11 ms·

Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars

45 points by NoRagrets 4y ago

adrianN 4y ago
Studying this topic is very interesting in a world where climate change threatens to make whole regions essentially uninhabitable. I think the conflicts caused by climate change will be a much bigger threat to humanity than climate change itself.
- vba616 4y ago
  I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      "History is written by historians." Frank Herbert
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past. "History is written by historians." Frank Herbert
  - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
    Question: Is evolution falsifiable?
    - joelhoffman 4y ago
      Of course it is. What has that got to do with anything?
      - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
        It was a rhetoric to “I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.” Creationists regularly posit that Evolution is not falsifiable. Popperian falsifiability is being abandoned these days and instead Neumann’s definition of Science and scientific theory is increasingly embraced.
  - irrational 4y ago
    Isn’t that true of almost every field that deals with humans? Health - coffee/alcohol is good for you this week and bad for you next week Sociology and Psychology - is anything in these fields truly falsifiable? History - same
    - BurningPenguin 4y ago
      That coffee and alcohol thing only happens in certain tabloids and other trash media. Both have positive and negative effects on your health depending on how much you drink of it. Having a little is fine, drinking it 24/7 is not.
  - labster 4y ago
    The civil war in Syria started with a famine, which is certainly evidence for the claim. Culture preserves adaptation strategies long after those ideas become maladaptive. But nature is bad enough. As a climatologist, what keeps me up at night is Bangladesh. A couple meters of sea level rise, and a direct hit from a super typhoon, and we could easily see millions of refugees. And as India continues its tilt towards a Hindu state, conflict could also happen there.
  - mftb 4y ago
    We apply a different standard here, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    The concept is equivalent to "Bring a coat, it might rain" not "It's going to rain"
  - csee 4y ago
    It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Environmental stressors also make it far easier for an unscrupulous party to create a casus belli, and you should absolutely expect to see that happen in the next few years.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  The US DoD has already said similar.
paulpauper 4y ago
famine is the least of America's concerns, so I guess this is good news
- elevaet 4y ago
  Because America is the only country that matters?
- mellavora 4y ago
  Huh. Because famine and war wouldn't cause disruption to any of our supply chains? Nor would it results in millions of people walking north, which of course wouldn't be a problem, we'd welcome them with open arms, right?
- seydor 4y ago
  who is going to attack america, the Ocean?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  And when you reason, how many steps of consequences do you consider? Consider as a primary example the creations of famines to create emigration waves supposed to put pressure on intended recipient countries.
ruskiesrepent 4y ago
- trhway 4y ago
  >the food prices in Europe hit new highs in the coming fall energy too - Russia uses the food for blackmail in the energy space too as it clearly communicated to the African countries where Europe was trying to get natural gas and oil to replace Russian ones that such help to Europe will be punished by blocking Russian (and Ukrainian to the extent that Russia controls it) food for those countries.
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  > I hope we do not forget that it is Russias fault when the food prices in Europe hit new highs in the coming fall So you dont recognise the deceit with Nato govts as the trigger for Russia? I dont blame Russia for standing up to Western passive aggression thats played out over decades across popular culture, media and govt policy. Its not like you get the truth from criminals running much of the world directly or indirectly through manipulation, blackmail and other disingenuous means. There has to be one country which is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the world, its how the simple unthinking masses manage to comprehend world events.
  - _kbh_ 4y ago
    What deceit did NATO governments that justifies, invading raping and systematically destroying a country?. Russias war of aggression falls firmly on the shoulders of only Russia. We are lucky that Russia is so terrible at war, if they where any good they would of won by now.
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      Right. What propagandists often use is the logical fallacy called "Whataboutism". Russia invaded Ukraine but what about US invading Iraq, doesn't that show that Russia is no worse than US? The fallacy in that argument is that Russia is doing its war-crimes right now at this moment. What US did in Iraq was far less bad, and most importantly whatever US did in Iraq they stopped doing. But Russia has not stopped bombing Ukraine. Therefore, at the current moment, we must condemn Russia for what it is doing now, not US for what it did long ago and stopped doing. And even if it was true that US was and still is as bad as Russia then so what? That doesn't give Russia the license to do war-crimes. Two bads don't make it right. Hey, I may be bad, but what about Al Capone? He was much worse than I!
