflict.

What does the Pentagon research look like? Because this is something that I know that they have studied thoroughly and that they are preparing for. So what do we know that the U.S. military is doing and what do they think about all of this? So I've participated in some of the sort of planning efforts. And I think they take a range of approaches. One is to actually look at the scientific literature and try to make sense of it and make sense of it in light of everything they know about the world. The other is to, as you guys know,

use these sort of gamification, these gaming scenarios where they get a lot of people in a room representing different constituencies. They exert some sort of environmental or climate stress on one of the parties and they try to understand how people react. And then the third part, their third approach is to think about case studies, think about particular areas or conflicts that they know well and try to understand to what degree climate might have affected things in that area or that specific conflict. So to me, I think they take a portfolio approach and trying to understand this, right? They use many different types of evidence to try to build a picture of what might go on. And what I like about their approach is that they don't need to be 100% certain to take action,

right? They, I think, are very used to working in very uncertain environments and can balance the evidence. And if the weight of evidence suggests that this might be important, then they're willing to make a decision based on that. So I personally like that approach. I wanted to know a little bit about how you do your research. How does it work? Is it really, I don't want to oversimplify. I don't want to just assume that it's you with an atlas of temperatures and a history book. How do you go about it? So that's not a dramatic oversimplication, actually. So we rely on work that other scholars have done to very carefully catalog what conflicts have happened where around the world. So for some reason, the Scandinavians are really into this.

The Norwegians and the Swedes have a couple different outfits in Scandinavia have done a very amazing job building these georeferenced, so location information, time-stamped data sets of where conflicts have occurred around the world. And so we and other researchers use these data a lot to try to then understand what are the determinants of these conflict outcomes. So what we do is then merge that with observations of what's going on with temperature or rainfall around the world. And those observations are from satellites. They're from ground stations. They're just our entire sensing network for what's going on in the climate. And our research is then really,

so we're not going out and collecting the conflict data. Someone else has nicely done that. We're not collecting the climate data. Someone else has nicely done that. Our role is really combining these things and analyzing them in a way that really lets us isolate the role of these climate variables from all the other things that could be affecting conflict outcome. So the magic, if you will, the goal is really that isolation. How can we strip out all the other correlated stuff and really know that we're picking up the effective temperature of rainfall and not something else? That's affecting conflict.

All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are going to pause there for a break. We are talking about war and climate change. Thank you for listening to Angry Planet. We are back talking about climate change and how it will shape the future of conflict. I'm going to assume that's not particularly easy. Is it a mathematical formula? How do you take some of the other stuff out? Yeah, so math is useful here. There are some reasonably well-honed approaches for how we do that.

What's nice about the climate system is that if you at least look historically, the year-to-year changes in temperature or in rainfall are pretty random, right? Whether this is a wet year or a dry year is pretty random, whether this is a hot year or a cool year is somewhat random. Climate changes, again, has the thumb on the scale there. But what that allows us to do is then, approach what would be an experimental situation. So we call these natural experiments, right? And this is literally a natural experiment in which nature is providing some sort of random variation. And we can use that random variation to then study the impact. So instead of comparing Nigeria to Norway, Nigeria is hot, Norway is cool, right? We're going to compare Nigeria to itself as the temperature fluctuates. So did Nigeria see more conflict in a year in which Nigeria was hotter than average

compared to cooler than average. And so that really allows us to isolate the role of temperature or rainfall from all these other factors. How do you deal with the section of the public and the section of our legislators that just don't believe any of this, that just don't want to have anything to do with any of it? Yeah, that's a real challenge. And that's not just a challenge in that sort of climate conflict is a challenge in the climate anything sort of domain. And here is where actually I find the engagement by the defense community to be pretty useful. These guys aren't your park and stock wearing liberals for the most part.

And so if these guys are taking climate change seriously and are actually spending money to invest in risk mitigation, then to me that's a good signal that maybe this stuff is actually serious. You have your own devids community putting out reports saying, yeah, we should really worry about this, both in terms of like where we station things, where, you know, how we invest in our bases abroad to protect them from climate change. So to me, that's actually been helpful. And we bring that up a lot in making the broader case that this is real and people are taking it seriously in your own government. Yeah, I guess that's one of my questions is that has anyone, have you seen and you don't have to name names, but have you been able to, I would imagine that if you go to

somebody that has already in the position that climate change isn't real, saying that it's going to affect conflict is perhaps not going to sway them because it's another, they have to believe two things to get there. So you have to get them to believe that first order thing has the fact that, hey, the Pentagon is really serious about that. Have you seen that move people? Have you seen it change minds? No, that's a good question. I don't think I can point to any specific minds that I've scene changed by that. So it's a good sort of research question, what changes people's minds on this stuff? I was lucky enough to testify in a congressional hearing on climate change impacts. And so I was talking about my sort of dorky research. And then the guy said next to me was a

retired admiral. And he spoke to the defense, just what we were talking about, the sort of defense community's clear realization that this is something we need to worry about. And I personally found him a lot more convincing than me. Hopefully someone was listening. So are things going to get more dramatic? Do you think? What I mean by that is I obviously read too much science fiction. I watch too many science fiction movies. This is true about myself.

