Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate外文电子书籍.pdfVIP

LETTER doi:10.1038/nature10311 Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate 1 1 2 Solomon M. Hsiang {, Kyle C. Meng Mark A. Cane It has been proposed that changes in global climate have been define annual conflict risk (ACR) in a collection of countries to be responsible for episodes of widespread violence and even the the probability that a randomly selected country in the set experiences collapse of civilizations1,2. Yet previous studies have not shown that conflict onset in a given year. Importantly, this ACR measure removes violence can be attributed to the global climate, only that random trends due to the growing number of countries18 (Supplementary Fig. 1). weather events might be correlated with conflict in some cases3–7. In an impossible but ideal experiment, we would observe two ident- Here we directly associate planetary-scale climate changes with ical Earths, change the global climate of one and observe whether ACR global patterns of civil conflict by examining the dominant inter- in the two Earths diverged. In practice, we can approximate this experi- annual mode of the modern climate8–10 ˜ , the El Nino/Southern ment if the one Earth that we do observe randomly shifts back and Oscillation (ENSO). Historians have argued that ENSO may have forth between two different climate states. Such a quasi-experiment is driven global patterns of civil conflict in the distant past11–13, a ongoing and is characterized by rapid shifts in t