Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics 282: Temper and temperature: the missing link of climate on armed conflicts

We investigate the causes of a conflict by adding ambient climate factors to the existing bundle of most significant variables. It turns out that – controlling for possible associations – temperature could actually induce a conflict. We emphasize that temperature could not be a dominant reason in starting a conflict; however, it could escalate the chances when other factors are present. This paper references some of the related psychological studies to support this claim. We also show that grievance factors could actually be rightfully effective in starting an internal conflict alongside greed based reasons. In the end, we believe that it could be informative to study ambient factors more often in economics.