Concealing agreements over climate-conflict results.

Do short-term climatic changes increase civil war risk? This question has been subject to much scientific debate, prompted by a pair of PNAS studies that reached different conclusions (1, 2). Now, another paper (3), authored by colleagues of the first study, seeks to reconcile this debate by claiming that the results from the second study are consistent with the first. Hsiang and Meng are gifted scholars whose advice is worth considering. Unfortunately, their latest contribution (3) misses the opportunity to reconcile disagreements—and acknowledge existing agreements—by not addressing the fundamental issue of the debate: the robustness of empirical findings on the climate–conflict relationship. A recap of Hsiang and Meng and the aforementioned studies by Burke et al. (1) and Buhaug (2) is instructive: