Thursday 28 June 2012

Great news for Panetta: Climate change does not increase risk of armed conflict


"Our mission at the Department is to secure this nation against threats to our homeland and to our people.  In the 21st Century, the reality is that there are environmental threats which constitute threats to our national security.  For example, the area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security"
Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense


"Over the next 20 years and more, certain pressures-population, energy, climate, economic, environmental-could combine with rapid cultural, social, and technological change to produce new sources of deprivation, rage, and instability." 
Robert Gates, former secretary of Defense:


There is great news for Panetta and the other Pentagon warmists.  A new study on Climate Change and Armed Civil Conflict shows that climate change does not increase the risk of conflicts: 

What was learned
In the first stage of their analysis, the two Norwegian researchers did indeed find that "climate-related disasters have a negative impact on growth," but they say that their analysis of disaster data and conflict onset shows that "climate-related natural disasters do not have any direct effect on conflict onset." And they additionally report that they "did not find any evidence that economic shocks caused by climate-related disasters have an effect on conflict onset," noting that their findings "are similar to those in the recent cross-country study by Ciccone (2011)."
What it means
In the concluding words of the authors, "storms and floods adversely affect people and production inputs such as land, infrastructure, and factories, which in turn have a negative impact on the aggregate economy," but they determined that, "interestingly, these negative income shocks do not increase the risk of armed civil conflict as predicted by prominent studies in the field (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Miguel et al., 2004)."


There is reason to be sceptical about the Norwegian researchers´concept of "climate-related disasters", but that does not invalidate their conclusion that natural disasters do not increase the risk of armed conflicts. 

2 comments:

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

This could pay for the health care!

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

This could pay for the health care!