The date for this post is arguably timely - or not, depending on your perspective. 9/11, and, subsequently, Afghanistan and Iraq have cost thousands of lives, caused immeasurable grief and have misallocated untold billions of dollars. But, the reality is climate change looks set to increase such international 'interactions' manifold, as weather and temperature extremes, combined with ever-increasing demands on ever-depleting resources, like fertile soil and clean water, cause regional needs to transform into regional conflicts.

Six months ago a number of high-ranking US Generals released a report that could be summarised thus: "Pay now, or pay later". The Generals urged the Bush administration to make major cuts in greenhouse gases, stating "that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. “The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,” the 35-page report predicted." (US Generals Urge Climate Change Offensive).

While the Bush administration may not be taking these dire warnings seriously, across the Atlantic the British Ministry of Defense is.

The Ministry of Defence has asked climate change experts to identify regions of the world where global warming could spark conflict and security threats.

The Met Office will today announce a £12m research contract with the MoD as part of an effort to map the likely impacts of increased temperatures. The research aims to identify countries where battles could break out over increasingly scarce supplies of food and water, as well as predict the likely conditions in which British troops may have to fight in future.

... The MoD project ... marks a change in emphasis from whether climate change is occurring to what the likely impacts will be and what society should do about them. The environment department, Defra, has pledged £74m to help scientists provide more detailed forecasts of how UK weather is likely to shift over the coming decades. - Guardian

Currently, the most volatile parts of the geopolitical landscape also happen to be among the regions that will be hit soonest, and hardest, by global warming over the coming years. Wealthy nations that are perceived as coordinating/controlling the global economy, will naturally become targets of escalating retaliation.

Let's hope that the most determined war we see being waged in the next few years is against our own attitudes on lifestyle, our economic colonisation and the commodification and subsidised corporate extraction of natural resources. Global warming can be beaten. Wars like those we witness today in Iraq cannot.

Let there not be another 9/11.

Further Reading:

• Global Warming is On the Warpath