I know it. But when I think about migration levels, people moving from places that have had climate problems to places like Northern Europe where things were a little bit better, I just wonder if in 20 years we're talking about a scene from a movie like World War Z where you have millions of people trying to climb the walls to get into safe places. Are we talking about that level of direness? Is that a word direness? Dyerness, yeah.

How freaked out are you, basically? How scared are you? It depends on the day for me, probably like for you guys too. I feel like on some days I'm really freaked out and our research, if drawn to one conclusion, suggests, yeah, we can see a lot more conflict. There's, you mentioned migration, Jason. There's excellent academic research suggesting, you know, that even in the last 10 or 15 years, we've seen a lot more migration as the climate has changed. It can really pin this on the climate changes specifically. That said, there's a lot we can do here.

And we see pretty clear evidence in some settings that concerted public policy can break the link between climate shocks, rapid changes in climate, and these conflict outcomes. We've seen that when there are income support programs, maybe the best studied example of this is in India, this sort of minimum wage program that basically guaranteed everyone a set amount of rupees per year, minimum wage basically. that program pretty much completely broke the link between climate and conflict within India. So these examples to me suggest that none of this is inevitable, right? We have tools at our disposal that can help manage these systems. And they look a lot like social safety nets, right? They support people locally when the climate gets really bad. Where, all right, looking at America,

where would you not buy a house in the next year? I like I we bought a house in California here and then this year has made me feel like that was a mistake. We literally looked at property and up in the mountains in Colorado and right now that looks like a terrible mistake. We had terrible fires right now. I don't know where you buy house in northern Saskatchewan. I have water. No one's around you. I don't know where you go. That that's you make it. Yeah, you make it sound like this is one of this. There's not a perfect place to be. there's not going to be a part, there's not going to be a part of the planet that's untouched by this in some way.

Correct? That's correct. I think there's reasons to think that some of the very cold parts of the planet might get nicer, nicer to live. And we've already seen this. So the northern latitudes, I think,

could become more productive places to be as they warm up, as they get closer to temperatures where we're comfortable. And so if you were really thinking long term, buy some lands. Yeah, again, up in the Northwest Territory. for Siberia or something, but that's a long-term play. We were talking a little bit, you mentioned something I never would have guessed,

which is social welfare programs actually helping to mitigate conflict. So you take that further, would it also mean like the United States coming into a place that's filled with conflict going on and terrible climate problems and giving them a couple billion dollars? Would that help? That is a great question. And I would say the evidence would suggest that it could if that aid or assistance is in the right form. So there, I would say, there's some provocative findings in the literature that suggest that historically increases in U.S. food aid into some countries that actually increased conflict rather than reduced conflict. And one of the stories there is that the food aid actually doesn't go to the people that's intended to.

Some of the times it gets siphoned off and that's used actually to fund conflict operations. I would say that finding is a little bit disputed, but it does make you think that the type of aid or assistance that's delivered is pretty important. So in this Indian setting where we have pretty good evidence, it's actually a very well-run program in which we know exactly what money is going to whom. And we know the individuals are getting paid and this stuff is not really getting siphoned off. So to me that says, if that lesson is right, then to the extent that we can actually deliver assistance specifically to those low-income, typically folks who are most harmed by these climate shocks, that's likely to help the most. I'm trying to think of, I have a few more questions to terrify the audience with. I think another part of this that I think I really want to stress for the audience.

And it's been on my mind because I've been doing this big project about what a civil conflict in the United States might look like in the next year or so, is that I think there's a perception from people my age and younger that you can turn off from all of this stuff because it's the end of something. Because life will cease to go on. But the truth is that the nature of life just changes, right? Life goes on. Many people will still have jobs. The nature of those jobs will change. Buses and trains may still run in an altered form.

Life will continue. But the quality of that life is what's at stake. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. What do you see as the implications for all this stuff for the great power competition? Russia, China, America. How does, it's a big, weird question, but like, how does this affect all of that?

