7 ms·

Pentagon Fears Confirmed: Climate Change Leads to War, Refugees

55 points by gregcrv 8y ago

luckylion 8y ago
It focuses on the middle east, where the US (& allies) / NATO have been the driving forces behind most of the recent "conflicts" that led to forced migrations (Iraq, Libya, Syria), and then says "climate change had a significant impact"? Do generals at the Pentagon get too war-happy when it's too warm on average in any given year? Or is it that plunging Libya and Syria into civil war and leaving Iraq close to it wouldn't have mattered as much if it wasn't for that sea level rise?
- djohnston 8y ago
  the latter, although it doesn't have anything to do with sea levels in these cases
- josefresco 8y ago
  "The ongoing Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, has drawn attention from both the scientific community and the media to the question of how climatic conditions can contribute to political unrest and civil war. Recent studies of the Syrian uprising have shown that growing water scarcity and frequent droughts, coupled with poor water management, led to multiyear crop failures, economic deterioration and consequently mass migration of rural families to urban areas (Gleick, 2014; Kelley et al., 2015). Rapid growing population, overcrowding, unemployment and increased inequality put pressure on urban centers and finally contributed to the breakout of political unrest" That's the introduction paragraph. "Blaming the US" for all turmoil in the Middle East is far too simplistic.
  - iguy 8y ago
    I don't doubt that you can find something statistically significant (once you control for everything else) but every time this comes up, the relative sizes of things seem vastly under-emphasized. If 5% less rain does bad things for stability, and what surely matters is food per mouth, then what's 4x the population doing? https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria
    - benj111 8y ago
      If you have 4x the population, you plant 4x the grain. If you have drought, 4x the grain would succumb to drought. You can plant extra grain in anticipation but you need to commit to buying possibly unneeded grain, which pushes up costs, which causes problems for the people you're trying to help.
    - gowld 8y ago
      5% rain doesn't mean 5% less crops. It's a nonlinear relationship that could mean 1% less crops or 90% less crops.
      - iguy 8y ago
        Absolutely, and I pulled 5% out of thin air, too. Here's a graph with the famous Arab spring 2011 drought... about 10%, for one year. You can debate how much of that you wish to attribute to what cause. But note that this is also the population growth since 2011 alone. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?locations=EG https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?location...
  - CodeMage 8y ago
    It's clear from that same introduction paragraph that the focus of the studies is pretty narrow and excludes a whole slew of factors that would normally be considered extremely relevant.
  - luckylion 8y ago
    > That's the introduction paragraph. "Blaming the US" for all turmoil in the Middle East is far too simplistic. Sure, you're right (at least in a general sense; Libya, Iraq are 100% on the US/NATO). But saying climate change plays a significant role in a conflict that has been started by external forces is a joke. We might've seen wars in the middle east without US/NATO starting them, and climate change would probably have played a role in those (as would population size), but we won't, because they did start them. It's a nice meme, though. "It wasn't us by arming, training and directing forces to topple a Regime we didn't like - it was climate change!"
- lallysingh 8y ago
  No it's making a whole generation of people coming from agriculture or other water/climate dependent jobs looking to change their untenable situation. When they don't find it, they're easily recruited cannon fodder for hate/terror orgs.
  - chmod775 8y ago
    You mean they enroll in the US military? /sarcasm
globlist 8y ago
Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!
jressey 8y ago
Every 80s and 90s post-apocalyptic movie taught me this.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
What if this is the insidious reason those in power refuse to address climate change? They know they can make money off of the chaos and war.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Never underestimate the profits of established industries from continuing business as usual... Climate change is not just some "use electric cars" thing, it's also "change whole industries", "stop producing/selling as much crap" thing, and that flies in the face of constant magnification of everything...
happy_man 8y ago
I would rather blame overpopulation than climate change for the upcoming wars and refugee waves
- chillwaves 8y ago
  The problem isn't "overpopulation" it is resource consumption. How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another?
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    It's both. Unless we plan to stop, by force if necessary, the rest achieving a developed life. If 1m have profligate Western lifestyle, the planet and climate would cope just fine. If 7bn desire and are advertised at to desire a profligate Western lifestyle, then the climate is going to break long before all get there.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    > How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another? A non-uniform distribution of resource use and overpopulation are not mutually exclusive, both occur simultaneously.
    - chillwaves 8y ago
      Pithy response but not in line with reality. If we are talking about climate change in the context of globalized economies, then it should be understood that US demand and lifestyle is contributing more to the problem than a poor guy living in India.
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
rrggrr 8y ago
Click bait. The article is clear... "political conditions play an outsize role. If it’s too authoritarian or too democratic the results are different."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thenextguy 8y ago
loving this new Civilization 6 expansion, cool mechanics
czbond 8y ago
Does the Pentagon "fear this", or more likely "yay this"?
edoo 8y ago
It is a pesky little fact that all the climate models have thus far been wrong and there is still no scientific proof that CO2 drives temperatures. The best research on the table at the moment shows we may be facing a super maunder minimum and possible mini ice age. This research will pan out or not in the next 2-5 years as it is actually falsifiable. No falsifiable claim = no science
