Greg Austin wrote this piece for his weekly column in New Europe

Three facts are staring us in the face about certain communities around the world: more people in poverty; rising and large numbers of unemployed youth; and an increasing absolute population (increasing the demand for resources). This is a recipe for violent unrest even in ordinary times. Just this week, the FAO reported that there are now “more hungry people in the world than at any time since 1970”. The report said that 1.02 billion people (ordinary people) are living “hungry”. This has been a decade-long trend and is not merely the result of the financial crisis this past year. In 2009, the ILO has reported that in the previous year, the number of unemployed youth globally reached 76 million. The report grimly stated that “little progress has been made in improving the position of youth in labour markets, and young people still suffer disproportionately from a deficit of decent work opportunities”.

The absolute growth in population at the global level has long been expected and widely discussed. The youth bulge within this population growth has also been discussed regularly. There has been however a hitherto unshakeable faith among many in the idea of “progress’, especially the belief that economic growth and technological advance would ultimately reduce poverty and provide jobs for most of the expected population growth.

Climate change is a threat to this basic hope for progress.

Take the tropics for the example. These are the hottest places on earth. In tropical deserts, daytime temperatures can reach 50°C. In inhabited fringe grassland areas, as in Darfur, temperatures can reach 48°C. Add even a fraction of one degree under global warming, and you have some severe obstacles to continued habitation in the most marginal regions.

But please note, the reported temperature for any location is air temperature, not ground temperature, which can be as much as 15 to 20 degrees hotter.

According to the UN Panel, warming during the past 100 years was 0.74°C, with most of the warming occurring in the past 50 years. The warming for the next 20 years is projected to be 0.2°C per decade. Those figures are global averages. The actual increase in some locations will be higher.

About 40 per cent of the world’s population lives in tropical zones. The eruption of piracy and terrorism in tropical zones, places like Somalia and Indonesia, cannot be separated from emerging climate stress. The warming of concern for these zones is not the distant future but the recent past and immediate future.

With more global warming, human communities in marginal areas like these will be forced to migrate, first in small numbers and then en masse.

The political effects of climate change, especially fear-based effects, are moving ahead of the reality of climate change. This has both positive and negative features. On the positive side, a number of concerned parties are mobilizing well ahead of the most severe likely changes to do whatever is possible now to slow the rate of increase in global warming.

On the negative side, there are those who are reacting to the threat of climate change to attempt to alter political calculations about a number of un-related issues. Many commercial contractors are playing up climate security threats to win new business.

Even more serious, we already see the first signs of “climate extremism”, people taking direct action and using violence to protest against or punish those they see as responsible for an imminent environmental catastrophe. This is just one indicator that the most serious forms of terrorism within the next decade may well be linked to popular perceptions of inaction by world governments and industry in the face of this feared environmental catastrophe.

The “time has come”, as Midnight Oil’s song so stridently warns, to prepare for “45 degrees”. The hottest places on earth, already experiencing day-time temperatures over 45 degrees, will get hotter. And young unemployed and hungry people from the tropical zones and elsewhere will revolt – violently and in larger numbers each year. To paraphrase the song, “How do they sleep when their beds are burning?”