Climate wars 气候战争

AS THE planet warms, floods, storms, rising seas and drought will uproot millions of people, and with dire wider consequences. Barack Obama, collecting his Nobel peace prize, said that climate change “will fuel more conflict for decades”. He took the analysis not from environmental scaremongers but from a group of American generals.
随着地球不断变暖，洪涝灾害、暴风雨、海平面不断上升及干旱等将迫使数以百万计的人们背井离乡，并由此产生可怕、波及面更为广泛的后果。荣获诺贝尔和平奖的巴拉克•奥巴马表示，气候变化将在未来几十年里引发更多的冲突。他说这些话的依据不是来自那些“环境威胁论”散布者，而是一帮美国将军。

The forecast is close to becoming received wisdom. A flurry of new books with titles such as “Global Warring” and “Climate Conflict” offer near-apocalyptic visions. Cleo Paskal, at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, predicts that floods, storms, the failure of the Indian monsoon and agricultural collapse will bring “enormous, and specific, geopolitical, economic, and security consequences for all of us…the world of tomorrow looks chaotic and violent”. Jeffrey Mazo of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, also in London, calls climate change an “existential threat” and fears it could usher in “state failure and internal conflict” in exposed places, notably Africa.
奥巴马的预测几乎成为了人们全盘接受的“古训”。像雪花般涌现的新书，名头不外乎《全球战争》、《气候冲突》，它们认为世界末日已离近在咫尺。英国皇家国际事务研究所研究院克雷欧•帕斯柯预测，洪涝灾害、暴风雨、印度洋季风失调及农业歉收必然会给人类带来极大的影响，涉及地理政治、经济和安全等领域。未来世界将混乱不堪、暴力不断。英国伦敦国际战略研究所的杰弗里•梅佐将气候变化视为“生存威胁”，担忧那些应对气候变化影响能力低的地区可能出现“国家分裂及内部冲突”，特别是在非洲。更多信息请访问：http://www.24en.com/

Yet surprisingly few facts support these alarming assertions. Widely touted forecasts such as for 200m climate refugees in the next few decades seem to have been plucked from the air. Little or no academic research has looked at questions such as whether Bangladeshis displaced by a rising sea would move a series of short distances over a long period, or (more disruptively) a greater distance immediately.
不过，支持这些惊人论断的事实却出奇的少。广为流行的诸如未来几十年里将出现2亿气候难民的预测似乎都是空穴来风。将来很长一段时间内那些由于海平面上升而无家可归的孟加拉人是否将不断进行短距离迁移，抑或（更严重的说）即刻进行更远距离的迁徙，很少或根本没有学术研究机构就这些问题进行探究。

So scientists preparing the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2013, are for the first time including a chapter on threats to human security. An early effort came at a conference last month in Norway, under the auspices of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
所以，科学家在起草联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会第五号报告（计划于2013年发表）的时候，首次将人类安全威胁列入其中。上月在挪威奥斯陆国际和平研究所的赞助下，大会取得了一些初步成果。

One idea is to find previous occasions when big environmental changes came alongside social, political and military shifts. Droughts in the Central Asian steppe, for example, led to mass westward migration and the “barbarian” invasions that helped topple the Roman Empire (pictured above). Hunger and drought led to the collapse of Mayan civilisation a millennium ago. Sudden cooling wiped out an early European settlement on Greenland. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced over 2m people to migrate within the United States.
观点之一就是探寻历史上环境变化与社会、政治及军事的联系。比如：中亚大草原旱灾导致大量牧民西迁，“蛮族入侵”加速了罗马帝国的倒塌；一千年前饥荒和旱灾引发了玛雅文明的失落；骤冷的气候摧毁了早期欧洲人在格陵兰岛上的定居点；20世纪30年代发生的沙尘暴导致美国国内200万人大迁移。

Those examples may be relevant in Africa, where in many countries around three-quarters of the population survive by cultivating a few varieties of crops watered directly by rain, the form of farming most vulnerable to climate change. Africa has warmed by 0.5°C on average in the past half century, and may heat by 1.5-4°C more this century. Heat hits cereal yields (especially maize), perhaps by 10-20% for a 1°C rise. Rainfall patterns will also shift.
这些现象也许和非洲的情况有类似之处。非洲很多国家3/4的人口靠种植品种有限的庄稼来养家糊口，靠天吃饭的耕作方式很容易受到气候变化的影响。过去半个世纪里非洲地区的平均气温上升了0.5℃，本世纪可能再升高1.5-4℃。炎热的天气削减了农作物的产量（玉米的产量下降的更厉害）。气温每升高1℃，农作物可能就会减产10%-20%。雨型也会发生改变。