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Your foolish fringe-science delusions and intellectual arrogance are going to drive your descendants to despair and death. But I have no doubt you'll go to your grave unconvinced no matter what the evidence points to, blissfully leaving the outcome of your decisions to future generations. It's ironic that you mention falsifiable claims, since literally no amount of overwhelming evidence can ever convince deniers that their claims are false. Climate models are not "wrong" or "right," they are models based on finite variables which resemble reality within an expected margin of error. Thus they will always have slight but expected variance from actual measurements in the future. Science doesn't reveal absolute truth, it gets us fractionally closer to absolute truth. Right now 97% of scientists have reached a consensus that even based on the most conservative extremes of the margin of error of our climate models that anthropogenic climate change is real and is marching towards catastrophe. That's a higher degree of certainty than plenty of other scientific concepts that we have put into practice. You are claiming to have better knowledge than the utterly overwhelming majority of evidence and expert observation. Is it because you are miraculously the smartest person on earth, or is it because you are a deluded crank? It's pretty obvious which it is to everyone but yourself and other conspiracy peddlers.
  - edoo 8y ago
    Ad hominem attacks are the sign you have left logic at the wayside and are running on emotion. It is often a sign that your belief, true or not, has been reinforced with false logic, as when confronted with true logic you are unable to appropriately respond. Don't worry, we all get better with practice.
    - 8y ago
BtdTom 8y ago
7.5+ billion people and counting, some of which enjoy the highest standard of living our species has ever known. Those that don't enjoy that standard of living want it, drawing down from a pool of finite resources. Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like drinking water shortages, food and resource scarcity, and migrations from coastal cities - the opportunity for conflict will only rise amongst people and nations. My concern is that this can lead to large scale nuclear war. Yes I'm aware of MAD, but that doesn't protect us from everything. Look at Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident. They are just a small number of publicly known incidents where large scale nuclear war was almost triggered due to computer glitches and/or miscommunication. The proliferation of nuclear weapons adds additional challenges in maintaining the peace and we must also deal with existing nuclear actors experiencing wide swings in political leadership - like what has happened with the US presidency. We live in interesting times.
- kiba 8y ago
  It's not the resources that's the limiting factor, it's the side effect from our consumption
- makerofspoons 8y ago
  The world will be forced to give up this standard of living by force, be it human or by nature, and it is not going to be pretty.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Lately I've been wondering if a full-scale thermonuclear exchange might actually save us in the long run. Our endlessly growing industry is going to eventually wipe out much more of our biosphere than even a worst-case nuclear exchange would. Imagine that. It might actually end up dampening our industry and giving us more time. Sure, fallout is a terrible thing--you have a bunch of deadly isotopes hanging over a region with a half-life of 80,000 years or so--but what is the half-life of a Sahara desert? How would most of the world hunker down and survive if nearly all latitudes resembled that for the next few million years? What about when our oceans completely collapse? There's already dead zones the size of entire continents out there. How long will that last when the whole thing is a dead zone and has to start over? If that happens, all large, complex life on land will be 100% fucked. That would last so, so long that even if humankind somehow miraculously managed to survive (fyi: they wouldn't) the survivors would no longer be anatomically modern humans by the end. They would have slowly differentiated and adapted and evolved through several stages of new, distinct species along the way. Our sentence for the crimes we're carrying out today will be that long. The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful. The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.
_bxg1 8y ago
My favorite thing is when Republicans - so supportive of the military and focused on practical matters of safety and defense - are the ones continuing to deny climate change. Even though the military is publishing statements and studies saying "no, actually this is a thing we're very worried about and actively taking steps to prepare for".
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  Support our troops! (Unless they have ideas which threaten our world view...)
- claydavisss 8y ago
  I also was so disappointed when President Trump restarted the Afghan conflict that President Obama decisively concluded, reopened Gitmo after Obama ordered it destroyed, and reconstituted an economy based on fossil fuels after Obama had banned them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
clomond 8y ago
Not explicitly mentioned: The research they reference links droughts in the middle east during 2009-2012 to the migration and refugee situation which has played out in last decade from the Arab Spring.[1] The casual factor that I don't see talked about much: increased local food prices[2] caused by droughts, which in my opinion very much provided the kindling of the "Arab Spring", whose consequences are still very much being played out today. Related aside: When learning about ancient Rome, it stuck with me that the emperors and ruling elite were acutely aware of the importance of providing sufficient "bread and circuses" with the goal of quelling revolution and uprising. When the political situation is not popular in the first place, revolutions are often sparked when food and basic necessities suddenly become difficult to acquire. This has been true since antiquity. [3] When looking at the impact of climate change, I am very concerned about what the impact of a small number of poorly placed natural disasters could do to the world's food supply and prices. Much of the world's food production is concentrated in a small number of breadbaskets, and global commodity markets can be very sensitive to relatively small changes in supply. These breadbaskets are often close together, represent only a small amount of the world's land area and when conditions are good are highly productive.[4] I'm sure the security agencies of the world are aware of this and are deeply concerned about this, but unfortunately I can only see our global situation getting worse before it gets better. At some point we need to realize this as a serious, shared issue that ignores borders. [1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress-drove-wave-of-arab-spring-refugees/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress-dr... [2] https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-arab-spring-and-food-prices/ https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-a... [3] http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html [4] https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg

