The idea that climate change will lead to war is often raised by environmental pessimists, and a meeting on the climatic past of South-East Asia, held last month in Dalat, Vietnam, suggests it is not such an unlikely thought. The meeting was organised by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, some of whose researchers have been trying to reconstruct the pattern of South-East Asia's monsoons over the past few centuries. One matter they raised was the possibility that two periods of conflict in the area, in the 15th and 18th centuries, were provoked by droughts.rnHistorical records of the climate in Asia are lamentable outside India, where the weather-obsessed British collected good data during the 19th and 20th centuries. The observatory's researchers had therefore to rely on tree rings.
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