+Disasters | August 24, 2011

Does El Nino—and Climate Change—Really Cause Civil Wars?

By Bryan Walsh

For several years now, a few academics have been fighting a civil war over the possible effects of climate and global warming on, well, civil war. In 2009 Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper arguing that higher temperatures increased the risk of civil conflict—and that the warming predicted by [...]

+Disasters | September 8, 2010

Climate Change: Does Warming Help Cause Civil Wars?

By Bryan Walsh

Say this about Marshall Burke and Halvard Buhaug—they know how to title their papers. Late last year Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled “Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” which sums up the argument pretty well. Then [...]