55 points by gregcrv 8y ago

It focuses on the middle east, where the US (& allies) / NATO have been the driving forces behind most of the recent "conflicts" that led to forced migrations (Iraq, Libya, Syria), and then says "climate change had a significant impact"? Do generals at the Pentagon get too war-happy when it's too warm on average in any given year? Or is it that plunging Libya and Syria into civil war and leaving Iraq close to it wouldn't have mattered as much if it wasn't for that sea level rise?

djohnston 8y ago
the latter, although it doesn't have anything to do with sea levels in these cases
josefresco 8y ago
"The ongoing Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, has drawn attention from both the scientific community and the media to the question of how climatic conditions can contribute to political unrest and civil war. Recent studies of the Syrian uprising have shown that growing water scarcity and frequent droughts, coupled with poor water management, led to multiyear crop failures, economic deterioration and consequently mass migration of rural families to urban areas (Gleick, 2014; Kelley et al., 2015). Rapid growing population, overcrowding, unemployment and increased inequality put pressure on urban centers and finally contributed to the breakout of political unrest" That's the introduction paragraph. "Blaming the US" for all turmoil in the Middle East is far too simplistic.
- iguy 8y ago
  I don't doubt that you can find something statistically significant (once you control for everything else) but every time this comes up, the relative sizes of things seem vastly under-emphasized. If 5% less rain does bad things for stability, and what surely matters is food per mouth, then what's 4x the population doing? https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria
  - benj111 8y ago
    If you have 4x the population, you plant 4x the grain. If you have drought, 4x the grain would succumb to drought. You can plant extra grain in anticipation but you need to commit to buying possibly unneeded grain, which pushes up costs, which causes problems for the people you're trying to help.
  - gowld 8y ago
    5% rain doesn't mean 5% less crops. It's a nonlinear relationship that could mean 1% less crops or 90% less crops.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Absolutely, and I pulled 5% out of thin air, too. Here's a graph with the famous Arab spring 2011 drought... about 10%, for one year. You can debate how much of that you wish to attribute to what cause. But note that this is also the population growth since 2011 alone. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?locations=EG https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?location...
- CodeMage 8y ago
  It's clear from that same introduction paragraph that the focus of the studies is pretty narrow and excludes a whole slew of factors that would normally be considered extremely relevant.
- luckylion 8y ago
  > That's the introduction paragraph. "Blaming the US" for all turmoil in the Middle East is far too simplistic. Sure, you're right (at least in a general sense; Libya, Iraq are 100% on the US/NATO). But saying climate change plays a significant role in a conflict that has been started by external forces is a joke. We might've seen wars in the middle east without US/NATO starting them, and climate change would probably have played a role in those (as would population size), but we won't, because they did start them. It's a nice meme, though. "It wasn't us by arming, training and directing forces to topple a Regime we didn't like - it was climate change!"
lallysingh 8y ago
No it's making a whole generation of people coming from agriculture or other water/climate dependent jobs looking to change their untenable situation. When they don't find it, they're easily recruited cannon fodder for hate/terror orgs.
- chmod775 8y ago
  You mean they enroll in the US military? /sarcasm

