If anyone has time, I would welcome your participation at a follow-up  Q & A w/ Jeff Mazo. In particular, I’m interested in hearing how useful history might be in assessing contemporary climate security threats. For instance, Jeff’s chapter on historical and prehistorical case studies is very much informed by Jared Diamond’s Collapse. But I wonder if many of you are aware of the criticisim leveled at Collapse by some archaeologists and anthropologists? (See here for example.)

With respect to the issue of climate change analogs, I found Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming much more illuminating than Collapse. His focus is on how drought played a key role in state collapse during prehistory.

To the extent that the contemporary climate change debate can highlight the importance of drought as a major ‘forcing’ action is a good thing, because there are projections that we may soon be experiencing some of those mega-droughts that hit during ancient times.

Here’s Fagan near the end of his book: “Judging from the arid cycles of a thousand years ago, the droughts of a warmer future will become more prolonged and harsher. Even without greenhouse gases, the effects of prolonged droughts would be far more catastrophic today than they were even a century ago.”

So on this note, I’d be curious to hear what history or science book especially influenced your thinking on the climate security issue. Please respond at this thread, so we may bring Jeff into the discussion. Thanks!

Many critical points have been raised. Just to go back to one, about whether environmental change could lead to cross-border conflict, it seems as though, much like Andrew’s Senatorial staff, many people around the world want to use the issue (or their interpretation of the issue) to advance, shall we say, preexisting conditions. This can give the appearance of causing conflict, but sometimes it is just another card that can be added to give more leverage in an existing situation.

So, for example, at a meeting including India and Pakistan that was supposed to be about the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan instead used the platform to complain about how India was stealing its water. Hydrological reality aside, this approach was very effective for Pakistan. It derailed the Mumbai attack discussion. It whipped up anti-Indian sentiment among the population (which can lead to more support for the Army). And it distracted from the fact that a large part of the blame for the water scarcity comes from mismanagement on the Pakistan side. Would Pakistan go to war with India over water? No. But would it use it as an excuse to do what it wants to do anyway. Looks like it.

Similarly, though from a more positive perspective, environmental issues may be added into the ‘resolution’ pot during negotiations. So, if China and India are serious about negotiating Himalayan border issues, scare water supplies may be on the table, along with other issues such as the Tibetan government in exile, support to Maoists and location of borders.

Geopolitical relations are a complex web of attractions and repulsions, and increasingly environmental issue are being thrown in to the mix. Personally, I think many governments have yet to realise how critical the situation is, and so are indulging in these sorts of games rather than actually implementing solutions (say, in the case of Pakistan, widespread watershed rehabilitation, rainwater harvesting, etc.).

All that said, I think in some cases there is the potential for real cross-border conflict driven almost exclusively by environmental issues. For example, around potentially shifting maritime borders in locations such as the South China Sea. In that case, though, they would likely be brief and blunt.

Regarding your question, in my humble opinion, I would say that the states that are beyond the pale for climate change mitigation are those that have been the consistent basket cases in the bottom ranks of the HDI.  It may seem a blinding bit of the obvious, but I think we will see that bands within the HDI rankings will become more distinct as climate change really impacts on environmental conditions. 

The southern tier of Saharan states and the northern tier of sub-Saharan states are prime examples.  Their ecosystems have been steady losing resilience and diversity over the last few decades and that has been accelerated.  Desertification taking its toll.  In a workshop that we organized for the Army Environmental Policy Institute more than 2 years ago, the issue of climate and its relationship to sustainability and stability in Africa was raised.  The response was that climate was going to exacerbate the already poor and widely varying conditions in Africa – not create new problems so much as make the current ones worse.

Mitigation isn’t going to net much because these are not the places that are sources of the climate change – in many cases, they are the recipients and the multipliers.  Adaptation requires state capacity to implement and in most cases, they have little or none.  You need to be prepared to going into addressing the fall out from the failures in a number of cases, in part because the environmental conditions are so poor, but also because the opportunities for innovation and the organic resources for adaptation are simply missing.

“Would you get on airplane with a three or four percent chance that it might crash?” asked Prestrud.

In (31) you say that climate advocates aren’t talking about adaptation, but I would dispute that.  Maybe that was the case 5 years ago, but in my experience, everyone I’ve talked to says we need to do adaptation.  The difference, of course, is that mitigation is predominantly a national and global issue while adaptation is a very local issue (except for the money, of course). 

I would agree with you, though, that most of the work on climate security issues should focus on adaptation, in the short-term at least.  Also, disaster response is a major focus, for example, I think the US Navy is beginning to realize that its unique sea lift capabilities are going to be in much higher demand, if climate changes bring more hurricanes.  However, if policymakers don’t go in for mitigation now, we bring in the possibility of really horrific changes, as Stephen says in (31).  A 4 degree rise will cause broad — and unpredictable – cross-cutting security threats to all levels of society around the world, and would be almost impossible to plan for.

I wholeheartedly support your efforts to bring more nuance to climate-related blog discussions.  So far this thread has been excellent!

Working with policy makers on a daily basis I can say that unfortunately the tendency is to distill everything down to a couple of powerpoint slides (as noted in the recent NY Times article).  The challenge as I see it, is how to effectively convey complex information through bureuacractic pyramids (both corporate and government) in such a way that the important nuance (i.e. details/context) isn’t lost as it goes up the chain….

This quote from Wallace Broecker of Columbia University’s Earth Institute sticks in my mind:

“We’re at 387 now and we’re going up at two ppm per year. That means 450 is only 30 years away. We’d be lucky if we could stop at 550.”