Did climate change help spark the Syrian war?

Science Codex: A new study says a record drought that ravaged Syria in 2006-2010 was likely stoked by ongoing manmade climate change, and that the drought may have helped propel the 2011 Syrian uprising. Researchers say the drought, the worst ever recorded in the region, destroyed agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to cities, where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011. The conflict has since evolved into a complex multinational war that has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced millions. The study appears today in the leading journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We're not saying the drought caused the war," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who coauthored the study. "We're saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region."

A growing body of research suggests that extreme weather, including high temperatures and droughts, increases the chances of violence, from individual attacks to full-scale wars. Some researchers project that manmade global warming will heighten future conflicts, or argue that it may already be doing so. And recent journalistic accounts and other reports have linked warfare in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in part to environmental issues, especially lack of water. The new study, combining climate, social and economic data, is perhaps the first to look closely and quantitatively at these questions in relation to a current war....

A Bedouin tent in the Syrian desert, shot by yeowatzup yeowatz, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attirbution 2.0 Generic license 

Ground water depletion driving global conflicts

Chris Arsenault at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Global ground water supplies, crucial for sustaining agriculture, are being depleted at an alarming rate with dangerous security implications, a leading scientist said.

"It's a major cause for concern because most of the places where it (ground water depletion) is happening are major food producing regions," James Famiglietti, a University of California professor who conducts research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "India is the worst off, followed by the Middle East, and the U.S. is probably number three ... the Chinese, particularly on the north China plain, are more water limited than people believe."

Famiglietti's conclusions are based on his latest research paper "The global ground water crisis" published in the journal Nature Climate Change last month. The study uses analysis of satellite images to warn that ground water in many of the world's largest aquifers is being exploited at a far faster rate than it can be naturally replenished.

Farming accounts for more than 80 percent of the United States' water use, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the figures are similar globally. Famiglietti has been called to the Pentagon a number of times to discuss the potential impact of groundwater scarcity with leading military planners....

A dried up pool at Fairburn Ings, shot by Bernard Bradley, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

The 'threat multiplier’ of climate change

John D. Banusiewicz at Department of Defense News, Defense Media Activity: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel [outlined] the effects of climate change on the world’s security environment and [unveiled] the Defense Department’s plan to meet that challenge in a speech this afternoon at the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas in Arequipa, Peru.

In a statement, Hagel noted that thinking ahead and planning for a wide range of contingencies is the Defense Department’s responsibili
ty in providing security for the nation, and that climate change is a trend that will affect national security.

“Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict,” he said. “They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”

The U.S. defense strategy refers to climate change as a “threat multiplier,” the secretary said, because it has the potential to exacerbate many challenges, including infectious disease and terrorism. “We are already beginning to see some of these impacts,” he added.

A changing climate will have real impacts on the military and the way it executes its missions, Hagel said, noting that the military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities and to provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters.

“Our coastal installations are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increased flooding, while droughts, wildfires and more extreme temperatures could threaten many of our training activities,” he said. “Our supply chains could be impacted, and we will need to ensure our critical equipment works under more extreme weather conditions.”

Weather always has affected military operations, and as the climate changes, the way the military executes operations may be altered or constrained, the secretary said. Uncertainty is no excuse for delaying action

David Gleason shot this picture of the Pentagon in 2008, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Cholera surges in Cameroon

IRIN: Rains and insecurity caused by Nigerian Islamist militants are aggravating a cholera outbreak in northern Cameroon which has killed at least 75 people and infected some 1,400 others since April. Water scarcity, poor public health care and risky hygienic practices have rekindled the disease which badly hit the country between 2009 and 2011, experts say.

Population movement during the current school holidays could help spread infections to other regions of Cameroon or even to neighbouring countries, said Félicité Tchibindat, a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative in Cameroon.

The first cholera case was in a Nigerian family who were among a group of refugees fleeing to Cameroon from bombings and attacks by Nigeria’s Boko Haram extremist militia in April. Scarcity of safe drinking water, open defecation and other poor hygienic habits have exacerbated the cholera cases in northern Cameroon, Tchibindat said.

More than 26,000 cholera cases have been reported in Nigeria since the start of the year, according to health authorities. “For the moment we are supporting health workers, conducting community sensitization, supplied water and cholera treatment kits. But given the insecurity, whether the community mobilizers can visit all the villages is a question we are still asking ourselves,” Tchibindat told IRIN....

Will climate change lead to conflict or cooperation?

Joel Jaeger in IPS: The headline of every article about the relationship between climate change and conflict should be “It’s complicated,” according to Clionadh Raleigh. Director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Raleigh thinks that researchers and the media have put too simplistic a spin on the link between climate change and violence.

In recent years, scientists and the United Nations have been increasing their focus on climate conflict. The debate ranges from sensational reports that say the world will soon erupt into water wars to those who do not think the topic is worthy of discussion at all.

Much of the uncertainty over the connection between climate change and armed conflict exists because it is such a fledgling area of interest. According to David Jensen, head of the U.N. Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Environmental Cooperation for Peacebuilding programme, the relationship between climate change and conflict began receiving significant U.N. attention only in recent years.

“While the debate on this topic started in 2006-2007, there remains a large gulf between what is discussed at the global level and in the Security Council, and what is actually happening at the field level,” he told IPS.

