Weather & War

March 21 is the date of the Vernal Equinox. This day marks the time when days and nights are of equal length, and when in the Northern Hemisphere the days get longer and in the Southern Hemisphere, the days get shorter. This process affects the weather, with spring and summer following this date in the north, and fall and winter in the south, until the process is reversed on September 21 at the Autumnal Equinox.

For several years now, Taliban fighters appear to have tailored their fighting strategy to the season. As winter ends, U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan are once again warning of a "spring offensive" by the Taliban. Is such predictability unusual, or have war and weather always been so closely linked?

In the November 19th edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Hong Kong published the results of a revealing study. Looking at the time period between 1400 and 1900, they discovered that war and weather were definitely related.

By consulting historical documents and analyzing tree rings, ice cores, and coral skeletons, they mapped out weather patterns. They then compared those patterns to data taken from a massive war database. A clear correlation emerged: the colder it got, the more people fought. Indeed, the frequency of wars in cold centuries was practically double that in warm centuries. The researchers hypothesized that cold weather meant shorter agricultural seasons and hence less food and more competition for that food.

But does the cold weather/war correlation hold in modern times? Or, in this age of global warming, might we see it inverted? It's easy to see how such an inversion could happen. The hotter it gets, the more water sources dry up, and the less land is available for people to grow crops and raise animals.

This precise scenario has been played out in Darfur, with dwindling agricultural land an important factor in causing and prolonging the horrifying violence there. Indeed, in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed piece, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called the conflict in Darfur an "ecological crisis" related to "climate change."

What's more, as the Taliban example suggests, ongoing wars sometimes heat up with the weather, as combatants spend the cold months regrouping and finalizing the details of new military strategies.

Activity

For the Weather Month of March, read through the following sections of World Conflicts Today: Global Implications in the Colombia report and the Overview section of the Darfur report.

Then write a 200-word response to the following essential question for critical thinking: Assuming Ban Ki Moon is correct in his assessment of Darfur, how might the violence there be aggravated by the persistence of civil war in Colombia?