The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

But for the military, climate change is not just a matter of great-power rivalry executed across a transformed map. Even for those in the American military who expect the country’s hegemony to endure indefinitely, climate change presents a problem, because being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. And it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming—a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began to accelerate when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil. From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster. According to one assessment, thirty-two countries—from Haiti to the Philippines and India to Cambodia, each heavily dependent on farming and agriculture—face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest from climate disruptions over the next thirty years.