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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

>Look at North Africa and the Middle East... so much of the conflict now is driven at least in part by climate change.

I haven't seen this claim made before, do you have any links to read more? I was under the impression that nearly all of the conflict is driven by things like terrible government structures and ideological extremism (e.g. ISIS).

>Climate change isn't just sea levels rising, it's changing climates; some places with desert will green, some green places will turn to desert.

Right, but that's why I pointed out that countries with advanced agriculture technologies wouldn't be impacted nearly as hard and those are the same countries with the means to geo-engineer.

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There's been a number of pieces that bread prices, or water, can be indicators of likely conflict. It's also revealing that so many regimes subsidise wheat prices.

Try this [0] Mother Jones piece on "Bread Prices, A Measure of Political Stability", or one from the Conversation [1].

There was a BBC documentary of 10 years ago. I can't remember the title so haven't found a web link.

[0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/climate-change-f...

[1] http://theconversation.com/food-security-how-drought-and-ris...

> I haven't seen this claim made before, do you have any links to read more?

Here you go. Tl;dr: Syria had a longterm drought before the conflict started, leading to rising food prices and about one million Syrians without livelihood by 2011.

https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-chan...

Syrian Civil War was very much driven by climate.

Essentially a portion of agriculture failed due to drought and a lot of the population fled to the central city, setting off fighting.

You are correct there's a world food surplus so mostly countries with large farming populations would be impacted.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/a-major-contributor...

Have a look at http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241

"Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought"

>Abstract

>Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.

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