Gaia and Ares: Climate Change and the Future of War

I have yet to find any respected social scientist who makes a causal connection between air temperature and war.
               —Major General Robert H. Scales, USA, Rtd, Scales on War: The Future of America’s Military at Risk (2016)

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Throughout the history of arms, there has always been an important relationship between climate and the waging of wars. Climate differs from weather in that climate refers to long-term weather patterns, while weather describes short-term particularities occurring within the atmosphere. It was Russia’s continental climate with its severe winter, rather than any discrete weather events, which played the key role in thwarting the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler. As Napoleon’s aide, General Philippe-Paul de Segur, observed of the frost-bitten French survivors of 1812: “It was the ghost of the Grande Armée. They felt they had been defeated only by Nature.” In the First World War, the damp maritime climate of lowland Flanders plunged armies on both sides into a quagmire that helped to create a protracted trench deadlock. In more recent conflicts, climate has continued to be influential in conditioning how armies fight: Vietnam’s tropical monsoon climate, Iraq’s arid deserts and Afghanistan’s sub-arctic mountain climate all affected the efficacy of American-led military operations. Yet conceding that climate has always played a role in warfare is very different from accepting the proposition that the phenomenon of global warming will, in the years ahead, become the predominant concern in international security and the major cause of future wars with armies needing to be reconfigured for a new age of “climate wars”.

What might be styled the “climate wars thesis” has been given authority and legitimacy by such prominent figures as former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former US President Barack Obama, the British economist Lord Stern, and Prince Charles. In June 2007, Ban Ki-moon described the war in Sudan’s Darfur region as being the result of an “ecological crisis” arising from climate change. In December 2009, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Obama stated, “There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing [on climate change] we will face more drought, famine, more mass displacement—all of which will fuel more [armed] conflict for decades.” In the same year, Lord Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, warned that, if the world failed to deal with climate change in a timely manner, humanity risked stumbling into “an extended world war”. In November 2015, in an interview with Sky News, Prince Charles attributed both the cause and course of the Syrian civil war to “the cumulative effect of global warming”.

Such views on climate change, security and war have since made their way into mainstream Western culture through popular histories such as Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (2011) and through the new genre of climate fiction or “cli-fi” novels, notably Omar El-Akkad’s apocalyptic American War (2017).

The science of climate change presents a major challenge to national and international public policy-making. The scientific community is virtually unanimous on the reality of human-induced global warming—a process that Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen defined in 2000 as the beginning of new geological era, the Anthropocene (the Age of Humans)—stemming from the impact of industrialisation. In 2014, of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles on the subject, only five rejected anthropogenic global warming. Similarly, only 2 per cent of the membership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific professional society—contest the reality of a warming world. The global scientific community has coalesced around the 2005 eleven-nation Joint Science Academies Statement of the Group of Eight (G8) countries—alongside Brazil, China and India—to the effect that earth’s warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Yet, accepting the existence of a scientific consensus on the phenomenon of global warming does not amount to any notion that “the science is settled”. As the American economist William Nordhaus notes in his book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (2013), science does not proceed by majority rule and a collective judgment does not imply unanimity nor rule out the appearance of new evidence. This cautionary view is echoed by two prominent British writers, climatologist Mike Hulme and sociologist Anthony Giddens. In his important 2009 study, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, Hulme warns that climate science can only advance by a relentless questioning of orthodoxy. Similarly, Giddens in his book The Politics of Climate Change (2011) writes:

scepticism is the life-blood of science and just as important in policy-making. It is right that whatever claims are made about climate change and its consequences are examined with a critical, even hostile eye and in a continuing fashion.

The works of Nordhaus, Hulme and Giddens are powerful reminders of the existence of major gaps in our knowledge about the progression of global warming. Climate science embraces complex atmospheric and oceanographic systems involving feedback loops, accumulations and nonlinearities, all of which are difficult to understand as interactive physical processes. The innate unpredictability of the dynamics of global warming—combined with any number of unforeseen human activities in the future—means that uncertainty will pervade all attempts at climate change prediction.

The scientific complexities of the global warming debate are further complicated by long-held cultural beliefs and competing ideological worldviews in society. As Andrew J. Hoffman puts it in his insightful 2015 study How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, the West’s climate change debate is often less about the validity of science than it is about an impassioned competition between different sets of political, social and philosophical values that arise from the challenge of dealing with global warming.

