Is North Africa the West's First Climate War?

We've witnessed unrest and uprisings in one form or another from Egypt to Morocco over the past two years.   We, the West, intervened directly in two - Libya and Mali.   We've been quick to label each of these conflicts as uprisings to break the shackles of tyranny or Islamist terrorism.   Yet that is much too simplistic no matter how convenient to our purposes.  In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, an instrumental element was a disaffected youth movement, educated, tech savvy and yet denied opportunity in a society plagued with nepotism.   They allied with those fighting tyrannical persecution and corruption and another large group rioting over basic food insecurity.

Writing in The Guardian, Eliza Griswold contends the latest conflicts between the West and Islamist terrorists in Mali and neighbouring environs was more than just a struggle against Islamist Jihadis but a war to defend Western investments against the destabilizing impacts of climate change.

"What might be emerging more clearly into public consciousness is a sense that Africa is a zone of strategic concern for the west. Rather than being a place that crosses our radar because of famine, civil war or the legacies of colonialism, we're entering an era in which it becomes a place where western powers directly intervene to protect their interests. So what might this mean for the continent, for some of those key countries, to be placed in this position? And how will it affect our perception of Africa and Africans?

Tuareg Homeland

One of Africa's vital interests, which is linked to the rise in militancy, is climate change. Nowhere is this a more urgent issue than in the Sahel, where both flash floods and droughts – which contribute to the Sahara desert's southern spread – are growing more extreme. In Africa, there are now more people fleeing the weather than fleeing war.

Many of these environmental refugees are nomads whose itinerant way of life is in peril. In North Africa, most are Muslims. Since water and grasslands are being replaced by sand dunes, nomads of the Sahel are being forced into different means of survival, such as smuggling cocaine and cigarettes to Europe along ancient salt routes, or joining up with one militant outfit or another.

Another disastrous pattern is that across the continent, Muslim nomads are pushing south into settled land, which tends to belong to Christian farmers. In many places, what begins as a local fight for land and water becomes a globalised battle for religion. In Sudan, for example, the Islamist regime of the north has armed paramilitary Muslim nomads to push south for the sake of their cattle's survival. Deep beneath the surface, that push allows Khartoum to secure its rights to oil.

Oil underlies much of the Sahel – and its well-known curse leads to that curious paradox in which governments such as Nigeria's or Chad's, which receive billions in revenue each year, impoverish their citizens. Despite vast wealth, these states don't safeguard most people's rights to the basic infrastructure of roads, water, electricity or education. Once again, both Muslims and Christians turn to their local mosque or church to help them survive. The resulting corruption on behalf of governments across the region also feeds rebellion in the name of Islam.

...During the cold war, the west fought proxy battles against the Soviets across Africa. In some ways, the vacuum the cold war left behind has left room for a new political contest between Islam and the west. The west's greatest mistake would be to do nothing but militarise this conflict and to shore up corrupt leaders just because they parrot the right kind of western-friendly speak, as we have done in the past.

Far more important – and more daunting – is the need to address the underlying causes of this burgeoning conflict. Corruption and climate change top the list. Until then, American surveillance drones are going to fly over a growing desert that's increasingly hospitable to its enemies."

We in the West have a recent history rich in willfully misconstruing conflicts to conform to our geopolitical narrative.    That has real and costly consequences.   In Afghanistan, for example, it led us to formulate objectives that we could not hope to achieve and to get drawn into a type of "whack-a-mole" warfare in which we could not be defeated but could also not prevail.

If this analysis of the war in the Sahel is right, then we're getting it wrong again which means the risk of getting drawn into another wrong-headed war of the sort so appealing to the incompetent and ineffectual political and military leadership so prevalent today in the West.   If Griswold's take that this is a conflict fueled by corruption and climate change is accurate then our chances for success are dependent on how willing we are to respond to those forces and that's not willing at all.

Gwynne Dyer Resets His Climate Wars Clock

Rossby.   Remember the name - Rossby.    Because Rossby is something that's going to play an increasing role in your life for the rest of your days, all of'em. 

When you think of Rossby, think floods and droughts, think really severe winters and abnormally warm winters.

