Now another study showing links between climate-enhanced drought, and political instability in the Middle East.
Above, scientists predicted this pattern of drought, and the resulting instability, in news reports from 1983, and ’88.
By now, it’s pretty clear that we’re starting to see visible manifestations of climate change beyond far-off melting ice sheets. One of the most terrifying implications is the increasingly real threat of wars sparked in part by global warming. New evidence says that Syria may be one of the first such conflicts.
We know the basic story in Syria by now: From 2006-2010, an unprecedented drought forced the country from a groundwater-intensive breadbasket of the region to a net food importer. Farmers abandoned their homes—school enrollment in some areas plummeted 80 percent—and flooded Syria’s cities, which were already struggling to sustain an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Iraq. The Syrian government largely ignored these warning signs, helping sow discontent that ultimately spawned violent protests. The link from drought to war was prominently featured in a Showtime documentary last year. A preventable drought-triggered humanitarian crisis sparked the 2011 civil war, and eventually, ISIS.
A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science provides the clearest evidence yet that human-induced global warming made that drought more likely. The study is the first to examine the drought-to-war narrative in quantitative detail in any country, ultimately linking it to climate change.
“It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” said Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a meteorologist who’s now a professor at Penn State University. After decades of poor water policy, “there was no resilience left in the system.” Titley says, given that context, that the record-setting drought caused Syria to “break catastrophically.”
“It’s not to say you could predict ISIS out of that, but you just set everything up for something really bad to happen,” Titley told me in a phone interview. Given the new results, Titley says, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”
The researchers said this trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation.
Colin P. Kelley, the lead author of the study, said he and his colleagues found that while Syria and the rest of the region known as the Fertile Crescent were normally subject to periodic dry periods, “a drought this severe was two to three times more likely” because of the increasing aridity in the region.
Dr. Kelley, who did the research while at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said there was no apparent natural cause for the warming and drying trend, which developed over the last 100 years, when humans’ effect on climate has been greatest.
Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose earlier work showed a link between climate change and aridity in the Eastern Mediterranean, said the researchers’ study was “quite compelling.”
“The paper makes a strong case for the first link in their causal chain,” Dr. Hoerling said in an email, “namely the human interference with the climate so as to increase drought likelihood in Syria.”
At present the news story that never fails to occupy the front page is ISIS, the Islamic State, making a nuisance of itself in Syria and Iraq. It is generally thought that ISIS emerged in large part because of the quasi-failure of Syria. Syria transited from being a run of the mill Middle Eastern Kingdom with some powerful connections to a quasi-failed state for a number of reasons, but one of the big factors turns out to be water. Or, really, lack thereof. In a recently published paper (not the one in Science mentioned above), Peter Gleick made this point:
The Syrian conflict that began in 2012 has many roots, including long-standing political, religious, and social ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and worsening environmental conditions. … key environmental factors include both direct and indirect consequences of water shortages, ineffective watershed management, and the impacts of climate variability and change on regional hydrology. Severe multiyear drought beginning in the mid-2000s, combined with inefficient and often unmodernized irrigation systems and water abstractions by other parties in the eastern Mediterranean, including especially Syria, contributed to the displacement of large populations from rural to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and increased unemployment—with subsequent effects on political stability. There is some evidence that the recent drought is an early indicator of the climatic changes that are expected for the region, including higher temperature, decreased basin rainfall and runoff, and increased water scarcity. Absent any efforts to address population growth rates, these water-related factors are likely to produce even greater risks of local and regional political instability, unless other mechanisms for reducing water insecurity can be identified and implemented.
Two key graphics from Gleick’s paper demonstrate the role of climate change. First, the drop in available water due to decreased rainfall and, probably, increased evaporation:
Thomas L. Friedman in the excellent T.V series “Years of Living dangerously” convinced me of the link between the civil war and drought/Climate Change in which approximately 220,000 (U.N estimate) have been killed to date, with many many more displaced and tortured souls.
Eerily there is the predictive scientist, from well over 30 years ago, warning about it and other things which are becoming so true today.
Are we so sure and confident about our own environments ?, when food and water shortages occur, and all the other possible terrible effects start being manifested (some are already, but it has only just begun).
Food for thought indeed ……..
Though world grain production and yield continue to rise, some places aren’t part of the trend: Russian grain peaked in the early 1990’s. Yemen peaked in the mid seventies, and it also presently consumes 4x what it produces, becoming more and more reliant on imports the last several decades. The Middle East and Israel had peaks in both the early 90’s and 00’s, but their obligation for imports has been rising, again, for decades and, again, they consume 4x what they produce. Kazakhstan too peaked in the early 90’s.
http://www.earth-policy.org/datacenter/pdf/book_wote_crops.pdf
Interestingly enough I think US wheat production peaked in the early 80’s. The reason for this, given back then, was that we were trying to rein in our total arable acreage. I haven’t an idea what has kept us under the 80’s levels since then. I was able to pull that info from http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_Subject/result.php?2A0B8533-3111-3DB9-9114-778F788FF590§or=CROPS&group=FIELD%20CROPS&comm=WHEAT but now I can’t find the same graph I was looking at yesterday.
One of the initiators of piracy in the Indian Ocean was the collapse of the fishing stocks upon which Somalis relied for food and exchange, the collapse caused by globally operating entities using huge factory ships to catch and process.
Now, piracy has been recognised as a lucrative business attracting the attention of large criminal organisations.
Just one example of oceanic plunder creating pirates:
“…the lobster population off the coast of Eyl has been devastated by foreign fishing fleets – mostly Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean ships, Boyah said. Using steel-pronged drag fishing nets, these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs: they uprooted them, netting the future livelihood of the nearby coastal people along with the day’s catch.”
From: A href=”http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/24/a-pioneer-of-somali-piracy”>Somali pirate: ‘We’re not murderers… we just attack ships’.
Trawling needs immediate regulation if not banning.