The ideological vortex that surrounds Paul Crutzen’s new anthropogenic age has created three identifiable schools of thought on climate change. They have been described by the late British sociologist John Urry, in his 2016 book What is the Future? as the gradualist, the sceptical and the catastrophic schools of thought, and they explain much of the bitter controversy that surrounds the subject of climate variation. An understanding of these three contending schools is particularly important because, as we shall see, their narratives are often reflected in discussions of the linkages between climate alteration, security analysis and the future of war.

Members of the gradualist school accept climate change science but view global warming as a challenge best met by applying new post-combustion technologies of carbon capture and sequestration developed over time. For gradualists there is no silver bullet solution to a warming world and their catchphrase is “mitigate where you can, adapt where you cannot”. Adherents note that the oft-derided system of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for natural gas has done more to reduce emissions in the United States than all the renewable energy investment combined. Anthony J. McMichael in his Climate Change and the Health of Nations (2017) summarises the philosophy of many gradualists when he writes that the task ahead is:

to ensure operating space on the planet for future generations, the global population must reduce its excessive pressures on the global environment. Yet sufficient resource and energy “space” must be available to low-income countries to achieve satisfactory material and social development.

The sceptical school on climate change focuses strongly on the complex interplay between science and public policy. Much of this school’s thinking is reflected in Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg accepts the science of global warming but suggests that the huge political effort and financial cost involved in cutting greenhouse gas emissions is misguided policy; the vast sums of money projected are far better invested in alleviating global poverty. Other sceptics such as Nigel Lawson point to important historical works—such as Wolfgang Behringer’s A Cultural History of Climate (2010) and John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Human History (2014)—to highlight that the climate change challenge can be mastered by human ingenuity because it is not a new phenomenon.

Urry’s final school is that of catastrophism. Catastrophists argue that the very existence of human civilisation is threatened by carbon emissions and only large-scale global action can reverse a cataclysm akin to the effects of a nuclear war. They range from Green radicals who embrace the Gaia hypothesis of a self-regulating biosphere—some of whom favour an ecological dictatorship reminiscent of Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature—to respected establishment figures such as Martin Rees, former President of the Royal Society. In 2003 in his book Our Final Century, Rees gloomily writes, “The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century.” Catastrophists adhere to existential texts such as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018).

A strand of the catastrophist school is particularly evident among the elite opinion-makers of the Western mass media—many of whom pursue an alarmist repertoire of “believers versus deniers”, of imminent human peril and inevitable species-extinction. As Mark Maslin puts it in his Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction (2014), “climate change is perfect for the media: a dramatic story about the end of the world as we know it”—offering endless streams of television coverage which deliver “the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”. Yet thought, rather than opinion, is precisely what we need on global warming—not least when it comes to linking the subject of climate change to the important area of security analysis and future armed conflict.

As climate change has emerged in public policy, attention has turned to examining the place of global warming in international and national security. While most Western defence and security analysts accept the IPCC’s climate change scientific consensus, there is disagreement on its significance for global security affairs and future war. In philosophical outlook, most security analysts reflect variations of the gradualist, sceptical and catastrophist schools of thought on climate variation. Views on climate change, security and war range from Australian analyst Alan Dupont’s 2008 view that climate change is a “stress multiplier” on all states and should be included in defence planning as a contingency measure, to Canadian scholar Simon Dalby’s 2013 conviction that—because earth-system science and human security now intersect so closely—there is an urgent need to “remodel strategic planning in the Anthropocene era”.

An example of gradualist thinking is the US CNA (Center for Naval Analyses) Corporation’s 2007 and 2014 reports on American national security and climate change. The 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, authored by a military advisory board composed of eleven retired generals and admirals, described climate change as “a threat-multiplier for instability” but did not view the phenomenon as a discrete cause of armed conflict. The CNA Corporation’s 2014 report, National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change, was chaired by General Paul J. Kern, a former commander of the US Army’s Materiel Command. The report bewailed the state of the climate change debate in the United States, stating, “we [the military advisory board] are dismayed that discussions of climate change have become so polarizing and have receded from the arena of public discourse and debate”. While the report speculated that effects of climate change might accelerate in the future from being “threat multipliers” to being “catalysts for instability and conflict”—particularly in vulnerable parts of Africa and the Middle East—it was careful not to assign a direct causal relationship between environmental stressors and war.