I think it's an interesting question. And it was actually, yeah, talking about this week. Yeah, so I think it's a very interesting question. One inroad into thinking about that is to think of the relationship between political power and economic power. So economic, large economies tend to have more political power, I would say on average. That's a stylized fact. And there's research, including some of our own, that shows how,

economies as a whole, countrywide, might be affected by changes in climate in the future. And what that research suggests that if the largest effects are going to be for the economies that are really cold to start with, the rushes of the world, and there we see actually pretty clear evidence that, at least historically, warmer than average years have been associated with higher economic output. On some level, this is intuitive, right? If you're in a really cold place, it warms up a little bit, you become more productive. The opposite is true if you're in a really hot place. If temperatures warm up a little bit, you come somewhat less productive. Again, I think that's somewhat intuitive. And so actually what we see is in countries like

Russia, Canada, Northern Europe that are pretty cold, there's some evidence that their output actually might go up somewhat as temperatures warm. The U.S. and China happen to be right now what we would estimate as the sort of sweet spot for economic productivity. They're at pretty mild temperatures on average. And so what that says is then as temperature, warm up, their economies are actually likely to be harmed. So then draw that out 50 years, 100 years, whatever. Is that enough to change sort of the great power relationships, the balance of power between these countries? That feels above my pay grade. I'm not sure. But it certainly suggests that it could change sort of the balance of economic power. Now, is that the most

important to determine it of the political allocation of power. Again, this is not my expertise. I don't know. But to me, it seems like it could have a role. I want to go to the darkest extreme, if we can. Have you read Timothy Snyder's Black Earth? No, my chance? I have not. No, okay. Well, then I can't ask you that question. I need you to have read that book. Oh, sorry. Give me the, no, it's okay. Timothy Snyder is famously like a historian specifically of the Nazi, like Nazi and Soviet genocides. Okay. To simplify it, he makes the claim that he worries that climate change will set up the perfect conditions for states to justify genocides. Do you think that is a possibility?

What do you make of that? Wow. Like, I would, I guess, say it's not, it's not crazy. And he, Here's why. We already have some sense that even within a place like the U.S., climate change is going to have unequal costs and benefits. And I think there's pretty good evidence that lower income individuals or lower income areas could be more hurt, both based on where they are. So in the U.S., the South tends to be poorer, and it tends to be hotter. And given that you're already hotter, additional increases in temperature are going to harm you worse. We have pretty good evidence. That's the case. And so already you have some inequality in the effects. And this inequality breaks down on socioeconomic lines, and it breaks down, unfortunately, on racial lines as well.

So unfettered, unmitigated climate change already in some sense has this genocide is probably too hard to work, but has this very unequal effect, socioeconomically and racially. So does that go all the way to genocide? To me, this is less purposeful than how we, I think, normally characterize genocide. But it's not genocide, right? It has a race-specific effect that I think is something we need. to acknowledge more openly. Yes, I hear what you're saying, but I think Snyder's argument, and we're getting to a point where I'm like extrapolating out and speaking for a person that's not here.

But I think his argument is that it sets up conditions where the state can pick an outgroup to winnow down in order to preserve resources for other people in the state is like the extreme where he goes with it. I'll just throw that out there and say, thank you so much for coming on to the show. in walking us through this, and listen, unless you have another question. We like to end on a dark spot.

Yeah, you got it. You can't get a lot darker than that. He called the book Black Earth for a reason. Jeez. Yeah, because I did have another question, but I think that I can't really talk

what Matthew was saying. I really came. No, that's a good one, Jesus. We try to pay fealty to the historical record and our evidence there is just less strong on this stuff. It's probably failure or imagination. on my part. Actually, can I ask a question that I think Matthew will hate, which is,

do you see any possibility for optimism? Yeah. Actually, I think there are reasons to be optimistic on a number of fronts. In terms of doing something about climate change, we could think of two broad categories of doing things. One is in adaptation, is in figuring out how to deal with the warming that we're going to see. and the other is in mitigation, isn't reducing the amount of warming that we're going to see. And I think on both of those fronts, there are reasons to be optimistic.

On the adaptation side, as we talked about, we do have evidence that certain policy interventions can actually help break the link between climate and conflict in this case. Social safety net program seemed pretty successful. So there we have a policy lever that seems successful and useful for this outcome. It does a lot of other good things in the world that we like.

On the mitigation side, I also think we are in a better place than we were five or ten years ago. We've seen a pretty dramatic transition away from the dirtiest source of energy to cleaner sources with more investment. That transition will quicken. And now our best guess of how much warming we're going to see is no longer 4.5 degrees Celsius. It's probably more like something between three and four. And that's even without concerted government action on this stuff.

So what would happen if we actually got our act together on mitigation and really invested in this stuff? some of our candidates are proposing. I think then we have an opportunity to really bend the needle. And we've seen, I think, more motivation on this by mainstream politicians than we have ever seen in the past in this country. So to me, that's hopeful. Marshall Burke, thank you so much for joining us. How dare you end on a happy note.

Thank you so much. I apologize for the happiness. Yeah, Jason Matthew. Thank you, guys. That's all for this week, Angry Planet. listeners, we will be back a little bit later this week with a bonus episode. If you like the show, you can get that bonus episode by going to Angryplanet.substack.com forward slash subscribe.

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