Examining the seventeenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
As is the case with the last two lectures, this one also focuses on climate and conflict. It starts with a paper by Hsiang, Burke and Miguel (a different paper than the one in the last lecture by the same authors). This paper is not a single test, but a survey of 60 different papers from 1994-2013. There are 15 that look at interpersonal conflict and climate (usually temperature compared to crime), 30 that look at intergroup conflict and climate (often rain or temperature compared to civil conflict), and 15 that look at “institutional breakdown and population collapse” and climate. All these are listed in slides 3-8.
The discussion after that goes into considerable depth (and is certainly worth perusing), but the conclusion on slide 25 is “HBM seem to present a pretty impressive accumulation of evidence associating higher temperatures with more conflict….” (my bolding)
And he notes: “The authors admit that there is not a lot of research spelling out plausible mechanism that might explain why higher temperatures are associated with more violence.”
I will stop here and pick this up tomorrow. Starting on slide 26, he then reviews a group of authors who are critical of the findings of Hsiang, Burke and Miguel.
The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2017.pdf
