Most conflicts have their profiteers – the black market traders exploiting shortages and arms dealers who play both sides for personal gain. If the latter don't actually create conflict by flooding a region with weapons, they'll readily perpetuate existing conflicts.
History's most famous profiteer is probably the fictional, archetypal American capitalist Milo Minderbender, from Joseph Heller's acidic satire on world war two, Catch-22. He strikes deals with the Germans and, in search of financial return, organises for his own airbase and comrades to be bombed.
In a twisted parallel to Minderbender's amoral machinations, the UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict.
Rather than being flooded by military hardware, when water deluged swaths of England last month, years of ideologically driven policy on austerity was seemingly ditched when the prime minister, David Cameron, declared: "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed, we will spend it." He went beyond his own environment secretary in linking the floods to climate change.
http://www.weather.com/news/california-drought-desperate-farmers-turn-water-witches-help-20140303
Winter Storm Titan may have dumped record snow and rain on California, but the much-needed precipitation still hasn't fully eased the state's worst drought on record. And with water at a premium, California's farmers have been hit particularly hard by measures aimed at conserving what little water the state has remaining.
So farmers are turning to an unusual, some might say, mystical, resource to help find any water lost to the naked eye: dowsers, also known as water witches.Practitioners of dowsing use rudimentary tools - usually copper sticks or wooden "divining rods" that resemble large wishbones - and what they describe as a natural energy to find water or minerals hidden deep underground.
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