A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article's underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggest that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.
Buhaug, Halvard; Jonas Vestby; Thomas Bernauer; Tobias Böhmelt; Michael Brzoska; Joshua W. Busby; Antonio Ciccone; Hanne Fjelde; Erik Gartzke; Nils Petter Gleditsch; Jack A. Goldstone; Håvard Hegre; Helge Holtermann; Vally Koubi; Jasmin S. A. Link; Peter Michael Link; Päivi Lujala; John O'Loughlin; Clionadh Raleigh; Jürgen Scheffran; Janpeter Schilling; Todd G. Smith; Ole Magnus Theisen; Richard S. J. Tol; Henrik Urdal & Nina von Uexkull (2014) One effect to rule them all? A comment on climate and conflict, Climatic Change 127 (3): 391–397.