globlist 8y ago

Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!

jressey 8y ago

Every 80s and 90s post-apocalyptic movie taught me this.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

What if this is the insidious reason those in power refuse to address climate change? They know they can make money off of the chaos and war.

coldtea 8y ago
Never underestimate the profits of established industries from continuing business as usual... Climate change is not just some "use electric cars" thing, it's also "change whole industries", "stop producing/selling as much crap" thing, and that flies in the face of constant magnification of everything...

happy_man 8y ago

I would rather blame overpopulation than climate change for the upcoming wars and refugee waves

chillwaves 8y ago
The problem isn't "overpopulation" it is resource consumption. How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another?
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's both. Unless we plan to stop, by force if necessary, the rest achieving a developed life. If 1m have profligate Western lifestyle, the planet and climate would cope just fine. If 7bn desire and are advertised at to desire a profligate Western lifestyle, then the climate is going to break long before all get there.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another? A non-uniform distribution of resource use and overpopulation are not mutually exclusive, both occur simultaneously.
  - chillwaves 8y ago
    Pithy response but not in line with reality. If we are talking about climate change in the context of globalized economies, then it should be understood that US demand and lifestyle is contributing more to the problem than a poor guy living in India.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago

rrggrr 8y ago

Click bait. The article is clear... "political conditions play an outsize role. If it’s too authoritarian or too democratic the results are different."

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thenextguy 8y ago

loving this new Civilization 6 expansion, cool mechanics

czbond 8y ago

Does the Pentagon "fear this", or more likely "yay this"?

edoo 8y ago

It is a pesky little fact that all the climate models have thus far been wrong and there is still no scientific proof that CO2 drives temperatures. The best research on the table at the moment shows we may be facing a super maunder minimum and possible mini ice age. This research will pan out or not in the next 2-5 years as it is actually falsifiable. No falsifiable claim = no science

vertexFarm 8y ago
Your foolish fringe-science delusions and intellectual arrogance are going to drive your descendants to despair and death. But I have no doubt you'll go to your grave unconvinced no matter what the evidence points to, blissfully leaving the outcome of your decisions to future generations. It's ironic that you mention falsifiable claims, since literally no amount of overwhelming evidence can ever convince deniers that their claims are false. Climate models are not "wrong" or "right," they are models based on finite variables which resemble reality within an expected margin of error. Thus they will always have slight but expected variance from actual measurements in the future. Science doesn't reveal absolute truth, it gets us fractionally closer to absolute truth. Right now 97% of scientists have reached a consensus that even based on the most conservative extremes of the margin of error of our climate models that anthropogenic climate change is real and is marching towards catastrophe. That's a higher degree of certainty than plenty of other scientific concepts that we have put into practice. You are claiming to have better knowledge than the utterly overwhelming majority of evidence and expert observation. Is it because you are miraculously the smartest person on earth, or is it because you are a deluded crank? It's pretty obvious which it is to everyone but yourself and other conspiracy peddlers.
- edoo 8y ago
  Ad hominem attacks are the sign you have left logic at the wayside and are running on emotion. It is often a sign that your belief, true or not, has been reinforced with false logic, as when confronted with true logic you are unable to appropriately respond. Don't worry, we all get better with practice.
  - 8y ago

