In the late 2000s, a new climate change story line emerged in the media. The seeds for this narrative were perhaps sown ten years ago, when a worst-case scenario report commissioned by the Pentagon triggered breathless headlines about a research field known as “abrupt climate change.” Perhaps you saw the 2004 movie. The sensationalist portrayal of…Continue Reading…
In a column published today, a scholar challenges the legitimacy of the climate security frame and suggests it is distracting from the real climate concerns that need to be addressed. But before I get to that, some quick background. In recent months, a flurry of highly publicized papers have explicitly linked climate change to war…Continue Reading…
Climate security gets an airing today in a U.N. Security Council meeting. It’s not the first time the Security Council has taken up climate change. And wise heads, such as environmental security scholar Geoff Dabelko, offers some excellent pre-meeting context that puts the nascent climate security issue into perspective. The Guardian also has a nice story on the meeting’s…Continue Reading…
Nobody has done more to educate the masses about climate change than Al Gore. He’s written a best-selling book and inspired an Oscar-winning documentary. He’s been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for all his efforts. This week Gore rolled out a new campaign to raise awareness of climate change. As Bryan Walsh observes, Gore’s argument””and his point…Continue Reading…
In the Guardian, Jules Boykoff takes stock of the seriousness with which national security experts inside and outside the U.S. military view climate change, a subject I’ve often take up here and elsewhere. As Boykoff drily notes: This isn’t a tree-hugging festival. It’s the US military and its partners making clear-eyed calculations based on the best…Continue Reading…
It must infuriate Joe Romm when people don’t take his word as gospel. Here’s how he opens his latest effort to slime a respected scholar and shape the climate narrative to his liking. We’re starting to see pieces of counterfactual history on the climate bill in The New Republic and elsewhere based in part on discredited scholarship….Continue Reading…
As I mentioned last week, I’ll be flagging my Frontier Earth posts in this space with a link. My latest, asking if security concerns can be an enduring focal point for climate and energy debates, is up. If you have any thoughts to share, please do so over there.
If you thought assigning attribution of individual weather disasters to global climate change was tricky business, imagine trying to establish a causal link between specific ecological problems and global warming. In this commentary in Nature Climate Change, ecologist Camille Parmesan and her co-authors suggest not going there. It’s not that they think global warming doesn’t adversely…Continue Reading…
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about global warming being a “conflict accelerant” in volatile regions of the world. That discussion, which I’ve explored in articles and various blog posts, (see here and here) is focused on the potential geopolitical ramifications of climate change-related disasters (such as more frequent and severe floods,…Continue Reading…
The Economist, in a rather one-sided article, is dubious about the increasingly touted link between climate change and human conflict. It’s true that the “climate wars” narrative is starting to take on a life of its own. I’ve even used the term as a headline in a post. But it’s also obvious (from the comment…Continue Reading…