cryptonector 4y ago
War causes famines. Ethiopia, for example. Certainly in the 20th century. I can't read the paper, but the abstract says it's specifically about China in the years 1470-1911. Well, what on Earth could that say about our planet in the 21st century? One would think that studying famines and epidemics and wars of the 20th century would yield more statistics and lessons that would be a lot more relevant to the 21st century than any centuries previous to the 20th. Given my knowledge of 20th century history, I'm quite ready to say that the title of this submission is simply backwards. Moreover, the title of the submission does not match TFA's. And TFA's does not match the paper's (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683618761549 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095968361876154...). So I'm calling this click bait, and declaring it jumping to conclusions to the exclusion of general and widespread knowledge of 20th century history.
- sofixa 4y ago
  I think the point is to try to "prove" the opposite. Wars causing epidemics and famines is a well established fact and it's a "natural" part of mass scale conflict - men go to fight, men die, big swathes of land are damaged, foraging, etc. create conditions for famine, and meanwhile improper handling of the many dead coupled with the massive movements of people in closely cramped quarters ( be it armies moving, supplies, sieges, etc.) create conditions for epidemics. There's even cholera now in Ukraine due to the invasion. So those two are nothing new. But the opposite, that unstable social conditions due to famine/epidemic causing social unrest causing war, is also interesting, has happened many times ( e.g. the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Arab Spring), and could be indicative of the future, as the article says - we're in for a lot of social unrest due to unstable social conditions due to climate change ( famines, epidemics, swathes of land becoming uninhabitable thus forcing migration, etc.).
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    Famines cause revolutions, for sure. Famines don't cause wars (except for revolutionary wars). Otherwise the famines in Ukraine (30s), China (50s and 60s), Africa (80s), etc. might have caused wars, but they did not. And it's been a while since we've seen famines even cause revolutions. Famously, of course, the French Revolution. Governments are very powerful now and can put down revolts before they gain steam. The Arab Spring revolts had external support. The wars in Libya and Syria were not caused by famine but by external powers getting involved in internal power struggles. But if you insist, famines cause revolutions -> revolutions often fail -> failed revolutions often lead to wider war. Although the main example of this is... the French Revolution, 233 years ago. None of WWI, WWII, the Franco-Prussian war, the U.S. Civil War, the Crimean war, the Triple Alliance War, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the Iraq wars, the wars in Afghanistan, the Ukraine war, etc., were caused by famine. Not one! That's going back to the 1850s (Crimean war). That's a list of rather salient wars. Got any counter-examples?
galaxyLogic 4y ago
It makes intuitive sense to me. When there is pandemic there is social isolation which leads to distrust between people. And there is shortage of things which causes looting and crime. And what is war but social unrest on a large scale?
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  That would make sense if the claim was that epidemic cause civil wars, but it doesn't quite explain, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- which is also the only currently ongoing 'hot' war directly between two nation-states.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Pandemic causes also isolation between nations. And they say Putin has been isolated for a long time. When you are isolated you started distrusting other people, including those of other nations. I have no data on this just saying it makes intuitive sense to me. When people interact they realize it is good to interact. When they don't it is easy to be afraid.
    - im3w1l 4y ago
      I can believe it. And I don't think it's just trust. Having positive interactions with other people goes beyond that. If you have a fun time in another country this will stick in your mind. You will remember all the friendly people and you will want good things to happen to them. (If you have a bad time I could totally see the opposite happening).
kstenerud 4y ago
The title needs to be fixed. "Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars" has a very different connotation to "How Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars", and is already leading to fruitless argument by the people who only read the title.
- seydor 4y ago
  I think HN auto-removes "how" from titles
  - pcl 4y ago
    Yeah. It’s a good rule for click bait headlines, but there are also plenty of examples in which the modifier provides clarity, such as this case.
valeg 4y ago
Yeah, people know this for a long time, since the Book of Revelation.
Proven 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
irrational 4y ago
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are Epidemic, Famine, War, and Death. I presume the people who first came up with this list already recognized the relationship between them from personal experience.

