ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we look at perspectives that allow us to tie together the broad set of phenomena that come together under the “global warming” umbrella, violence and crime. In a sense, this chapter is out of place: Because crime is at the back end of all of our models of global warming, this discussion should be toward the end of the paper. The essential causality of the model, in simplest form, is four stages: first, we must understand global warming; second, we look at the way in which planetary phenomena such as the hydrological cycles are negatively affected by global warming; then third, we look at the direct impacts on human ecologies; and fourth and finally, we look at how those changes might be associated with violence and crime. However, we believed that it was important to locate the models earlier and then throughout the book show how different aspects of violence and crime are sensible through the lens of these models. This reordering is for several reasons. First, the realist causalitywhat actually will likely occur-will be muchmore reciprocal and nonlinear than portrayed by a standard recursive model (HomerDixon, 2006) and will play out at very different speeds in different settings. Second, violence associated with climate change is already upon us, as shown by the excellent work on global warming by Parenti (2011). Third, the processes brought to bear by climate change are already in play; for example, extended droughts across the American High Plains will intensify water shortages already in play from overuse of the Ogallala aquifer; similarly, problems of mass migration to urban areas, organized crime, and violence are already substantial; climate change will simply make them much worse. Consequently, the models we use are models that depict real-world phenomena already in play and of which global warming is an added (though substantial) factor, and they are ones that already are in use to explain violence and crime.
