A telephone survey of more than 1,000 people released today showed that 40 percent of Australians thought that global warming was a greater threat to security than Islamic fundamentalism. Only 20 percent thought it was less serious.

“It is very interesting to see how climate change has moved from the environmental field to the security sphere,” said Alan Dupont, who heads the United States Studies Center, based at the University of Sydney, referring to the report released today. “Most of the government response has been about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than trying to manage the effects of the change.”

The survey came a day after the government’s most senior scientific body said that rising temperatures and reduced rainfall were inevitable in Australia.

On Tuesday, Australia’s most influential scientific research body, the government-financed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, released a report that said a temperature rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit was likely by 2030, along with many more days with temperatures of over 95 degrees and reduced rainfall across much of southern Australia, already the driest part of the driest inhabited continent.

“The message is that global warming is real, humans are very likely to be causing it and that it is very likely that there will be changes in the global climate system in the centuries to come larger than those seen in the recent past,” the report said.

From a report in today’s New York Times…

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Discover Magazine Newsletter links to this article about a study conducted by Hong Kong University Earth scientist David Zhang and colleagues. Zhang’s study of more than 900 years of conflict in eastern China has tested the hypothesis that cold spells fuel the social instability that leads to war.

They consulted a multivolume compendium, The Tabulation of Wars in Ancient China, which records wars in China between 800 B.C. and A.D. 1911. They focused on the 899 wars that took place between the years 1000 and 1911 in densely populated eastern China.

Zhang and his colleagues identified six major cycles of warm and cold phases from 1000 to 1911. The team then tabulated the frequency of wars and grouped them into three classes: very high (more than 30 wars per decade), high (15 to 30 wars per decade), and low (fewer than 15 wars per decade.) All four decades of “very high” warfare, as well as most periods of “high” conflict, coincided with cold phases.

‘Zhang believes his work has relevance for a warming world. Global temperatures are expected to rise faster and faster in the future, and our expanded population may be unable to adapt to the ecological changes. “Animals can adapt to climate change, mainly by relying on migration, depopulation—which consists of starvation and cannibalism—and dietary change,” he explains. “Human beings have more adaptive choices and social mechanisms, such as birth control, trade, and scientific innovation. Some of these social mechanisms are good for humanity, and some are bad, such as war. The war is just like the cannibalism of animals.” ‘

We made mention of the potential for climate change and conflict in an earlier post…

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