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War and Social Unrest -- Summary
What is the connection between rising air temperatures and CO2 concentrations and social stability?

Zhang et al. (2005) note that historians typically identify political, economic, cultural and ethnic unrest as the chief causes of war and civil strife.  However, the five Chinese scientists argue that climate plays a key role as well; and to examine their thesis, they compared proxy climate records with historical data on wars, social unrest and dynastic transitions in China from the late Tang to Qing Dynasties (mid-9th century to early 20th century).  This work revealed that war frequencies, peak war clusters, nationwide periods of social unrest and dynastic transitions were all significantly associated with cold phases of China's oscillating climate.  More specifically, all three distinctive peak war clusters (defined as more than 50 wars in a 10-year period) occurred during cold climatic phases, as did all seven periods of nationwide social unrest and nearly 90 percent of all dynastic changes that decimated this largely agrarian society.  As a result, they concluded that climate change was "one of the most important factors in determining the dynastic cycle and alternation of war and peace in ancient China," with warmer climates having been immensely more effective than cooler climates in terms of helping to "keep the peace."

Cleaveland et al. (2003) developed a history of winter-spring (November-March) precipitation for the period 1386-1993 for the area around Durango, Mexico, based on earlywood width chronologies of Douglas-fir tree rings collected at two sites in the Sierra Madre Occidental.  This reconstruction, in their words, "shows droughts of greater magnitude and longer duration than the worst historical drought," and none of them occurred during a period of unusual warmth, as climate alarmists are fond of saying they should; instead, they occurred during the Little Ice Age.  They also note that "Florescano et al. (1995) make a connection between drought, food scarcity, social upheaval and political instability, especially in the revolutions of 1810 and 1910," and they state that the great megadrought that lasted from 1540 to 1579 "may be related to the Chicimeca war (Stahle et al., 2000), the most protracted and bitterly fought of the many conflicts of natives with the Spanish settlers."  Consequently, if these concurrent events were indeed related, they also suggest that warmer is far better than cooler when it comes to maintaining social stability.

An analogous relationship was found to prevail in East Africa by Nicholson and Yin (2001), who analyzed climatic and hydrologic conditions from the late 1700s to close to the present, based on (1) histories of the levels of ten major African lakes and (2) a water balance model they used to infer changes in rainfall associated with the different conditions, concentrating most heavily on Lake Victoria.  The results they obtained were indicative of "two starkly contrasting climatic episodes."  The first, which began sometime prior to 1800 during the Little Ice Age, was one of "drought and desiccation throughout Africa."  This arid episode, which was most intense during the 1820s and 30s, was accompanied by extremely low lake levels.  As the two researchers describe it, "Lake Naivash was reduced to a puddle ... Lake Chad was desiccated ... Lake Malawi was so low that local inhabitants traversed dry land where a deep lake now resides ... Lake Rukwa [was] completely desiccated ... Lake Chilwa, at its southern end, was very low and nearby Lake Chiuta almost dried up."

Throughout this unfortunate period, Nicholson and Yin say that "intense droughts were ubiquitous."  Some, in fact, were "long and severe enough to force the migration of peoples and create warfare among various tribes [our italics]."  As the Little Ice Age's grip on the world began to loosen in the mid to latter part of the 1800s, however, things began to change for the better.  The two researchers report that "semi-arid regions of Mauritania and Mali experienced agricultural prosperity and abundant harvests; floods of the Niger and Senegal Rivers were continually high; and wheat was grown in and exported from the Niger Bend region."  Then, as the nineteenth century came to an end and the twentieth began, there was a slight lowering of lake levels, but nothing like what had occurred a century earlier; and in the latter half of the twentieth century, things once again improved, with the levels of some lakes actually rivaling high-stands characteristic of the years of transition to the Modern Warm Period.

Many other people have also understood the connection between "drought, food scarcity, social upheaval and political instability" described by Florescano et al., not the least of which was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who once penned an op-ed piece entitled "To Cultivate Peace, We Must First Cultivate Food."  As we reported in our Editorial of 1 Oct 1999, he said that "when the Cold War ended 10 years ago, we expected an era of peace" but got instead "a decade of war."  He then asked why peace had been so elusive, answering that most of the past century's wars were fueled by poverty in developing countries "whose economies depend on agriculture but which lack the means to make their farmland productive."  This fact, he said, suggests an obvious, but often overlooked, path to peace: "raise the standard of living of the millions of rural people who live in poverty by increasing agricultural productivity," his argument being that thriving agriculture, in his words, "is the engine that fuels broader economic growth and development, thus paving the way for prosperity and peace."

Can the case for atmospheric CO2 enrichment be made any clearer?  Automatically, and without the investment of a single hard-earned dollar, ruble, or what have you, people everywhere promote the cause of peace by fertilizing the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide - one of the major end-products of the combustion process that fuels the engines of industry and transportation - is the very elixir of life, being the major building block of all plant tissues due to the essential role it plays in the photosynthetic process that sustains nearly all of earth's vegetation, which in turn sustains nearly all the planet's animal life.  As with any production process, the insertion of more raw materials (in this case CO2) into the production line results in more manufactured goods coming out the other end, which in the case of the plant-growth production line is biosphere-sustaining food.  And as President Carter rightly stated, "leaders of developing nations must make food security a priority."  Indeed, he ominously proclaimed in his concluding paragraph that "there can be no peace until people have enough to eat."

