Human-Caused Warming Helped Trigger Current Syrian Conflict And Rise Of ISIS

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/03/3628899/warming-syrian-conflict-isis/

by Joe Romm Posted on March 3, 2015

A new study finds that human-caused climate change was a major trigger of Syria’s brutal civil war. The war that helped drive the rise of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) was itself spawned in large part by what one expert called perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent,” from 2006 to 2010.

That drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000 people according to the U.N. and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, “where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011,” as the study’s news release explains.

The study, “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” found that global warming made Syria’s 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely. “While we’re not saying the drought caused the war,” lead author Dr. Colin Kelley explained. “We are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors — agricultural collapse and mass migration among them — that caused the uprising.”

The study identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought, Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley told Slate. Titley, also a meteorologist, said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

In particular, the study finds that climate change is already drying the region out in two ways: “First, weakening wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean reduced precipitation during the usual November-to-April wet season. In addition, higher temperatures increased moisture evaporation from soils during the usually hot summers.”

•••••

Climate models had long predicted that the countries surrounding the Mediterranean would start drying out. In general, climate science says dry areas will get dryer and wet areas wetter.

In 2011, a major NOAA study concluded that “human-caused climate change [is now] a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.”

•••••

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” explained Dr. Martin Hoerling of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, the lead author of the 2011 study.

•••••

Perhaps the central takeaway from this area of research is that the greatest danger to humanity this century from human-caused climate change is Dust-Bowlification and the threat to our food supplies and hence global security.

That’s because large parts of the most inhabited and arable parts of the planet — including the U.S. breadbasket — face the exact same heating and drying that have already affected the Mediterranean. The 2014 study, “Global warming and 21st century drying,” projected this bleak future:

•••••

The bottom line: Homo sapiens is currently on track to make drought and extreme drying the normal condition for the Southwest, Central Plains, the Amazon, southern Europe, the entire region around the Mediterranean, and many other key areas in the second half of the century.

As Femia bluntly told an interviewer in 2013, the time to act is now: “if you let this problem get out of hand you’re going to have a number of situations in the future, whether they’re major disasters or conflicts, that our security forces may have to respond to. It will cost us a lot more in the long term if we do nothing now.”

•••••

See also:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/teia-dcc022615.php