One of the many questionable claims made by climate catastrophists is that climate change causes conflict. See, for example, this report in the Independent, this one from Scientific American or these two articles from the Conversation, all trying to link climate change with violence and war.

A year ago we reported on a talk given in Oxford by Clionadh Raleigh, in which she fairly bluntly took these claims to pieces. Andrew Montford also wrote an article on her talk.

But now the Conversation, normally at the forefront of climate alarmism and exaggeration, has published not just one but two articles acknowledging that there really isn’t a link, only a week apart.

The first is Climate change is not a key cause of conflict, finds new study, which is interesting partly because it is written by Mark Maslin, who is usually one of the most extreme and political of climate scientists, brown-nosing Al Gore in a recent interview. Maslin and a student looked at data on conflict and severe events such as droughts across 10 countries in East Africa over the last 50 years, and found no link. They did find a link between refugees and drought, which Maslin – or perhaps the Conversation editor – labels as climate change in a heading.

The second article, published just a week later is Why blaming conflicts in Africa on climate change is misguided, by Ore Koren of Dartmouth College. He points to this paper in Nature that criticises earlier studies making the climate-conflict link, and says that in his new paper he found that in fact armed groups are most active when food is most plentiful – a point that Raleigh also made in her talk. He didn’t seem to know about Maslin’s article until I wrote deja vu in the comments.

I wonder if this is one climate scare that will now be permanently consigned to the dustbin, or whether it will be exhumed next time there’s an urgent political need to promote climate calamity?