This article (written in backlash to some recent high profile claims of conflicts caused by climate change) suggests that blaming climate for human conflicts is nothing new:
It’s that they promote a kind of climate reductionism, one
that carries echoes of the deterministic theories that were
once popular during the second half of the 19th century.
Consider, for instance, John William Draper’s History of
the American Civil War, published in 1867. Draper, who
served as president of the medical college of New York
University from 1850 to 1873, was a professor of chemistry
and an architect of the so-called “conflict model” of
science and religion, bringing a scientist’s eye to his
task. On the very first page of his book, he announced “the
great truth that societies advance in a preordained and
inevitable course” guided by “uncontrollable causes.” Chief
among these was the climate.
