A Quote by Steven Pinker
Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
Related Quotes
One of the drivers of displacement and potential conflict over the next 10 to 20 years will be climate (change) - resource scarcity, climate change is going to compound the cocktail that's driving war and displacement.
Many scales of climate change are in fact natural, from the slow tectonic scale, to the fast changes embedded within glacial and interglacial times, to the even more dramatic changes that characterize a switch from glacial to interglacial. So why worry about global warming, which is just one more scale of climate change? The problem is that global warming is essentially off the scale of normal in two ways: the rate at which this climate change is taking place, and how different the "new" climate is compared to what came before.
A refugee in the traditional vision is someone who flees from country to another because of persecution or conflict. But what we're witnessing now more and more is a certain number of mega-trends interacting with one another: population growth, urbanization, food insecurity, water scarcity, climate change, and conflict.
I think the challenge of climate change in particular is the challenge for us to create and produce new norms for a new kind of world. And that's why I think as important as the issue of climate change is, it's even more important than it seems because if we can't evolve very quickly, new norms to deal with issues like climate change, we're not going to be able to survive in the kind of world we've created. So I think, really, the whole nature of democracy, of governance, of global community and of solving the kinds of problems of the 21st Century are really at stake.
Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land, and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself.
Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change.
There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all—human beings. . . . [An] increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.
The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.
Climate change brings pressures that will influence resource competition between nations and place additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the globe. These effects are threat multipliers.
Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.
Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.
The bottom line is that the impacts of climate change can exacerbate resource competition, threaten livelihoods, and increase the risk of instability and conflict, especially in places already undergoing economic, political, and social stress.
I am persuaded to think that any climate change is bad because of the investments and adaptations that have been made by human beings and all of the things that support human existence upon this globe. Even minor fluctuations of climate could change the distribution of fish, … upset agriculture,…and inundate costal cities…… Such changes could occur at a faster rate perhaps than human society can evolve.
But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet.
Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale.
Libertarians believe that any government interference is bad. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. Their ideology is so strongly held that, remarkably, it's overcoming the facts.
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