Climate change and political stability

The most important headlines about climate change might not look like climate change headlines
The most commonly discussed effects of dangerous climate change relate to the physical systems of the earth: rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, warmer temperatures (especially at night, during winter and at high latitudes), melting glaciers and ice caps, acidifying oceans, intensifying extreme weather events and so on. All these can be measured and quantified by empirical observation. But for many people, the most important effects will not be sweating more, wearing fewer layers, buying a new umbrella, or cancelling their glacier climbing holiday.

For most of us, particularly the vast majority of the developed world who live in urban areas, the most important effects will arrive indirectly, through flow on effects in human society. For example, while farmers might directly struggle with changing patterns of precipitation, urbanites will feel this indirectly through higher prices or shortages of food types affected by drought, flood or heat wave. In a system as complex as human society, global warming will only ever be one factor in such a news story. There will be government regulations, transport strikes, supermarket profits and all kinds of other factors that are also affecting the price and availability of food, which may at times mask the effects of climate change. Indeed, it may be that the proximate cause of a particular news story apparently has nothing to do with climate change, but a less stable climate may be the background against which a particular issue is worse than it might otherwise be.

For instance, Australia has always had cycles of drought, and Australian agriculture has always heavily influenced by the natural and quasi-periodic ENSO climate pattern. Climate change may increase the length and severity of periods of drought, leaving crops and livestock stressed and more vulnerable to a variety of adverse events. Ecosystems are pushed closer to the edge; their ability to cope with new threats is reduced. So while a new outbreak of disease or infestation from an introduced species might grab the headline, it may have been climate change that lowered the defences.

Or, to pick another plausible scenario, international conflict could be sparker over stressed water resources (such as the Jordan river, which is dying). The proximate cause of such conflict might be inequitable access to a water source, incompatible policies and allocations between nations sharing a common water source, inappropriate industry or population centres sited on the water source, a new dam or a pollution event. But again in the background could well be changing precipitation patterns leading to less water being available.

The most important medium-term effects of a changing climate are likely to be greater political instability, at both intra and international levels. Although there has been much discussion of ecological refugees from rising sea levels, I suspect higher numbers of refugees will be fleeing conflict and violence in places where climate change is an ultimate (though not necessary proximate) cause.

Here are some quotes from retired high-ranking US military figures (source):

Lt. General John G. Castellaw (US Army, Retired): “This isn’t an environmental issue, this is a security issue. Our strategic interests, and therefore our national security and the safety of Americans, are threatened by climate change and our continuing dependence on oil. Military leaders know this isn’t about polar bears and ice caps, it’s about international stability and national security.”

Major General Paul Monroe (US Army, Retired): “We make a profound strategic error if we underestimate the impact that climate has on regional and international stability. Some of our most worrisome trouble spots around the world are dangerous because of a combination of climate problems and social unrest – Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen are strong examples.”

This is why responding to climate change is not simply about reducing our carbon footprint (as important as that may be). It is also crucial that we re-invest in the resilience of local and regional communities. Dangerous climate change is dangerous partially because it is likely to increase the frequency and severity of events that threaten the social fabric. And it will be tensions or breakdowns in the social fabric that bring climate change close to home for many people.

This too is another site at which the Christian message is good news. Christ summons us into experimental communities of peace and forgiveness, places where people look to the interests of others before their own, where joy and hope can be found amidst sorrow and grief, where failure is not final. Jesus is the pioneer of a living way that refuses to perpetuate cycles of recrimination, returns hatred with blessing and recognises that love is important that self-protection. We walk in his footsteps not in order to survive a world that may grow more violent, or because it is the church's task to achieve world peace. We follow Christ simply because it is he who has issued the summons.
Second image by Andrew Filmer.

Bobby

I saw Bobby tonight and recommend it as a film worth watching, particularly as the US enters another season of primaries. Rather than comment further on the film, I thought I'd simply post one of RFK's more famous speeches, delivered the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and just two months before his own violent death.

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This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.