Climate change is fueling extremism, raising tempers along with temperatures.
Since January, a wave of extremist attacks, often involving explosives and firearms, has left more than 60 dead and more than 1,000 wounded. From the United States to France, and from Indonesia to Britain, these assaults have triggered a wave of political and humanitarian crises.
The violence and political tensions that sparked this wave have been exacerbated by the recent spike in global warming. In the United States, for example, the recent rise in temperatures has helped intensify the spread of extreme Islamic State-inspired terror.
But global warming is a complex and poorly understood problem, so it’s important to step back and ask what’s causing it. In recent years, there’s been a surge in efforts to study the relationship between global warming and social conflicts.
The rise of the #resistance
The term “climate change” is not well-known, but if you think about it, the term “climate change” reflects the change in the average weather outside. The word “climate” means air temperature in a single location or within a relatively narrow range of temperatures.
Weather isn’t climate.
But the climate is still a relevant variable in many fields, including science, engineering, and business. There’s a long history of studying weather. In the nineteenth century, meteorologists began to use weather to study climate.
Today, scientists have multiple tools available to them to model the weather: data from a variety of sources—including weather stations, satellites, and aircraft—as well as computer simulations. Data from all these sources are used to estimate the strength and patterns of the global atmosphere, and to evaluate the risk posed by global changes.
But scientists also are beginning to use these tools to ask what influences and changes our climate.
Understanding the science of climate change has always been a challenge for policymakers. The climate is very dynamic. The Earth’s climate “system” is composed