Of Mideast Revolts and Global Warming

Published: April 26th, 2011

By Keith Kloor

Several months ago, amidst the popular uprising in Egypt that ousted the former authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak, there was much heated discussion about how climate change fit into the picture. Some in the climate community were quick to assert that the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt could be traced in part to rising food prices, which was triggered in part from severe weather that had reduced agricultural yields — weather itself triggered in part by rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Among the most prominent commentators who made this causal argument was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote that, "what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world."

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and climate policy expert at the University of Colorado, was scornful of this view:

Paul Krugman joins the crowd who think that they can see the signal of greenhouse emissions in noisy, short-term data on food prices, and then construct a chain of causality to the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. Such tenuous claims of attribution have about as much scientific standing as Pat Robertson saying that Hurricane Katrina was the result of the vengeful wrath of God.

That may be so, but scholars who study the nexus between environmental stresses, climate change, and national security feel there are important avenues of inquiry to pursue here. For example, in a recent paper in a journal published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo ask:

Was climate change one of the causes of the wave of popular protests and uprisings that has swept the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East since January? At first blush, the question looks absurd. Surely myriad long-and-short-term social, economic, political and religious drivers of anger and dissent are the obvious causes.

But in fact the recent events offer a textbook example of what analysts mean when they talk of complex causality and the role of climate change as a 'threat multiplier.' The wave of protests, feeding on one another, might have broken at any time over the last few decades. Why did it happen now? Many different sets of events and circumstances might have been sufficient to set it off. Any particular set would have been unnecessary, since another could have sufficed. But in the chain of events that did lead to today's revolutions, climate change played a necessary role, even if it was obviously an insufficient trigger on its own.

Before I go any further, I should say that I'm someone who finds it difficult to separate out the multiple factors that have contributed to the recent wave of revolutions and protests rocking the Arab world. I wrote several posts (see here and here) at my home site that were critical of those who I felt were unduly highlighting global warming as a factor.

That causation relies greatly on the equation that Johnstone and Mazo make in their essay. They argue:

A proximate factor behind the unrest was a spike in global crises, which in turn was due in part to the extreme weather throughout the globe over the past year. This was not enough to trigger regime change — we have seen food price spikes and food riots before — but it was a necessary part of this particular mix.

But just how "necessary" seems worth asking. To be fair, the authors discuss other factors, such as conversion of cropland to biofuels, that undermines the primacy of the climate change/rising food price equation. However, make no mistake: food security is definitely part of the mix. I'm currently making my way through a newly published book called, Climate Change and National Security: A Country-Level Analysis. There's a chapter on Egypt that obviously was written before the recent events unfolded in that country. Here's an eye-catching passage:

The most immediate climate-related peril in Egypt would be a continuation of high and unstable food prices, like those experienced in 2008. Such conditions have a demonstrated capacity to cause serious social unrest.

Additionally, the May/June issue of Foreign Policy magazine takes up the food security issue in full, with numerous related articles, including a feature story by Lester Brown, who writes that, "as land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging."

The driving forces responsible for increasing food scarcity are well worth examining, and Brown's article is deserving of a discussion in of itself. But in this post I'm staying focused on the point of Johnstone's and Mazo's essay, which makes a case for a relevant connection between global warming and Egypt's uprising.

Again, though, I have to ask, how does one measure climate change as a driver of political unrest, especially in Egypt's case? On that question, a regular reader of mine who works in the intelligence community, offered this perspective in a comment thread from a few months ago:

First of all, determining causality is rarely clear-cut and there is always the tendency to fill the cup of causality with the wine of our own beliefs, predilections and biases. Additionally, while we can rarely determine causes for these events with a high degree of precision, we can make reasonable general conclusions.

In this case an obvious question to ask is: In the absence of climate change, would this revolution have occurred? I tend to think it likely would have simply because the proximate causes of demographics, Egyptian state policy, US policy, the nature of the Egyptian regime, communication technology, regional history, etc. are much bigger and more clearly related to the actual event. That doesn’t mean that climate change is irrelevant, but I think it is crowded out by other factors to such an extent that it becomes a minor factor.