Much of the sceptical school of thought on climate change is reflected in the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute’s 2008 publication, Global Climate Change: National Security Perspectives, edited by Carolyn Pumphrey. Like the CNA Corporation’s military board members, contributors to the Army War College publication accepted climate change science but some expressed doubts about viewing the subject in terms of security and military affairs. Some writers viewed the security dimension of climate change as being part of the military’s traditional responsibility to deliver humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations. Other contributors suggested that any military role in addressing climate change contingencies was subject to inter-agency co-operation and “whole-of-government” approaches in which the instruments of diplomatic, informational, military and economic power are integrated. One scholar, Kent Hughes Butts, argued that defence analysts need to treat climate change as a “subset of environmental security”. He suggested that an environmental threat only becomes a security issue if there is human danger or a community cost involved. For example, a flood may not be a security issue—but a flood that drowns or displaces thousands of people and contributes to the breakdown of law and order may well become both a national and an international security issue.

Perhaps the most interesting contribution to the US Army’s Global Climate Change came from James Woolsey, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Woolsey focused his attention on how climatic and security threats are inherently different in character:

We might call climate change a “malignant” as distinct from a “malevolent” problem—a problem of the sort Einstein once characterised as sophisticated (raffiniert) but, being derived from nature, not driven by an evil-intentioned (boshaft) adversary.

For Woolsey, malignant and malevolent threats involve quite different worldviews and ideological outlooks. Malignant threats such as climate change attract idealists concerned with environmentalism, while malevolent threats attract realists concerned with statecraft. Woolsey was sceptical of finding any common cause between “the tree-hugger culture” derived from Gaia the Greek earth goddess and a “hawk culture” reflecting the outlook of Ares the Greek god of war:

Our tree-hugger needs to remember that fanatic enemies with access to destructive technology have already wreaked mass death on modern societies. The tree-hugger needs to keep an open mind, remember the Nazis, and recognise that evil exists, and happens.

Woolsey’s sceptical views stand in contrast to security adherents of the catastrophist school such as the Canadian ecologist Thomas Homer-Dixon and Kurt M. Campbell, the American policy analyst who served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013 in the Obama administration. Writing in the New York Times on April 24, 2007, Homer-Dixon predicted that climate stress would breed “insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism”. Moreover, he warned that climate crisis may well “represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous—and more intractable—than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today”.

Similarly, in 2008, a Brookings Institution publication, Climatic Catastrophe: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change, edited by Kurt Campbell, outlined several scenarios of climate change including a catastrophic scenario. The latter was characterised by a devastating “tipping point” in the climate system which produces a world in which the land-based polar ice sheets have disappeared, global sea levels have rapidly risen, and the existing natural order has been destroyed beyond hope of repair. In his own contribution to the study, “National Security and Climate Change in Perspective”, Campbell and his co-writer Christine Parthemore described climate change as an existential threat to the United States:

The United States must confront the harsh reality that unchecked climate change will come to represent perhaps the single greatest risk to our national security, even greater than terrorists, rogue states, the rise of China, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

A catastrophist view of climate change as a subject of security analysis has served to provide fertile ground for a related belief that climate wars represent the long-term future of armed conflict. Examples of climate wars literature include Michael Klare’s Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2002), James R. Lee’s Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars (2009), Jeffrey Mazo’s Climate Conflict: How Global Warming Threatens Security and What to Do About It (2010) and Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: Why People Will Be Killed in the 21st Century (2012). Collectively, these catastrophist studies argue that climate change wars will proliferate in the years ahead as droughts, floods and melting ice lead to dwindling resources, desertification, shrinking water supplies, state failure and mass human migrations.

In Resource Wars, Michael Klare predicts a new geography of conflict in which wars over shrinking water supplies and energy become “the most distinctive feature of the global security environment”. These conflicts include projected water wars in the Nile valley and the Tigris-Euphrates basin, energy wars in the Caspian Sea and oil wars in the South China Sea. Harald Welzer and Jeffrey Mazo come to similar conclusions. Welzer’s Climate Wars foresees a future of “never-ending wars” and echoes Ban Ki-moon’s view that the war in Darfur represents the “first climate war”—a struggle between African farmers and Arab nomadic herdsmen arising from ecological disaster. In Climate Conflict, Mazo agrees, noting, “the fighting in Darfur can accurately be labelled the first modern climate-change conflict”.

In perhaps the most baroque and apocalyptic study of all, Climate Change and Armed Conflict, James R. Lee takes matters further by speculating that the globe faces a protracted “Climate Change War”. This war would involve what he calls an “Equatorial tension belt” in Africa and Central Asia of hot wars emanating from warming and a “Polar tension belt” in the Western hemisphere of cold wars, stemming from melting ice. He predicts:

The Cold War lasted nearly half a century. The Climate Change War will be a global period of instability that will last centuries. The period of the greatest instability will be the twenty-first century.

