Climate Change Will Drive Genocide

By 2030, more than half the world's population will live in areas under "severe water stress."

Unmet demand for food, water and energy, are now seen as reliable indicators of looming genocide or mass killing.

 “We must remain open to the possibility that the past is not necessarily a predictor of where and when mass atrocities will occur, or the means by which they will,” said Chris Kojm, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a government agency, which will release its first estimate on the threat of genocide and mass killings later this year.

...In areas where there are disproportionate numbers of young men, Mr. Kojm said, the risk of genocide also rises. And, in much the same way that democracies are less likely to go to war than autocracies are, so too, participants said, are autocratically governed countries more likely to engage in genocide or other mass atrocities.

Climate change acts as a “multiplier of other resource crises,” according to Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, causing uncertainty about resources, leading to “the ecological panic that I’m afraid will lead to mass killings in the decades to come,” Mr. Snyder told the symposium.

“We’ve entered into this moment of ecological panic,” he said. “Global warming will itself almost certainly directly cause mass killing, but it will likely indirectly cause it” as major states like China and the United States seek to feed their citizens, possibly touching off shortages elsewhere, in places that would then be at risk. China has already begun to act and, in a potential harbinger of future problems, has been investing in farmland in Ukraine and in parts of Africa for a few years.

 With the specter of mounting violence in some countries, the threat of future mass killings was a prime concern.

“The United States and our partners must act before the wood is stacked or the match is struck,”[Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton said, “because when the fire is at full blaze, our options for responding are considerably costlier and more difficult.”

The remarks were made at a conference of foreign policy experts in Washington/

A Fair & Equitable Approach to Carbon Reduction

Nations that are disingenuous about cutting greenhouse gas emissions are those that play with percentages and baselines. That, unfortunately, is the approach most in vogue today. What's wrong with it? Plenty.

Beside the fact shown at Copenhagen that the "percentage and baseline" approach, or PB, leads to endless squabbling, suffocation by negotiation, it also preserves the status quo on per capita emissions. In the industrialized West, our per capita emissions tend to run about twice to three times that of developing nations and upwards of ten times that of Third World states. In other words, we're hogging far more than our fair share of the atmospheric carrying capacity when taken on a strictly per capita basis. If we start talking about reductions that don't address that per capita disparity, then we're simply locking in our unfair share.

Germany and the G77 Third World nations want a strictly per capita approach, worldwide. Work out the planet's remaining carbon carrying capacity, annualize that, count all the people, and then award each nation an emissions budget calculated according to its population. That sounds fair, but is it? I don't think so, at least not entirely.

What's unfair about the strictly per capita approach is that it "rewards" countries that have become dangerously overpopulated - China and India for example with several countries in Africa hell bent on catching up. Overpopulation is its own form of environmental scourge that extends into realms beyond global warming. With our planet's population already beyond Earth's resources carrying capacity, we're rapidly exhausting our natural ability to feed and fuel overpopulated societies. This manifests itself in soil exhaustion (desertification), water and air pollution, freshwater depletion - any number of intractable problems. Rewarding overpopulation by per capita allocations is no answer to anything.

So, if PB doesn't work and PC isn't really workable either, how do we find an equitable balance? I think I have a solution, one that I've not yet raised. A modified per capita approach. Here's how it would work.

We know the carbon targets man has to reach. Let's take the total population of the world, X, and the total landmass of the world, Y, and reach an average, landmass per person, or Z. Divide your overall carbon budget by Z to reach a final number which would be the carbon budget per man/hectare. You then work out each nation's landmass and multiply that with the carbon budget per man/hectare to fix that nation's carbon budget.

What's fair about that? It doesn't reward overpopulation nor should it. We've all come to realize the environmental value of landmass preserved in its natural state, particularly forests. They're enormous carbon sinks and we desperately want to arrest deforestation. It seems to me that the nations with the greatest remaining forestlands are, if anything, underpopulated and that deserves recognition.

Take Canada, for example. We have a per capita carbon footprint nearly identical to America's but - and this is a huge "but" - we also have vast tracts of boreal forest and tundra, enormous carbon sinks. Our population density is well less than one-tenth that of America's. There is no equitable way to treat the two countries identically.

Canada is the second-largest nation in the world by landmass. China, which is smaller in territory, has one-thousand, three-hundred million people compared to our paltry thirty-six million. (Think of it this way. The have Thirteen Dollars, we have Thirty Six cents) Their per capita emissions may still be just one-third or ours but, by hectare, they're vastly higher than ours.

A simple landmass calculation wouldn't be fair but a global population divided by global landmass factor strikes a fair balance that roughly redresses disparities in both per capita emissions and population density. It also provides a handy yardstick that we're going to need to address looming problems such as how to allocate dwindling open ocean fish stocks.

What I'm saying is that China and India both have to depopulate and African nations heading in that same direction have to stop. As I've written several times, when I was born the earth's population had just reached an all-time record of two-billion. Today we're at nearly seven-billion. We're already well beyond our planet's carrying capacity and we have to learn to live within the finite limits that Earth provides. We have to grow - smaller, smaller and cleaner. At the end of the day, that's the bottom line. And we all know it.

A Century of War Looms

The British government's former chief science advisor, Sir David King, has issued a dark warning - we're heading for a century of resource wars. From The Guardian:

The Iraq war was just the first of this century's "resource wars", in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities, according to the UK government's former chief scientific adviser. Sir David King predicts that with population growth, natural resources dwindling, and seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict.

"Future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind - the first of the resource wars," he told an audience of 400 in London as he delivered the British Humanist Association's Darwin Day lecture.

Implicitly rejecting the US and British governments' claim they went to war to remove Saddam Hussein and search for weapons of mass destruction, he said the US had in reality been very concerned about energy security and supply, because of its reliance on foreign oil from unstable states. "Casting its eye around the world - there was Iraq," he said.

This strategy could also be used to find and keep supplies of other essentials, such as minerals, water and fertile land, he added. "Unless we get to grips with this problem globally, we potentially are going to lead ourselves into a situation where large, powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others."

Sir David's warning ought to be a wake up call for all resource-rich, small population nations. Hey, wait a minute!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/13/resource-wars-david-king