That said, I think there will be growing debate over the food security/global warming/geopolitics nexus. As Brown poses in his Foreign Policy piece, "What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it?"

Interestingly, while most analysts and pundits are focused on the destabilizing impacts of the food security issue, especially at it relates to climate change, Johnstone and Mazo see an upside. Near the end of their essay, they argue that, "to the extent it may have contributed to the flowering of democracy and departure of despots in the Arab world, the potential of climate change to foster unrest need not always be a bad thing."

It's not everyday you hear scholars talking up the unintentional benefits of global warming.

Posted in Climate, Extremes, Food & Agriculture, Policy, Society, International, Frontier Earth

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Comments

By Gaythia Weis
on April 27th, 2011

I think that water is a key issue that needs to be added to the mix of the “nexus” of issues above. Water issues are likely to be made worse by global climate change if changes in this region increase evaporation without increasing precipitation. Only the oil rich Mideastern countries are, and will be likely to be able to use desalinization plants to provide water.

Yemen is perhaps the most extreme example:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/17/us-yemen-water-idUSTRE61G21P20100217

“Nature cannot recharge ground water to keep pace with demand from a population of 23 million expected to double in 20 years. ” ... “Millions of thirsty Yemenis may eventually have to abandon Sanaa and other mountain cities for the coastal plain. “Water refugees” may try to migrate to nearby Gulf states or Europe.”

By Jack Hughes (New Zealand)
on April 27th, 2011

I’m getting the hang of climate science now:

Step 1. Wait for something to happen.

Step 2. Blame it on “climate change”.

Rinse and repeat.

By Paul Brown, PhD (Morgantown, WV 26501)
on April 28th, 2011

Nonsense, Jack Hughes. Clearly nothing will convince you - apparently not the scientists, whose extensive and dedicated work you don’t read - so there’s no point arguing with you. Keep listening to the nonsensical deniers and their bogus science. For those who would like a little dose of legitimate science, here’s what we face.
An even more overlooked problem is overpopulation (defined as living unsustainably, whether due to a high number of people at a low level of consumption or a smaller number of people at a high level of consumption - basic human ecology). In most or all of the Arab countries undergoing civil unrest, unemployment is rampant due to a rapidly expanding number of people flooding the job market. Also, the fraction of the population that are children is enormous, meaning the problem will get worse very soon. Expect more countries to undergo this process, continued unrest, failed states, wars, and terrorism. Smaller families would have prevented this a generation ago.
Now it will take 1 - 2 generations at one child per family just to stop growth, and a century or two to bring population down to a sustainable level. We don’t have that much time before we hit the wall of climate change, inadequate resources, and mass extinction. That’s true worldwide: we need smaller families everywhere, and drastically reduced consumption in developed countries. Since that won’t happen, expect collapse of modern civilization.
In principle collapse could be “graceful,” with preservation of knowledge and diversity and an orderly retreat to agrarian, nomadic, and hunter-gatherer societies as humanitarian calamities rapidly lower population and consumption through natural disasters, disease, and famine that we will be powerless to prevent or adapt to.
Graceful collapses have happened before, but the odds are against it now for two reasons. First, languages and cultural knowledge are already being lost at a rapid rate as cultures go under. Second, the powerful will try to maintain their own well being by force, leading to more unrest, wars, terrorism, and possible nuclear holocaust.
Ungraceful (“graceless?”) collapse would probably mean the end of our species, and millions of years for the world’s ecology to rebuild after the mass extinction - if climate change doesn’t sterilize the planet.

By Alex Veloria (Ayer, MA/01432)
on April 28th, 2011

Paul,

Although I agree with you, and disagree with Jack, I see no actual difference in the end result of both opinion (Jack’s) and analysis (yours).

Jack doesn’t understand climate change and implicitly will do nothing to avert any future climate change. Your analysis is informative and, to me, spot on, but also concludes that there is not much we can do at this point.

As a frequent reader of Climate Progress, I also don’t see how we can avert the worst of climate change and continue to read articles that may offer any glimmer of hope. I have yet to read any hopeful articles.

I am no scientist but a father to two beautiful kids that will be growing up in a world that seems to worse by the month.

Regards,

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