Climate change is not going to make life easier

Change is difficult, and in marginally productive areas climate change is going to drive all sorts of problems and social disruptions, from mass population movements to insurgencies and rebellion to out-and-out war.

The Pentagon (or portions of it) has actually been planning around this issue for a while now — but they keep it fairly quiet lest the deniers in Congress have a hissy fit.

Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger

Climate changes drive population movements and war. This is an ancient truth: lack of rainfall in Central Asia pushed the Huns and the Goths into Europe. Droughts pushing up wheat prices precipitated the Arab Spring. And the collapse of farm and ranching land in the Sahel is catalyzing terrorism and civil conflict in Nigeria.

These are all things which we should expect to get significantly worse. As food supplies start to collapse due to climate change, everything from wars to mass popular movements will start in the places which are most desperate, and spread from there. 

(It wouldn't at all surprise me if the next few decades created a new kind of mass anti-Western — and possibly also anti-Chinese, depending on how the politics fall out — movement in much of the world. The West's battle with Islamic fundamentalists may prove to be a dress rehearsal for a much wider conflict later.)

via +Christine Paluch.