The hardest evidence for a link so far comes from a team led by Marshall Burke of the University of California, which studied African wars from 1980 to 2002 and found that rising temperatures are indeed associated with crop failure, economic decline and a sharp rise in the likelihood of war. It predicted a “50% increase” in the chance of civil war in Africa by 2030.
证明气候变化与这些现象有关的最可靠的证据来自加利福尼亚大学马歇尔•伯克（Marshall Burke）教授领导的一个研究小组。他们对非洲地区于1980年至2002年间发生的战争做了研究，发现升高的气温的确同作物歉收、经济衰退及战争几率的突增存在联系。该研究小组预计到2030年非洲地区发生内战的几率将出现“50%”的增长。

But that claim is now heavily revised, since researchers redid their sums to take account of the more peaceful period of 2002-08. Others say that political and other factors such as ethnic conflict and outside intervention are far better indicators of the likelihood of fighting.
然而，研究人员在将2002年至2008年和平时期考虑在内，重新做了统计后，对上述结论做了重大的修订。其他人认为政治因素及民族纷争、外来干涉等因素是预测战争爆发几率最好的指标。

Take the widely cited case of the war in Darfur, the western region of Sudan. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described it as “an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change”. Environmental problems have probably worsened the Darfuris’ dreadful plight, offering grist to those who call climate change a “threat multiplier”. Average rainfall in the region fell abruptly (by a third or more) in the early 1970s and Darfur repeatedly suffered droughts. Clashes over grazing and then displacement of villagers were followed, from 2003, by horrific war.
苏丹西部达尔富尔战争被人广为引用，联合国秘书长潘基文将其描述为“一次生态危机，部分原因来自气候变化”。环境问题令已经身陷囹圄的达尔富尔人们雪上加霜，为那些称气候变化为“威胁增倍”的人提供了有利证词。20世纪70年代早期该地区的平均降水量急剧下降，达尔富尔不断遭受干旱的袭扰。起初不断发生争夺牧场的冲突，以至从2003年起，不断发生驱离定居者的耸人听闻的战争。

Yet the connection is elusive. Roughly three decades elapsed between the rain stopping and war starting. Many other factors—political, ethnic, demographic and economic—conspired to stoke violence. Those were specific to Darfur, whereas the sharp drop in rainfall hit the whole Sahel, without intensifying conflict elsewhere.
不过这种联系有点牵强附会。从雨量骤减到发生战争间隔了大约三十年，很多其他因素一同促成了暴力的发生，这些因素涉及政治、民族、人口及经济等等。达尔富尔问题需要具体分析，因为虽然雨量骤减袭击了整个萨赫勒地区，但除了达尔富尔外其他地方的冲突并没有激化。

Another commonly cited example is violent competition for scarce grazing between nomadic herdsmen in the Horn of Africa. Yet a study of fighting among pastoralists on the border between Kenya and Somalia in the past 60 years (presented at the conference) showed instead that conflict worsened when grazing was abundant and fell during droughts. Hungry people were too busy staying alive, or too exhausted, to fight. By contrast, when rains made herdsmen’s lives easier, they could release surplus young labour for the violent sport of raiding other groups.
另外一个经常被人提起的例子是非洲之角游牧民族对稀有牧场的激烈争抢。不过，通过研究过去六十年肯尼亚和索马里边境牧民的战斗，反而会发现牧场水草充足时冲突会增加，而干旱时节冲突则会减少。饥饿的人们不是在忙于保命，就是疲劳不堪而没有力气再去打斗。相比之下，雨水充足时牧民的生活就会好过些，这时他们就能腾出剩余的年轻人对其他的群体进行掠夺。

Other researchers look at the political or military consequences of phenomena unrelated to weather, such as rapid urbanisation, migration or earthquakes. Yet the evidence here too is mixed at best. Where natural disasters do show predictable political outcomes, they are very slight. A study of the short-term impact of hurricanes on Haiti and the Dominican Republic from 1850-2007, for example, suggests that the storms have grown more intense (if not more frequent), but their arrival is not associated with more political violence. Another study showed that natural disasters usually produced short-term economic pain but no sign of increased political violence.
其他研究人员则对那些与气候无关的因素导致的政治或军事影响进行了研究，这些因素包括快速的城市化进程、移民及地震。但是这些证据充其量也是混合交织。自然灾害的确有预测政治结果的功效，但其所起作用甚微。比如，通过对1850年至2007年飓风对海地和多米尼加共和国的短期影响的研究，人们发现这期间暴风雨的强度在不断增加，但它们的到来同越来越多的政治暴力并不存在关联。另外一项研究显示，自然灾害通常会导致短期的经济创伤，但没有迹象显示政治暴力会有所增加。

Earthquakes, too, tend to produce mixed outcomes. A Mexican quake in 1985 may have stoked an insurgency. But the tsunami of 2005 offered a moment for secessionists in Aceh and the central Indonesian government to co-operate. Climate change could indeed cause woes aplenty. That is all the more reason to be precise about them.
同样，地震也会产生后果不一的影响。1985年的墨西哥大地震引发了社会暴动，但是2005年的海啸却促成了亚齐的分裂分子和印尼中央政府进行了合作。气候变化确实会引发很多灾难。这也正是我们需要严谨分析的原因所在。