BtdTom 8y ago

7.5+ billion people and counting, some of which enjoy the highest standard of living our species has ever known. Those that don't enjoy that standard of living want it, drawing down from a pool of finite resources. Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like drinking water shortages, food and resource scarcity, and migrations from coastal cities - the opportunity for conflict will only rise amongst people and nations. My concern is that this can lead to large scale nuclear war. Yes I'm aware of MAD, but that doesn't protect us from everything. Look at Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident. They are just a small number of publicly known incidents where large scale nuclear war was almost triggered due to computer glitches and/or miscommunication. The proliferation of nuclear weapons adds additional challenges in maintaining the peace and we must also deal with existing nuclear actors experiencing wide swings in political leadership - like what has happened with the US presidency. We live in interesting times.

kiba 8y ago
It's not the resources that's the limiting factor, it's the side effect from our consumption
makerofspoons 8y ago
The world will be forced to give up this standard of living by force, be it human or by nature, and it is not going to be pretty.
vertexFarm 8y ago
Lately I've been wondering if a full-scale thermonuclear exchange might actually save us in the long run. Our endlessly growing industry is going to eventually wipe out much more of our biosphere than even a worst-case nuclear exchange would. Imagine that. It might actually end up dampening our industry and giving us more time. Sure, fallout is a terrible thing--you have a bunch of deadly isotopes hanging over a region with a half-life of 80,000 years or so--but what is the half-life of a Sahara desert? How would most of the world hunker down and survive if nearly all latitudes resembled that for the next few million years? What about when our oceans completely collapse? There's already dead zones the size of entire continents out there. How long will that last when the whole thing is a dead zone and has to start over? If that happens, all large, complex life on land will be 100% fucked. That would last so, so long that even if humankind somehow miraculously managed to survive (fyi: they wouldn't) the survivors would no longer be anatomically modern humans by the end. They would have slowly differentiated and adapted and evolved through several stages of new, distinct species along the way. Our sentence for the crimes we're carrying out today will be that long. The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful. The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.

_bxg1 8y ago

My favorite thing is when Republicans - so supportive of the military and focused on practical matters of safety and defense - are the ones continuing to deny climate change. Even though the military is publishing statements and studies saying "no, actually this is a thing we're very worried about and actively taking steps to prepare for".

mfoy_ 8y ago
Support our troops! (Unless they have ideas which threaten our world view...)
claydavisss 8y ago
I also was so disappointed when President Trump restarted the Afghan conflict that President Obama decisively concluded, reopened Gitmo after Obama ordered it destroyed, and reconstituted an economy based on fossil fuels after Obama had banned them.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

clomond 8y ago

Not explicitly mentioned: The research they reference links droughts in the middle east during 2009-2012 to the migration and refugee situation which has played out in last decade from the Arab Spring.[1] The casual factor that I don't see talked about much: increased local food prices[2] caused by droughts, which in my opinion very much provided the kindling of the "Arab Spring", whose consequences are still very much being played out today. Related aside: When learning about ancient Rome, it stuck with me that the emperors and ruling elite were acutely aware of the importance of providing sufficient "bread and circuses" with the goal of quelling revolution and uprising. When the political situation is not popular in the first place, revolutions are often sparked when food and basic necessities suddenly become difficult to acquire. This has been true since antiquity. [3] When looking at the impact of climate change, I am very concerned about what the impact of a small number of poorly placed natural disasters could do to the world's food supply and prices. Much of the world's food production is concentrated in a small number of breadbaskets, and global commodity markets can be very sensitive to relatively small changes in supply. These breadbaskets are often close together, represent only a small amount of the world's land area and when conditions are good are highly productive.[4] I'm sure the security agencies of the world are aware of this and are deeply concerned about this, but unfortunately I can only see our global situation getting worse before it gets better. At some point we need to realize this as a serious, shared issue that ignores borders. [1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress-drove-wave-of-arab-spring-refugees/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress-dr... [2] https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-arab-spring-and-food-prices/ https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-a... [3] http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html [4] https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg