As the East Coast of the United States was pounded by a
hurricane over the weekend, mere days after an earthquake had
cracked monuments and upset lawn furniture from Virginia Beach
to Baltimore, Mother Nature was once again front-page news
across the country. So it was fortuitous that last week's issue
of the scientific journal Nature included a much-talked-about
article linking the wrath of nature to the wrath of man.
"Climate Shifts Cause War" and "First Proof that Climate Is a
Trigger for Conflict," the headlines suggested. In the paper,
Princeton University researcher Solomon Hsiang and colleagues
argue -- as paraphrased by a Nature news article -- that
"tropical countries face double the risk of armed conflict and
civil war breaking out during warm, dry El Niño years than
during the cooler La Niña phase." El Niño and La Niña
(collectively known as ENSO, for the El Niño Southern
Oscillation) are the warm and cool parts of the variation in
temperatures that occurs every few years in the Pacific Ocean.
In d