Melting Arctic Ocean sea ice is warming that polar region twice the rate of anywhere else on the planet.   Open water where once there was ice absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting its energy back into space.  The warmer surface temperatures warm the atmosphere overhead.  Warmer air holds more water vapour, another potent greenhouse gas.   That warmer, moister air also holds a great deal of energy that's now giving rise to a much more powerful Arctic jet stream.   And, as jet streams are wont to do, it meanders in loops that reach far south that are called Rossby Waves.

For reasons apparently still unknown these Rossby Waves have gotten larger, reaching much further south, but have also slowed to a crawl.   So, instead of a nice temperate pattern of alternating rain and sunshine, the sort we have relied on for our agriculture since we stumbled upon that idea, we now get extensive, sustained droughts and, in other places, severe flooding.

The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote about Rossby recently.    Now Gwynne Dyer, who usually sticks to military affairs, is discussing it.

I’m no fan of Don Rumsfeld, who helped lead the United States into the disastrous invasion of Iraq when he was George W. Bush’s defence secretary, but I never had a problem with the distinction he made between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” when discussing the intelligence data. He was brutally mocked in the media for using such jargon, but there really is a difference.

A “known unknown,” in the case of the Arctic Ocean, is how long it will be before the entire sea is ice-free at the end of each summer. The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, talked about that happening some time in the second half of this century, but it couldn’t be more specific.

The panel usually underestimates the rate of climatic change, but even the pessimists didn’t think we’d get there before the 2030s. I did encounter one maverick at the National Ice and Snow Data Centre who thought it might happen in this decade, but nobody actually knew. A “known unknown,” in other words.

As for the impact that an ice-free Arctic Ocean might have on climates elsewhere, it would obviously accelerate the global warming trend, but beyond that there wasn’t much to go on. This was the territory of the “unknown unknowns.” Big things might happen to the complex atmospheric system of the planet when a major chunk of it suddenly changes, but nobody knew what.

Now we begin to see the consequences. The polar jet stream — an air current that circles the globe in the higher northern latitudes and separates cold, wet weather to the north from warmer, drier weather to the south — is changing its behaviour.

...a warmer Arctic reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate and polar zones. That, in turn, slows the wind speeds in the zone between the two and increases the “wave amplitude” of the jet stream. The jet stream flows around the planet in great swooping curves, like a river crossing a flat plain, and those curves — Rossby waves, in scientific language — are getting bigger and slower.

This is a recipe for extreme weather. In the old days, the Rossby waves went past fast, bringing the alternating of rainy and sunny weather that characterized the mid-latitude climate. Now, they hang around much longer and generate more extreme weather events: droughts and heat waves, or prolonged rain and flooding, or blizzards and long, hard freezes.

The temperate zone has been seeing a lot of that sort of thing in the past couple of years — much more than usual. It’s cutting deeply into food production in the major breadbaskets of the planet, such as the U.S. Midwest and southern Russia, which is why food prices are going up so fast. This was an “unknown unknown.” Nobody saw it coming.

All the scenarios that the militaries of various countries were working with assumed that climate change would hit food production very hard in the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world, and that is still true. But the scenarios also assumed that the temperate regions of the planet would still be able to feed themselves well (and even have a surplus left over to export) for many decades to come.

Dyer understands the military dimension to this.   He wrote about it in Climate Wars based on research and studies undertaken by the Pentagon, Britain's Ministry of Defence and prominent climate scientists.   A couple of years later he wrote Crawling from the Wreckage in which he turned optimistic, basically relying on a "belief" that we would act in time, that we wouldn't really let this get out of our control, oh surely not.  Dyer envisioned that we'd jettison fossil fuels and transition rapidly into the carbon-free world of nuclear, solar, wind and geo-thermal energy.   Then again, he believed what many scientists then believed, that we had at least a few decades to make that alternative energy world a reality.   They believed a lot of what is happening today and will see over the coming decade wouldn't set in until the end of this century.   This is the still mildly hopeful Dwyer of 2008:



Now Dyer is having his "nobody saw it coming " moment.   He realizes it's already here, it has us in its grip and there's little to nothing we're going to do about it.   If you doubt that, just look to Ottawa.  Stephen Harper is gazing at Arctic seabed oil and gas as though the world needs another huge source of massive carbon emissions.   And Mulcair?   Ever hear "Rossby" cross his lips?   These guys have jumped into a hole and pulled the lid over their heads.   They're Petro-Pols, the lot of them.  It's a Petro-Parliament, Elizabeth May excepted.   Time is not on our side or any other country's.   In fact the Arctic oscillation shows how rapidly and severely we're being overtaken by events.

