In a world of declining resources war is likely to be ever more common. Climate change will increase competition for these resources in new areas, most obviously the Arctic. With the sea ice melting the resources that have previously been inaccessible under the ice are now becoming potentially exploitable. This is creating a dash to claim territory in much the same way that there was a scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century there is now a scramble for the Arctic. With boundaries that are under the sea that are contested there is an obvious potential for conflict should one player start drilling to take advantage of all that wealth. The dangers of this are currently being shown by the objections that Argentina are throwing at Britain for its drilling off the Falkland islands and the British claim is considerably stronger than anyone’s claim would be in a conflict in the arctic.

The idea of resource wars has been around for some time. Because of a free market wars should never be about resources as resources are no longer a zero sum game – the place that mines them will not automatically take the resources for itself. This is what Japan learnt after world war II when it found that it could be a great economic power even without controlling all the necessary resources.

Inequality, or the belief that one country is being treated unfairly has in the past lead to conflicts. Climate change is likely to his some nations more than others. Unfortunately it is likely to hit the poor developing world that has much less to do with the emissions in the first place. This would seem to be doubly unequal as the West creates the problem and then does not suffer the consequences.

It is such feelings of inequality and being badly treated that lead to World War II in Europe. A fair peace at Versailles in 1918 would not have punished Germany and not created the revisionist attitudes in German people that found expression in far right ideologies that lead to war.

Many borders are demarcated by natural features; the tops of mountain ranges, rivers and lakes. This makes perfect sense as there is much less need to keep a close watch over a border which is a ridge of mountains as very few people will come that way into the country. However this can cause potential problems if these natural features start to change as they may well do with climate change. While mountain ranges are likely to remain the same (although there are worries that malting permafrost may mean that some mountains do to some extent fall down) but in areas where glaciers mark a boundary there may be problems. The best known such boundary is the Siachen glacier on the India Pakistan Border that has been a hot spot for decades. Changes in the glacier could have very real consequences for the border and for creating a new conflict.

Just as worrying is the potential for rivers changing their course. Changes in the amounts of rain and the intensity of rain along with the melting of glaciers that feed the rivers could well mean that rivers burst their banks and change their course. A great many rivers mark international boundaries however rivers can and do move, what happens if they do, does the boundary move with it? This would mean that a country loses out. Even if a moving river does not lead to either country trying to change the boundary it would potentially cause problems with communications and trade as rivers often carry a lot of traffic, where you could previously stay within one country you now sail into a different one with tall the hassle that entails. While small course changes may cause problems rivers can sometimes quite dramatically change their course. The most obvious is the Yellow river that until the 1853 flowed into the yellow sea south of the Shandong peninsula however it now flows north of the peninsula into the Bohai Sea.

It is very unlikely that there will ever be a war where climate change is the sole factor in causing the start of that war. Most wars have many different causes that contribute to hostilities. Climate change will therefore at most be an aggravating factor that would otherwise still be a conflict waiting to happen.

Major large scale armed conflict is a thing of the past. Instead we now fight insurgency wars not big battles between nations. Nations instead work out their differences through diplomacy, sanctions and the UN. The 21st century will see a declining number of wars because we all know how costly any major war would be.

*in spite of the above we do seem to be gearing up for resource showdowns in the newly accessible Arctic--or at least the US definitely is, and perhaps Russia and China, to judge from the Christian Science Monitor article this week (linked from the parent wave to this one). To me, this seems the ultimate in fiddling while Rome burns, while Americans haven't yet suffered as much as the Sub-Saharan African countries, or for that matter Australia. Why not seize upon the patent senselessness of this course of action to consciously turn away from such courses, and instead utilize all means to secure international cooperation in providing a thirty-year effort to relocating the most vulnerable to safe latitudes and building sustainable infrastructures?

For those who argue that this isn't human nature, I suggest that human nature has at most another century to survive. After that, those who have managed to hang on will number only at most a billion and will likely face a 100,000 year epoch of hostile climate, if theorists such as James Lovelock are correct (and the geological record supports this last point). Knowing this, will the leaders among our grandchildren put faith on a course of warfare among the reduced remnant of humanity, our gene pool and legacy?

For the thinking human, this climate catastrophe represents both a chance for an intelligent peace and a ticket to continued human evolution.

Economic & hence Social change eg: Climate change is likely to cause native crops to fail or become less available & be generally disruptive to countries, weakening some to outside attack & driving the need of some to aquire valuable farming land.

There are plenty of reasons for countries to turn on each other , these reasons are known and bickering is heard on them. The reason that the squabbles and conflicts between countries do not translate to war are:

1)Diplomatic ties,diplomacy.international trade thus. (this is why sanctions largely work as a 'time-out' mechanism)

2)Organizations spearheaded by the United Nations which was formulated to deter the possibility of a third world war.

3) Monetary/financial constraints: Wars are expensive and in our zeitgeist(ahead/void of colonization and other take-overs) nobody wins them.

Some disputes will actually be solved by climate change. Islands are the most obvious example. Throughout the world there are a lot of very small uninhabited islands that are the source of maritime idsputes between nations. Many of these are just tiny lumps of rock in the middle of the sea such as the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea that are disputed between China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. It is possible that these islands that are disputed will start to dissapear so solving the problem! This is what has happened to an island that was the centre of a border dispute between Bangladesh and India.^[1]

1. ^ Joshua Keating, Another problem solved by global warming, Foreign Policy, 24/3/10, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/24/another_problem_solved_by_global_warming