The Climate War

Wars happen for all sorts of reasons; resources and religion being the most often cites ones. I would argue that Iraq and Afghanistan and the whole War on Terror (TM) is a resource war with religion playing second fiddle. I would say it is the first resource was of the end of the age of oil. With that in mind, an article in the Guardian pointed to another reason for war - related to resources - the conflict in about which the West seems so 'powerless' to act, yet whos consumor driven system has created; climate change...

Something fundamental has changed in this part of Africa, and it happened within a generation. From a state of sectarian innocence in which the dividing line between Arab and African was meaningless, something made people pick sides, and hardened their new sense of identity into ethnic hatred, all in the past two decades. What changed, the evidence suggests, was the climate....when a ferocious drought and famine transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa. It killed more than a million people and laid waste livestock herds. Whether they maintained their way of life or tried to take up settled cultivation, the pastoralists of Darfur clashed repeatedly with its farmers. A string of conflicts broke out as both sides armed themselves, and those conflicts created the template for today's disaster.