Researchers are hoping to work out how climate change affects risk of conflicts, such as the one in Somalia in which this tank was destroyed. Image credit: Carl Montgomery, via Flickr Creative Commons license
After researchers last year went through every paper linking climate changes and human violence, finding a strong connection, new findings suggest that one rare study disagreeing used the wrong maths. Kyle Meng from Princeton University in New Jersey and Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley, now hope they’ve settled previous conflicts over the climate-conflict link. “We think this allows the community to move forward onto what I believe are the next set of important questions,” Kyle told me. “Why exactly does climatic change affect violence and what can we do to lessen the effects of climate on violence?”
In last year’s paper, Solomon and his Berkeley colleagues Ted Miguel and Marshall Burke brought together 45 sets of evidence spanning 10,000 years. Reanalysing worldwide measurements from scratch they found that 2°C global temperature rise could make conflicts like civil wars more than 50% more common in many parts of the world.
One paper that didn’t fit with their findings had been published in 2010 by Halvard Buhaug at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway. Halvard’s study used the same data as a 2009 paper that found a climate-conflict link in Africa, written in 2009 by a team including Ted and Marshall. However, Halvard used different models indicating that political and economic factors were more important and that climate was ‘not to blame’.
Halvard’s argument revolves around a mathematical ‘robustness check’ into the statistics used by the 2009 paper. Such checks are common in social science, Kyle explained. “However, it is important to note that not all robustness checks are valid,” he said. “In general, robustness checks are designed to examine whether, given a particular outcome, a statistical model may be producing biased results, such as when improper comparisons are being made amongst observations.” Read the rest of this entry »
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