What are you doing here? Go and read this web comic, (5 minutes) then come back smarter.
Comic by Audrey Quinn and Jackie Roche. Produced as a collaboration of Years of Living Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine.
Syria’s Drowned child. A victim of climate change?
Let’s connect the dots.
Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011.
The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability.
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.
Below – watch Television reports from the 80s, when scientists predicted exactly this development.
Great web comic—-don’t know if I’m smarter for having read it, but I’m definitely sadder, especially after seeing the pic of the drowned kid that followed.
Same goes for watching the vids of how the migrants are being treated in Hungary. Time is running out—-the Paris talks had better produce some good results or this will be just the beginning of the turmoil that AGW is going to bring down on humans. Pics of dead kids will become all too common.
Let’s take a longer view on the current crisis in Syria. Consider that in 1890, 125 years ago, the population of Syria totaled approximately 865,000 persons. http://looklex.com/e.o/syria.demographics.htm
Compare that to today’s total population of Syrians, ~22,000,000, of whom about 4 million are refugees.
This population explosion might be a better explanation of what is so wrong about the Syria case, as opposed to suggesting a mere drought is the culprit in human distress in the region.
In other words, when a nation has four times as many refugees today as compared to the centuries’ long carrying capacity of the region, something is terribly wrong, and its not just the weather.
A moot point, Ray. The population of the whole planet was not much over 1.5 billion in 1890, and the 7+ billion of today are inhabiting many areas where they exceed the long term “carrying capacity of the region”. The cities in the U.S. would quickly become unsustainable if modern modes of factory agriculture and transportation fail. Yes, there are many things wrong, and not just the weather, but if the weather hadn’t turned bad on the Syrians, they might have made it a few more years before disaster struck.
The Syrian population bomb provoces more denial than climate change. In real life things are almost never monocausal. (A war is a duel in theory, in practise often a triell.) What broke the camel’s back was at least two straws.
Another would be the conflict itself, which would prevent resources from moving back and forth across the country freely. Another cause, unfortunately, would be U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East – and there will be a lot of denial about that one, too.
But climate change is likely to be one of the factors, too. Syria is a sort of preview for what the world faces in the coming century. As populations increase and become more and more dependent on a fraying infrastructure, and as climate change, freshwater depletion, and other environmental and resource issues increase in scale, we’ll almost certainly get a coupling of crop failures, large-scale migrations, and regional conflicts on several parts of the globe.
I agree about US foreign policy being a factor in this new holocaust but then all the current major powers have had a hand in policies affecting this regions and in particular since oil was discovered. Why was a UK political animal so keen to see a nation state of Israel resurrected.
Before that even, with the Suez canal being a vital link in British connections with India (the history of that alone under British rule is harrowing check out the droughts and famines of late Victorian times there with a British administration as disconnected and indifferent as Bashar al-Assad in Syria) that the eastern Mediterranean was the scene of a power play between Britain and France v Russia over the corpse of the then sick man of Europe – Turkey the Sublime Port.
Famous Punch cartoon of Disraeli and Salisbury, wearing coronets, doing a Pas de Deux having finessed the Russian scare. Never mind the millions slaughtered in the Balkans by Turkish driven bashi-bazouks.
The discussion is heated in media atm for understandable reasons. But unfortunately none of the articles in media or coverage even mention the drought and climate change that Syria has gone through. Again people will go around with blinders about our own indirect influence in the problems that has arisen – but instead can feel good about ourselves for sending some clothing to a Syrian family.
Admittedly a part of the problem is that Syria has experienced a 4x growth in population in the past 40 years – while the world as a whole has had a 2x growth in population during the same period. More people, more mouths to feed – add a bit of climate change and you have a disaster.
Here in Norway Hans Rosling is featured a lot, no doubt because he explains the facts rather plainly (using lego bricks) – but also because he has a very uplifting view about the positive changes in the world too. Only problem he has not grasped yet is that 7 billion people is already more than the planet can bear with the way wealth is distributed. And he talks about another 3 billion coming before it reaches a peak.
Whenever you comment in media about this, remember to mention the drought and climate change so that more people can connect the dots and understand this at its root.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But that drowned boy is worth more than mere words. He is worth dollars. And dollars are certainly worth counting.
Assuming that what the experts say about how many people die each year from the effects of global warming, let’s pick a nice round number, and say that since 1990 there have been about 5 million people who have died due to inaction to fix global warming. This pathetic-looking corpse is just one of those.
Well, personally, if any single person in the world is responsible for the inaction to fix global warming – and I say this without wanting to boast too much – it is me. And my accountants tell me that I am worth $44,600,000,000 bucks. That’s a lot of zeros, which can be confusing, so let me spell it out for you. Me – just me – I am worth forty-four billion dollars. And most of that comes from the oil business. Well, the oil business and my efforts to squash any attempt to fix global warming, because, as you might suspect, fixing global warming is very bad business indeed for the oil business.
So that drowned kid, by my calculation, is worth about $8920.00. $8920.00, that is – right into my bank account! Just like every single one of the 4,999,999 other corpses which have bloodied my hands over the past twenty years. Pretty good business if you find it.
David Koch
But remember, he’s not a sociopath, just a businessman helping the world to be a better place. For businessmen.
Peter – That is brilliant compilation of media, dealing with a difficult issue.
Surprisingly the cartoon, was very easy on the eye and told the story much better than other attempts I’ve seen, it was also dealt well in Living Dangerously. Of course drought was not the sole cause of the terrible refugee problem we have now, but we all need water to continue to breath and live, when it’s in short supply people get desperate and capable of acts well outside of normality.
What really struck me, it is next to a story on struggling herds of Walrus, and highlights parallel dangers from climate change to both types of mammal, yes that is what we are, we are just another species of animal as vulnerable as the Walrus.
I was reading in Mashable that refugees in Germany were converting to the Christian faith and settling in well, most people just want to be safe,secure and happy.
Water is the number one need to sustain life – We take it for granted, but should not . . .
The importance is well express by Rajendra Singh (winner of the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize ), in the Inter Press Service news agency today . . .
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/09/qa-we-must-put-everything-aside-and-just-focus-on-water/
I don’t give a shit what that Japanese bloke from Princeton said. If the predictions aren’t realised within a 24 hour news cycle then they aren’t worth the pixels they are written on.