Climate change ‘fanning conflict, terror’

Global warming could exacerbate the world’s rich-poor divide and help to radicalise populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said today.

“We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence,” Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London conference on “Climate Change: the Global Security Impact”.

“Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around.”
John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain’s Met Office, said al-Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,” al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 “letter to the American people”.

Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, said any attempt by countries to build fortress walls to keep out climate change refugees – what he called the “barbarians at the gate” mentality – was doomed to fail.

News.com.au