45 points by NoRagrets 4y ago

Studying this topic is very interesting in a world where climate change threatens to make whole regions essentially uninhabitable. I think the conflicts caused by climate change will be a much bigger threat to humanity than climate change itself.

vba616 4y ago
I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.
- adrianN 4y ago
  History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    "History is written by historians." Frank Herbert
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past. "History is written by historians." Frank Herbert
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  Question: Is evolution falsifiable?
  - joelhoffman 4y ago
    Of course it is. What has that got to do with anything?
    - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
      It was a rhetoric to “I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.” Creationists regularly posit that Evolution is not falsifiable. Popperian falsifiability is being abandoned these days and instead Neumann’s definition of Science and scientific theory is increasingly embraced.
- irrational 4y ago
  Isn’t that true of almost every field that deals with humans? Health - coffee/alcohol is good for you this week and bad for you next week Sociology and Psychology - is anything in these fields truly falsifiable? History - same
  - BurningPenguin 4y ago
    That coffee and alcohol thing only happens in certain tabloids and other trash media. Both have positive and negative effects on your health depending on how much you drink of it. Having a little is fine, drinking it 24/7 is not.
- labster 4y ago
  The civil war in Syria started with a famine, which is certainly evidence for the claim. Culture preserves adaptation strategies long after those ideas become maladaptive. But nature is bad enough. As a climatologist, what keeps me up at night is Bangladesh. A couple meters of sea level rise, and a direct hit from a super typhoon, and we could easily see millions of refugees. And as India continues its tilt towards a Hindu state, conflict could also happen there.
- mftb 4y ago
  We apply a different standard here, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
- mhh__ 4y ago
  The concept is equivalent to "Bring a coat, it might rain" not "It's going to rain"
- csee 4y ago
  It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Environmental stressors also make it far easier for an unscrupulous party to create a casus belli, and you should absolutely expect to see that happen in the next few years.
alphabettsy 4y ago
The US DoD has already said similar.

paulpauper 4y ago

famine is the least of America's concerns, so I guess this is good news

elevaet 4y ago
Because America is the only country that matters?
mellavora 4y ago
Huh. Because famine and war wouldn't cause disruption to any of our supply chains? Nor would it results in millions of people walking north, which of course wouldn't be a problem, we'd welcome them with open arms, right?
seydor 4y ago
who is going to attack america, the Ocean?
mdp2021 4y ago
And when you reason, how many steps of consequences do you consider? Consider as a primary example the creations of famines to create emigration waves supposed to put pressure on intended recipient countries.

ruskiesrepent 4y ago

trhway 4y ago
>the food prices in Europe hit new highs in the coming fall energy too - Russia uses the food for blackmail in the energy space too as it clearly communicated to the African countries where Europe was trying to get natural gas and oil to replace Russian ones that such help to Europe will be punished by blocking Russian (and Ukrainian to the extent that Russia controls it) food for those countries.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
> I hope we do not forget that it is Russias fault when the food prices in Europe hit new highs in the coming fall So you dont recognise the deceit with Nato govts as the trigger for Russia? I dont blame Russia for standing up to Western passive aggression thats played out over decades across popular culture, media and govt policy. Its not like you get the truth from criminals running much of the world directly or indirectly through manipulation, blackmail and other disingenuous means. There has to be one country which is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the world, its how the simple unthinking masses manage to comprehend world events.
- _kbh_ 4y ago
  What deceit did NATO governments that justifies, invading raping and systematically destroying a country?. Russias war of aggression falls firmly on the shoulders of only Russia. We are lucky that Russia is so terrible at war, if they where any good they would of won by now.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Right. What propagandists often use is the logical fallacy called "Whataboutism". Russia invaded Ukraine but what about US invading Iraq, doesn't that show that Russia is no worse than US? The fallacy in that argument is that Russia is doing its war-crimes right now at this moment. What US did in Iraq was far less bad, and most importantly whatever US did in Iraq they stopped doing. But Russia has not stopped bombing Ukraine. Therefore, at the current moment, we must condemn Russia for what it is doing now, not US for what it did long ago and stopped doing. And even if it was true that US was and still is as bad as Russia then so what? That doesn't give Russia the license to do war-crimes. Two bads don't make it right. Hey, I may be bad, but what about Al Capone? He was much worse than I!

