Wars and Water...

Global droughts, April 27, 2016. From the Global Drought Information System.

Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases

This is an often-correlated topic, even the Pentagon has warned Congress about it. Clausewitz said: "war is the extension of politics by other means," but it's also essentially a contest for resources, and it always has been. I recall my senior year my AFROTC instructor saying the primary duty of the officer was "the management of violence." That sounds kind of dark, but it's essentially the gist of it, despite your service branch or specialty. This article in Science Blogs caught my eye, as it tracks droughts across the globe in places where poverty, desperation and terrorism go hand-in-hand. Part of the responsibility of our elected officials should be the management of violence to keep it at a minimum (kind of a practical "fighting them over there" to borrow the jingoism), not sophomoric stunts with snowballs on the senate chamber floor.

Again, we have no solar sails, star ships nor extra habitable planets close by to escape to.

Populations around the world face many severe water challenges, from scarcity to contamination, from political or violent conflict to economic disruption. As populations and economies grow, peak water pressures on existing renewable water resources also tend to grow up to the point that natural scarcity begins to constrain the options of water planners and managers. At this point, the effects of natural fluctuations in water availability in the form of extreme weather events become even more potentially disruptive than normal. In particular, droughts begin to bite deeply into human well-being.

This has been a bad few years for people exposed to droughts around the world. Even normally occurring droughts have begun to be made more severe by rising global temperatures and climate changes. A particularly severe El Niño has played an important role: droughts are typically more widespread and severe than normal during El Niño years. Indeed, precipitation variability on land is strongly controlled by the characteristics of El Niño events.

Science Blogs: Global Droughts: A Bad Year, Peter Gleick

Related links:

The Water Wars, Cameron Stracher
War and Water, Rhett B. Larson
Water and War, Steven Lonergan
Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war, Suzanne Goldenberg