So, barring some near religious conversion on the floor of the House of Commons, you're on your own.   Hang on, it's going to be a wild ride.

Climate Wars, 60-years Running and Only Just Getting Started

We call it the "southern oscillation," the Pacific Ocean current variation that gives us El Nino and his ugly stepsister, La Nina.   People living on the Pacific Rim tend to be slightly more aware of it but the impacts are global - and they're deadly.

Researchers at Columbia University have linked El Nino as the proximate cause, or trigger, of 50 of 250 conflicts between 1950 and 2004.

Researchers connected the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which brings hot and dry conditions to tropical nations and cuts food  production, to outbreaks of violence in countries from southern Sudan to Indonesia and Peru.

Solomon Hsiang, who led the research at Columbia University, New York, said: "We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict right now. We are still dependent on climate to a very large extent."

Hsiang said that pre-emptive action could prevent bloodshed because El Niño events could be predicted up to two years ahead. "We hope our study may help reduce humanitarian suffering."

Global warming caused by humans, with the continual ramping up of temperature and extreme weather, differs from the natural El Niño cycle, the scientists are careful to note.

Mark Cane, a member of the team, said global warming would have greater climatic impacts than El Niño, making it "hard to imagine" it would not provoke conflicts.  

The scientists are beginning work to discover the factors involved in the climate-conflict link. Food is likely to be key as crop yields and incomes from agriculture are known to fall heavily in El Niño years. 

"When crops fail, people may take up a gun to make a living," said Hsiang.

"Take up a gun to make a living."   Hmm, isn't that what Texas governor Rick Perry has in mind?

 Another team of researchers, this time from Cornell, have released a paper.   Here is the chilling abstract:

Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and
the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food
prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These obser-
vations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments,
but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is
likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we
also and an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing
point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This implies that
avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.

Did you get that?   There is a specific food price index above which instability is triggered.   The UN FAO fixes that at 210.   Right now we're at 234 and the Cornell team believes the world will become permanently above 210 within just a year or two.   And that's with the onset of climate change impacts just beginning.  I'm sorry, I know this is a huge downer but that's only because we live in such a totally advantaged country.   Imagine, just try to imagine, what this revelation means to most of the people living in most of the world and then explain to me, one more time, about that Tar Sands thing.

Are We On the Road to War?

We've all had that feeling. You're going down the wrong road, heading in the wrong direction. It's a predictable process that begins when you first suspect you're not on the right path but you don't stop and turn back on a mere doubt. You keep on going as that doubt steadily grows often hoping that another block or another mile will dispel that doubt even as it continues to build. Finally you reach the point of resignation where you accept that you need to go in another direction, you need to be on another road.

I think that stands as a metaphor that pretty much sums up the path our Western society has taken over the past three decades at least, perhaps more. It explains a great many misfortunes and perils that confront and, worse, confound us today. We've been travelling down the wrong road, in the wrong direction and we've been doing it just as fast as our feet will carry us.

Does a society have any greater core purpose than its own continuation? Surely that must be the sine qua non of our astonishingly intricate community of nations. Nations come and go but societies must continue for there to exist anything to replace the old, the dysfunctional, the obsolete.

If you accept the premise of continuation, ask yourself why, then, are we heading down a road that may well lead to the failure of our prime purpose? Why would any society or any community of nations pursue a path that may lead to rendering our one and only biosphere uninhabitable? We're heading down the wrong road and the doubt is far more than strong enough that we should be changing course, getting back on the right road, travelling in the right direction.

