Arguments
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
“Drought, water, war, and climate change” is the title of this month’s Yale Climate Connections video exploring expert assessments of the interconnections between and among those issues.
With historic 1988 BBC television footage featuring Princeton University scientist Syukuru (“Suki”) Manabe and recent news clips and interviews with MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel, Ohio State University scientist Lonnie Thompson, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, and New York Times columnist and book author Tom Friedman, the six-minute video plumbs the depths of growing climate change concerns among national security experts.
Friedman, in footage from the 2014 Showtime “Years of Living Dangerously” nine-episode documentary, points to a NOAA analysis that climate change has caused the Mediterranean region, in Friedman’s words, “to dry up . . . . leading to longer and more severe droughts.” Friedman in that piece pointed out that severe droughts struck Syria – “which is right at the epicenter” of the worst impacts — in the four years leading up to the Syrian revolution.
MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel points to increasing concerns among military experts over climate change. “These are not sandal-wearing, fruit juice-drinking hippies from the sixties,” he says. “These are serious folk” concerned about “significant geopolitical impacts around the world.”
CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour reports that climate change and dwindling water supplies “may have helped fuel Syria’s war.” She says drought in Syria from 2006 through 2010 “scorched 60 percent of Syria’s land, and it killed 80 percent of livestock in some regions, putting three-quarters of the farmers out of work, and ultimately displacing 1.5 million people.”
“While no one’s claiming a direct cause and effect” relationship, Amanpour says, “the drought did bring on the diaspora from dying farms and over-crowded cities, and thereby put enormous economic and social pressures on an already fractured society.”
The video ends with Lonnie Thompson pointing to Tibet’s numerous glaciers and the Indus River flowing through China, Pakistan, and India. All, he says, are “nuclear-powered countries,” each of them dependent on the Indus for water supplies . . . “all geopolitical hot-spots in the future” with a big stake on the glaciers increasingly under stress in a warming climate.
Thank you for citing this interesting and timely article. The Middle East wars may not have been caused directly by global warming, but it is certainly contributing to the migration of millions from that region and also from Africa. It would be good to call this to the attantion of the G20 meeting in Istambul next weekend and before the Paris climate summit.
The video was interesting but did they have to use the horrible head-thumping background music?
Is it because people today need this awful music to focus scarce mental resources on the task of understanding verbal messages?
I like the analogy of AGW as being like a baseball player on steroids. Say a pllayer hits 20 home runs in a season. After steroids he hits 40 home runs. How many should be attributed to the steroids? All the sports fans I know say all the tainted home runs should be disqualified. For AGW that would mean that the entire Syrian war was due to AGW.
It is interesting to me that for AGW the standard is set so high for the question "did AGW cause this affect". Hansen has show that 99% of all hot summers are caused by AGW Scientists still say we do not have enough data to attribute the Syrian drought to AGW. If it were sport we would dismiss all other contributions to the war and just say it was drought from AGW.
What fraction of the cause needs to be AGW for AGW to be assessed as the main cause? Since everything has multiple causes, it seems to me that AGW will never take the blame since there are always other contributors. The Syrian war would not have occured without the record droght that preceeded it. The drought was a record because of AGW.
Another good analogy I read is the role of speed in motor accidents.
Speed (driving faster than the conditions warrant) may not directly cause road fatalitities, but it reduces the options, increases the risks and makes deaths or serious injuries more likely. A "threat multiplier", in other words, much like climate change and geopolitics.
michael sweet@3,
Sport is entertainment while AGW is a battle for survival in increasingly hostile environment. So different situations are and so different moods in them, that the same subjective perceptions (as you would imagine) will never apply.
In an entertainemnt, the culprit is saught because the good time was "spioled".
In a battle for survival, a denial (sometimes deep rooted) is the first and someimtes only response, from both victims and vested interests causing it. Also note that as AGW is a major cause of war in Syria, the media try to ignore that link (denial at that level), instead trying to inflate the attribution of other causes: religious conflicts, military intervention by West, etc.
@1,
The difference between 'direct' and 'indirect' causation is not as big as the language might have you believe.
Words do not contain the truth according to some interpretations of eastern scriptures... suffice to say: when Bruce Lee narrated that when he points at the moon he also narrated that you and all others concerned should not look at his finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory!!!