Within this context, Idso and Idso (2000) developed and analyzed a supply-and-demand scenario for food in the year 2050.  Specifically, they identified the plants that at the turn of the century supplied 95% of the world's food needs and projected historical trends in the productivities of these crops 50 years into the future, after which they evaluated the growth-enhancing effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on these plants and made similar yield projections based on the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration likely to have occurred by that future date.  This exercise revealed that world population would likely be 51% greater in the year 2050 than it was in 1998, but that world food production would be only 37% greater if its enhanced productivity comes solely as a consequence of anticipated improvements in agricultural technology and expertise.  However, they further determined that the consequent shortfall in farm production could be overcome - but just barely - by the additional benefits anticipated to accrue from the aerial fertilization effect of the expected rise in the air's CO2 content, assuming no Kyoto-style cutbacks in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

These findings suggest that the world food security envisioned by President Carter is precariously dependent upon the continued rising of the air's CO2 concentration.  As Sylvan Wittwer (Director Emeritus of Michigan State University's Agricultural Experiment Station) stated in his 1995 book, Food, Climate, and Carbon Dioxide: The Global Environment and World Food Production:

"The rising level of atmospheric CO2 could be the one global natural resource that is progressively increasing food production and total biological output, in a world of otherwise diminishing natural resources of land, water, energy, minerals, and fertilizer.  It is a means of inadvertently increasing the productivity of farming systems and other photosynthetically active ecosystems.  The effects know no boundaries and both developing and developed countries are, and will be, sharing equally."

Another fabled visionary has also written about the need to vastly increase the world's agricultural productivity.  In the October 2000 issue of Plant Physiology, as described in our Editorial of 15 Nov 2000, Norman Borlaug (Father of the Green Revolution and 1970 Nobel Prize Laureate for Peace) had an important Editor's Choice article entitled "Ending World Hunger: The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry."  In it, he describes the very real problem of food shortages that could be faced by the world in the not too distant future, noting that "it took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current level of about 5 billion tons per year," and that in order to meet the needs of the growing population of the planet, "by 2025, we will have to nearly double current production again."

Unfortunately, Dr. Borlaug saw some ominous forces at work that could keep us from achieving that goal, specifically citing those that array themselves against the genetic engineering of agricultural crops.  "Extremists in the environmental movement," he wrote, "seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks," stating that "the platform of the antibiotechnology extremists, if it were to be adopted, would have grievous consequences for both the environment and humanity."  In addition, he lamented the fact that "some scientists, many of whom should or do know better, have also jumped on the extremist environmental bandwagon in search of research funds."

What strikes us most forcefully about Dr. Borlaug's words is how they also describe the sad situation we face with respect to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration.  He talked, for example, about the "unsubstantiated scare mongering done by opponents of genetic engineering," which is amazingly similar to the unsubstantiated scare mongering done by climate alarmists, who would deny the world the incredible agricultural benefits of the aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment.  "Nowhere," Dr. Borlaug wrote, "is it more important for knowledge to confront fear born of ignorance than in the production of food," which is what we have been trying to do on our website from the day it first went public.

It is truly unconscionable that this agricultural aspect of the global change debate is almost never broached.  As Dr. Borlaug rightly states, "agricultural scientists and leaders have a moral obligation to warn political, educational, and religious leaders about the magnitude and seriousness of the arable land, food, and population problems that lie ahead, even with breakthroughs in biotechnology [our italics]."  In fact, "if we fail to do so," as he described it, "we will be negligent in our duty and inadvertently may be contributing to the pending chaos of incalculable millions of deaths by starvation."

"Global food insecurity will not disappear without new technology," Borlaug concluded; and our analysis suggests that it will be next to impossible to meet the challenge of feeding earth's population just a few short decades from now without a continuation of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.  We have got to wake up to this reality and eschew the diabolical doctrine of biting the hand that feeds us by limiting anthropogenic CO2 emissions.  We truly need the extra crop productivity and enhanced water use efficiency that is provided to earth's vegetation by atmospheric CO2 enrichment; and that need will only increase with time.

References
Cleaveland, M.K., Stahle, D.W., Therrell, M.D., Villanueva-Diaz, J. and Burns, B.T.  2003.  Tree-ring reconstructed winter precipitation and tropical teleconnections in Durango, Mexico.  Climatic Change 59: 369-388.

Florescano, E., Swan, S., Menegus, M. and Galindo, I.  1995.  Breve Historia de la Sequia en Mexico.  Universidad Veracruzana, Veracruz, Mexico.

Idso, C.D. and Idso, K.E.  2000.  Forecasting world food supplies: The impact of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.  Technology 7S: 33-56.

Nicholson, S.E. and Yin, X.  2001.  Rainfall conditions in equatorial East Africa during the Nineteenth Century as inferred from the record of Lake Victoria.  Climatic Change 48: 387-398.

Stahle, D.W., Cook, E.R., Cleaveland, M.K., Therrell, M.D., Meko, D.M., Grissino-Mayer, H.D., Watson, E. and Luckman, B.H.  2000.  Tree-ring data document 16th century megadrought over North America.  EOS, American Geophysical Union, Transactions 81: 121, 125.

Zhang, D., Jim, C., Lin, C., He, Y. and Lee, F.  2005.  Climate change, social unrest and dynastic transition in ancient China.  Chinese Science Bulletin 50: 137-144.

Last updated 16 November 2005