"Climate change increases the likelihood of war and terrorism," President Obama said earlier this summer. The Pentagon and a distinguished committee of retired generals and admirals both produced reports earlier this year highlighting the accelerating risks of climate change to US national security. A recent Showtime series on climate change had Tom Friedman linking climate change to political instability in the Middle East.

But what is the basis of these claims? Do we have good evidence to support the connection between climate, conflict, and war? Not really.

For a start, there has been a spirited debate among researchers about the links between climate and violent conflict with a significant number of studies showing weak, non-existent, and even negative correlations between climate stress and conflict. For example, one set of researchers finds strong statistical links between higher temperatures and conflict in Africa between 1981 and 2002, and predict a 50% increase in conflict as a result of global warming. Others find weak or no relationships between temperatures, rainfall and conflict in parts of Africa, pointing out that other factors - such as poverty and poor governance - are much more important and that since 2002, conflict has decreased while climate hazards have become worse.

Another problem with many of the climate conflict studies is that they - or those that read them - confuse correlation with causation and make fundamental errors in the way they deal with space and time. And there is also the challenge of scale where a strong relationship at one scale of aggregation disappears when analyzed at another even though the individual data points are the same.

Some studies correlate country level data without controlling for the size of the country or its population, and find it difficult to account for how past conflicts and histories strongly influence the present. Even those that try to compensate for the varying size of countries by using an even grid struggle with the lack of geographically detailed data on climate, conflict and other factors.

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