Drawing inspiration from H.G. Wells’s 1895 science-fiction novel The Time Machine, Lee speculates that the coming global climate war may be one in which developed societies come to resemble the decadent Eloi who are preyed upon by the barbarian Morlocks of underdeveloped societies. While denying that cannibalism will be the outcome of his envisaged grand Climate Change War, Lee writes, “it is possible, but not perfect to substitute developed countries (Eloi) and underdeveloped countries (Morlocks) into the lexicon of Wells”.

Several climate wars theorists have called upon Western militaries to transition from planning for traditional warfighting functions to preparing to manage environmental crises. In 2008, Michael Klare urged a transformation in military consciousness towards “a combination of the zeitgeist and the work of Albert Gore and the IPCC”. Similarly, Gwynne Dyer, in his book Climate Wars, suggested that “the next mission of the US armed forces is going to be a long struggle to maintain stability as climate change continually undermines it”. Finally, John Elkington, writing in Jorgen Randers’s 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (2012) called for Western military establishments to shift defence planning into considerations of the biosphere and the study of ecocide. “By 2052,” Elkington forecast, the “new core business of the armed services [will be] recovering from natural disasters and fighting a growing range of unsustainabilities, including the destruction of key natural assets like fisheries, forests, and watersheds”.

Apart from a lack of hard evidence, there are two major intellectual flaws in the collective work of the climate wars advocates. The first is their climatic determinism, caused largely by a lack of historical perspective. The second is their almost complete lack of military knowledge.

When it comes to historical perspective, we can learn much of value about the relationship between climate variation and war from our pre-industrial past. For example, a reading of Geoffrey Parker’s magisterial study, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), demonstrates that, when it comes to climate and war, correlation is not the same as causation. Parker’s scholarship demonstrates how the pre-Westphalian and pre-industrial world of the seventeenth century endured the most pronounced global climate anomaly of the past 8000 years, namely the global cooling of the Little Ice Age—an event that coincided with revolutions, wars and famines—that killed one third of humanity. In linking the Little Ice Age with the global political upheavals of the seventeenth century, Parker firmly rejects “climatic determinism” and the proposition that “global cooling must have somehow caused recession and revolution around the world simply because climate change is the only plausible denominator”.

The Thirty Years War, the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, the Ottoman threat to Eastern Europe; the rise of France under the Sun King, Louis XIV—as well as the long wars that plagued the Asian states of China, India and Japan—were not caused by the climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age. They were historical events in which “natural and human factors combined to create a comprehensive demographic, social, economic, and political catastrophe that lasted for two generations”. Yet, in an inconvenient truth for today’s catastrophists and climate wars advocates, the world survived the crisis of global cooling. The struggles and turmoil of the seventeenth century were accompanied by an era of European intellectual progress and discovery in what the British philosopher A.C. Grayling has called “the age of genius”—the epoch in which Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Kepler and Copernicus transformed human understanding of the natural world. Society in Europe adapted to the Little Ice Age and emerged economically reconstructed and more politically powerful than before, through post-Westphalian state building and a scientific revolution that led into the Enlightenment and on to modernity. If there is a lesson from the seventeenth century’s experience of global cooling for the twenty-first century’s era of global warming it is that, despite the potential for strife and turmoil, a combination of political adaptation, human ingenuity and technological innovation remains capable of overcoming a global crisis.

The second flaw in the work of many of the climate wars advocates is their weak grasp of military and defence analysis. This deficiency has left their work open to criticism by military experts. In 2016, the former American general and leading soldier-scholar Robert Scales, in his book Scales on War, took the climate wars writers to task, noting that the last war over water was between two Sumerian cities in the middle of the third millennium BC over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Scales went on to observe:

Environmental activism aside, the three-thousand year historical record of human conflict argues conclusively against any causal relationship between war and temperature. Let me be more specific. Never in the written history of warfare, from Megiddo in 1500 BC to the Syrian civil war today, is there any evidence that wars are caused by warmer air.

Scales was not alone. Earlier in 2011, the French defence specialist Bruno Tertrais penned a demolition of the climate wars thesis in the summer edition of the Washington Quarterly titled, “The Climate Wars Myth”. Tertrais pointed out that, historically, warmer eras have meant fewer wars, since colder climates yield reduced harvests, more famines, and increased predation by humans—as in the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. He employed statistical evidence to demonstrate that, if there was any significant link between warfare and warming, then the number of conflicts should have risen since the 1990s. In 1989, there were thirty-five wars occurring around the globe; yet in 2009, the number had dropped to seventeen. In particular, and despite incidences of prolonged drought and desertification, there has been a decrease in the number of civil wars. Tertrais concluded his survey by observing:

In the modern era, the evolution of the climate is not an essential factor to explain collective violence. Nothing indicates that “water wars” or floods of “climate refugees” are on the horizon. And to claim that climate change may have an impact on security is to state the obvious—but it does not make it meaningful for defense planning.