cryptonector 4y ago

War causes famines. Ethiopia, for example. Certainly in the 20th century. I can't read the paper, but the abstract says it's specifically about China in the years 1470-1911. Well, what on Earth could that say about our planet in the 21st century? One would think that studying famines and epidemics and wars of the 20th century would yield more statistics and lessons that would be a lot more relevant to the 21st century than any centuries previous to the 20th. Given my knowledge of 20th century history, I'm quite ready to say that the title of this submission is simply backwards. Moreover, the title of the submission does not match TFA's. And TFA's does not match the paper's (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683618761549 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095968361876154...). So I'm calling this click bait, and declaring it jumping to conclusions to the exclusion of general and widespread knowledge of 20th century history.

sofixa 4y ago
I think the point is to try to "prove" the opposite. Wars causing epidemics and famines is a well established fact and it's a "natural" part of mass scale conflict - men go to fight, men die, big swathes of land are damaged, foraging, etc. create conditions for famine, and meanwhile improper handling of the many dead coupled with the massive movements of people in closely cramped quarters ( be it armies moving, supplies, sieges, etc.) create conditions for epidemics. There's even cholera now in Ukraine due to the invasion. So those two are nothing new. But the opposite, that unstable social conditions due to famine/epidemic causing social unrest causing war, is also interesting, has happened many times ( e.g. the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Arab Spring), and could be indicative of the future, as the article says - we're in for a lot of social unrest due to unstable social conditions due to climate change ( famines, epidemics, swathes of land becoming uninhabitable thus forcing migration, etc.).
- cryptonector 4y ago
  Famines cause revolutions, for sure. Famines don't cause wars (except for revolutionary wars). Otherwise the famines in Ukraine (30s), China (50s and 60s), Africa (80s), etc. might have caused wars, but they did not. And it's been a while since we've seen famines even cause revolutions. Famously, of course, the French Revolution. Governments are very powerful now and can put down revolts before they gain steam. The Arab Spring revolts had external support. The wars in Libya and Syria were not caused by famine but by external powers getting involved in internal power struggles. But if you insist, famines cause revolutions -> revolutions often fail -> failed revolutions often lead to wider war. Although the main example of this is... the French Revolution, 233 years ago. None of WWI, WWII, the Franco-Prussian war, the U.S. Civil War, the Crimean war, the Triple Alliance War, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the Iraq wars, the wars in Afghanistan, the Ukraine war, etc., were caused by famine. Not one! That's going back to the 1850s (Crimean war). That's a list of rather salient wars. Got any counter-examples?

galaxyLogic 4y ago

It makes intuitive sense to me. When there is pandemic there is social isolation which leads to distrust between people. And there is shortage of things which causes looting and crime. And what is war but social unrest on a large scale?

thematrixturtle 4y ago
That would make sense if the claim was that epidemic cause civil wars, but it doesn't quite explain, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- which is also the only currently ongoing 'hot' war directly between two nation-states.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Pandemic causes also isolation between nations. And they say Putin has been isolated for a long time. When you are isolated you started distrusting other people, including those of other nations. I have no data on this just saying it makes intuitive sense to me. When people interact they realize it is good to interact. When they don't it is easy to be afraid.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    I can believe it. And I don't think it's just trust. Having positive interactions with other people goes beyond that. If you have a fun time in another country this will stick in your mind. You will remember all the friendly people and you will want good things to happen to them. (If you have a bad time I could totally see the opposite happening).

kstenerud 4y ago

The title needs to be fixed. "Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars" has a very different connotation to "How Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars", and is already leading to fruitless argument by the people who only read the title.

seydor 4y ago
I think HN auto-removes "how" from titles
- pcl 4y ago
  Yeah. It’s a good rule for click bait headlines, but there are also plenty of examples in which the modifier provides clarity, such as this case.

valeg 4y ago

Yeah, people know this for a long time, since the Book of Revelation.

Proven 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

irrational 4y ago

The four horsemen of the apocalypse are Epidemic, Famine, War, and Death. I presume the people who first came up with this list already recognized the relationship between them from personal experience.