It would be easy to dismiss the report issued this week by a group of eleven Generals concerned about global warming as a hypothetical scenario written by strategists with too much time on their hands. But the fact is it’s already happening. The genocide in Darfur is not about primitive people who’ve hated each other for hundreds of years. It’s about something much simpler: food and water. Scott Anderson explained this a few years back in what is one of the best pieces about Darfur:

Among the few things that the various antagonists in the Darfur crisis agree on is the conflict's root cause: cataclysmic droughts that have afflicted a vast stretch of northern and eastern Africa since the 1980's. Drought has strained the relationships that existed among the various tribes in the region and, most acutely, the relationships between its farming and nomadic communities… With everyone in increasing competition for the same shrinking pool of natural resources - water, grassland, arable soil - conflicts increased.

Essentially, the Junjaweed who have been razing villages and murdering thousands are nomads who are now fighting with local farmers for a shrinking supply of land and water. This is a hugely important point because too often the international community blames genocide on ancient rivalries and hatreds that go so far back they cannot be stopped by outside forces. It essentially acts as a convenient excuse for doing nothing while thousands are slaughtered. The reality is that in most cases of genocide and sectarian violence there are multiple ethnic groups living near each other. They may have long standing rivalries, but there is often an outside factor that sets off the violence. In Iraq it is a lack of any security that has caused people to revert to the lowest common denominator – ethnicity. In Darfur it is a question of food and water.

Sadly, we are likely to see more of these conflicts as the poorest countries in the world, those near the equator, suffer the harshest consequences of Global Warming. See more in the Atlantic (Subscription only) or in a recent UN report.