Other defence and security analysts have closely examined the alleged links between environmental factors and wars in Africa and the Middle East. For example, in 2011, three Norwegian researchers, Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann and Halvard Buhaug from the Centre for Civil War at the Norwegian Peace Research Institute in Oslo, found little evidence of drought-induced military conflicts in Africa. In a tightly researched essay, “Climate Wars: Assessing the Claim that Drought Breeds Conflict”, published in International Security (Winter 2011/12), the three scholars conclude:

Africa constitutes the ideal test bed for the “climate wars” thesis—the most likely setting where a systematic covariance of drought and armed conflict should be observed. That we do not find support for the drought-conflict relationship, then, is all the more damaging for the widely accepted drought-breeds-conflict proposition … There is no direct, short-term relationship between drought and civil war onset, even within contexts presumed most conducive to violence.

Proponents of the climate wars thesis also seem oblivious to the grave legal and moral dangers inherent in their proposition. The idea of wars being caused by climate change, as opposed to political factors, may serve to act as an alibi for war criminals who ignore humanitarian considerations and deliberately use adverse climatic conditions as a cloak to conceal the pursuit of genocide. A classic illustration of this situation is the case of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the murderous Marxist dictator of Ethiopia, who in the mid-1980s exploited drought and famine conditions in the rebel provinces of Tigray and Eritrea to enforce a pogrom masquerading as a relief program of “villagisation”. Thousands were killed. In 2007 Human Rights Watch described Mengistu’s reign of terror as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa”.

Apart from the myth of water wars and the dangers of providing warlords with alibis, further notions of links between extreme weather events and war or rising sea levels and armed conflict are similarly tenuous. The idea that climate change might well induce a conflict between NATO countries and Russia over the Arctic in the years to come—based on the creation of a new Northwest Passage arising from polar melting—remains purely speculative. Similarly, the idea of armed conflict from rising sea levels in the South Pacific and the Asian lowlands of countries such as Bangladesh overlooks the phenomenon that sedimentation from rivers may act to balance sea level mass.

Not surprisingly, in 2012, the US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, admitted that, beyond humanitarian aid and disaster relief missions, it was difficult to view climate change as a major concern of the American military. While the US Defense Department retains an interest in examining its use of energy and in monitoring the security implications of climate change, such concerns remain unrelated to the climate wars hypothesis. In the light of the Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw from the December 2015 Paris Agreement on emissions control, American military interest in climate issues is likely to diminish.

Conclusion

There is no direct causal link between climate variation and the outbreak of armed conflict. For this reason, the significance of climate factors in security analysis continues to lie in their potential interaction with traditional political sources of organised violence. Beyond prudent monitoring of the climate policy debate and maintaining a mission focus on humanitarian aid and disaster relief, it is difficult to view climate change as a future priority for Western security analysts and professional militaries. There is nothing occurring in human affairs today, or in the foreseeable future, to challenge Thucydides’s statement in his History of the Peloponnesian War, that wars stem from the “fear, honour and interest” inherent in the human condition. Nor is Carl von Clausewitz’s philosophy of war as an extension of politics with the admixture of other means in any danger of being superseded by notions of environmental conflict drawn from Anthropocene ideology.

It is both fanciful and impractical to suggest that defence planners and military professionals should dilute their core responsibilities for strategic analysis and operational warfare in favour of a greater concentration on the scientific riddles of the biosphere and the study of ecocide. The main causes of armed conflict today and tomorrow are political in character and have far more to do with malevolent, as opposed to malignant, conceptions of security threat. Despite the vigorous efforts of assorted environmental activists, media savants and catastrophist writers to promote a new belief in climate-induced wars, there is no empirical evidence—or even any convincing emerging trends—to support such a claim. Gaia, the earth goddess, remains an improbable partner, still less a replacement, for the fierce warrior-god Ares.

Ultimately, the notion that climate wars will dominate future armed conflict is at best a hypothesis and at worst a plausible fallacy more akin to a “cli-fi” scenario than to serious defence analysis. In the years ahead, then, it is unlikely that Crutzen will replace Clausewitz in the classrooms of the world’s war colleges and defence academies.