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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCall climate change what it is: violence
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-change-violence-occupy-earthIf you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you're the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers the US and Russia still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
Or so I thought when I received a press release last week from a climate group announcing that "scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence". What the scientists actually said, in a not-so-newsworthy article in Nature two and a half years ago, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Nino years, and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.
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Call climate change what it is: violence (Original Post)
xchrom
Apr 2014
OP
Long hot summers - there has been a link between physical heat and an increase in violence
el_bryanto
Apr 2014
#4
Response to xchrom (Original post)
polichick This message was self-deleted by its author.
former9thward
(32,005 posts)2. Where are the links showing an increase in "violence"?
However that is defined.
PasadenaTrudy
(3,998 posts)3. I'm glad I didn't have kids n/t
el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)4. Long hot summers - there has been a link between physical heat and an increase in violence
If climate change brings longer and hotter summers, seems possible that will lead to more violence.
Bryant