"Last week, various news outlets were publishing all sorts of dire headlines about climate change and war.

...

The occasion? A big new study published in the journal Science, led by Princeton’s Solomon Hsiang and Berkeley’s Marshall Burke, which examined the link between higher temperatures and violence. After analyzing 60 previous studies on the topic, the paper found “strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world.”

So does that mean that climate change will make war more common in the decades ahead? Actually, despite all the alarming headlines, that’s not so clear. Researchers who work in this field say that this is a complicated subject, and there’s not really a straightforward answer here."

Brad Plumer reports for the Washington Post's Wonkblog August 5, 2013. [2]