The apparently no longer scruffy, Scruffy Dan, sent me a link to a documentary series by Gwynne Dyer that aired on CBC radio's Ideas programme. The documentary consists of three segments. You can listen to it here: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/climate-wars/index.html

The series, entitled "Climate Wars" examines global warming induced climate change from the military perspective. If you're planning on being around for another two or three decades or you've got kids or grandkids or the expectation of same, you really need to listen to these recordings.

Dyer shatters a number of lies we've been telling ourselves so that we can keep racing down this wrong road. The first is that we're somehow going to keep temperature increases within the 2 degree target. He concludes that we're going to 'blow right through that.' The next lie is the notion of achieving an effective, international consensus on fighting climate change. The third lie is that global warming is an environmental issue rather than a global security nightmare.

As Dyer quite rightly points out, most credible climate scientists are, to be crass, scared shitless. Again and again they're finding their most dire predictions proven unduly optimistic. This business is hitting us harder and much faster than anyone believed possible. Worse yet, our leaders are still shuffling along, hoping to reach some international action plan based on the 'best possible' predictions that are already long irrelevant. Essentially, we're all geared up to keep heading in the wrong direction and doing that knowingly. Because we're not meeting the problem head on, it's already getting out of our control. A likely outcome is 4 degree warming this century. We may see 2 degrees by 2040 which is when the wheels will begin falling off.

No international consensus, at least nothing that might work, is going to be achieved. That's because the impacts are already happening and what's already in the atmosphere is going to make conditions worse even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases entirely today. That, of course, is not going to happen. Ours is a carbon-based civilization. Now we have two nations representing a third of mankind transitioning from agrarian states to industrial powerhouses. Think the Chinese can run those factories and smelters on solar panels and windmills?

As Kyoto critics complain (quite correctly) really fighting global warming won't be fair and equitable. Those societies which are actually among the least affected would have to give up the most. That would be you and me and pretty much every other country where there's an abundance of white people. It's a tough sell, especially when we tend to see the really dire impacts as being a long way off, possibly a century. Maybe we would be more open to suggestions if we weren't the most affluent and the best armed.

And then there's the military face of global warming. (Here's a hint - it ain't the weather that's going to kill you) Dyer's calling them 'climate wars' and they've already begun. These are wars of survival and it's amazing what people are willing to resort to in order to save their own tribe. Right now it's pretty much limited to folks with sharp sticks and Kalashnikovs but that's not going to last.

Shift your attention to the Himalayan glaciers and then start thinking about Pakistan, India and China. They all have two things in common; (a), a looming, potentially existential water crisis and (b), nuclear arsenals. Dyer quite correctly notes that India is facing the loss of its key, agricultural rivers. This could leave the country with no food for upwards of 250,000,000 Indians. Now, do you think India is going to voluntarily share its declining water resources with Pakistan?

China faces a similar loss of agricultural production and the resultant instability caused by mass famine. One of the places that will actually benefit from global warming is Siberia, a region to which China has never relinquished its claim. That could be the next nuclear war.

Now I don't want to go into the theories of nuclear escalation. Believe me, if you don't know them, you probably don't want to. Nuclear Winter is not really an ideal answer to global warming.

Then there'll be enormous tensions between North and South America and regional issues within continents. As Dyer brilliantly put it, when it comes to global warming, each nation's greatest threat is the nation it borders that stands between it and the equator. All of us up here in the True North Strong and Free should dwell on that for a minute.

It's not going to take more than a couple of metres of sea level increase to create masses of climate refugees within the United States. That means the Americans are facing the prospect of having to relocate inland masses of their own people and a lot of that inland territory is facing either drought or freshwater exhaustion. There's nothing for them looking south so what do you think their alternative is? Yes they're hillbillies but those hillbillies have all the guns.

It's when you finally take the blinders off and have a good, long look around that it becomes brutally obvious that we're on the wrong road, headed in the wrong direction. Once you have that epiphany you'll never look at our political leaders the same way again. Suddenly stories about how the Tar Sands are Canada's path to prosperity through the 21st century and the key to national unity sound worse than idiotic gibberish.

Do yourself a favour. Follow that link and listen to those documentaries. It just might be the most valuable time you'll ever spend.