A body of peer-reviewed literature on climate change and conflict has recently begun to emerge, but scientists have discovered that the link between climate change and conflict is more complex than they expected.

“A number of studies have found a statistical link between climate change and conflict, but they tend to focus on a specific area and cover a short time period,” Halvard Buhaug, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s Conditions of Violence and Peace department, told IPS. “The challenge is to determine whether these studies are indicative of an overarching, more general trend, which hasn’t been documented yet.”

Much of the nuance behind the climate conflict correlations is lost when technical scientific reports are spread to a wider audience...

A frangible bullet stress test, US government photo

Border guard wounded in shootout over water access on Kyrgyz-Tajik border

Space Daily via AFP: A Kyrgyz border guard received head injuries on Thursday following clashes near a disputed border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that Bishkek blamed on Tajiks attempting to divert water from a river.

Kyrgyzstan's border service said in a statement that its guards came across several Tajiks building an unauthorised water pipeline in the latest incident in the tense Fergana valley region, which is uneasily shared by the Central Asian countries amid increasing water shortages.

Bishkek said about 30 Tajik citizens began throwing stones at Kyrgyz border guards, who demanded they stop diverting the water and shot into the air.

Tajik border guards then arrived and opened fire on the Tamdyk Kyrgyz border post, including with mortar shells, Bishkek said.

The Fergana valley area, densely populated and straddling the territories of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, has seen clashes since becoming independent from Soviet rule in the early 1990s, as precise borders were never agreed....

Heavy rains, ongoing violence push South Sudan towards 'hunger catastrophe', warns UN agency

UN News Centre: Already working hard to get supplies to people in South Sudan cut off by flooded roads, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today warned that the rains, as well as the ongoing fighting, are pushing the country towards a “hunger catastrophe”.

“Fighting has led to alarming food insecurity in areas isolated by conflict,” WFP spokesperson Elisabeth Byers said today in Geneva, explaining that the agency is facing serious challenges in transporting food to “deep field” locations due to access and security concerns.

This has hampered WFP's annual pre-positioning exercise, in which it stocks up warehouses in areas that will become inaccessible during the rainy season. Heavy rains had made most of the roads in Unity State impassable, she added.

Moreover, Ms. Byrs said, WFP estimates that more than 4,600 metric tons of food has been lost through looting in several locations – enough to feed more than 275,000 people for a month. “[We] urge all parties to respect the neutrality of humanitarian agencies, and to protect the humanitarian supplies so badly needed to assist innocent civilians affected by the conflict,” she said.

Despite those immense challenges due to insecurity, she said the agency had dispatched more than 91,000 metric tons of food around the countrysince the start of 2014.

WFP is using a combination of airlifts and airdrops to reach people in remote areas of Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile states. As the rainy season set in and road access is cut off to two-thirds of the country, the agency has launched a special operation requiring almost $17 million to provide 10 aircraft needed for food deliveries....

Locator map of South Sudan created by TUBS, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

US government report cites climate change as a threat to military base readiness

Liz Klimas in the Blaze: The government has already considered the threat that climate change could pose to the military’s operations, but its latest report reveals “actual impacts” that could be indicative of what installations could face as a result of global warming.

Officials from the Government Accountability Office visited Department of Defense sites and noted examples where the effects of climate change could impact its “readiness” and leave the military vulnerable.

 “For example, according to DOD officials, the combination of thawing permafrost, decreasing sea ice, and rising sea levels on the Alaskan coast has increased coastal erosion at several Air Force radar early warning and communication installations,” the GAO noted. “Impacts on DOD’s infrastructure from this erosion have included damaged roads, seawalls and runways. In addition, officials on a Navy installation told GAO that sea level rise and resulting storm surge are the two largest threats to their waterfront infrastructure. For instance, they are concerned about possible storm surge during work on a submarine that will be cut in half while sitting in a dry dock. Officials explained that if salt water floods the submarine’s systems, it could result in severe damage.”

The GAO acknowledged in its video that any single weather event cannot necessarily be linked to climate change, but it said that these events can give “insight into the potential climate-related vulnerabilities.”

The report —Climate Change Adaptation: DOD Can Improve Infrastructure Planning and Processes to Better Account for Potential Impacts  — said that the DOD has already begun to assess the vulnerability of installations against the potential impact of climate change and what could be one to adapt to these effects. But the GAO wrote the defense department could face limitations in that some of its plans are not fully developed and such projects are rarely proposed as military construction projects....

George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove

Fighting hits water supply in east Ukraine city

Space Daily via AFP: Up to one million people face water shortages in eastern Ukraine as workers battle to repair pipes damaged by fighting in rebel-held Donetsk, a city spokesman said on Thursday. "Today the water supply is limited and a full supply is being provided only at certain times," Maxim Rovinsky, spokesman for Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko, told AFP.

The city is the largest rebel stronghold in eastern Ukraine and the epicentre of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Rovinsky said water would reach residents in five-hour stretches every morning and evening, in restrictions that went into force on Tuesday.

The region is suffering from severe water shortages after weeks of fierce fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian troops damaged vital infrastructure.

There has been no water supply to the battle-ravaged northern city of Slavyansk -- which has a population of 120,000 -- since the start of the month. Many other towns have had their supply restricted. "As of today the water supply to Donetsk is down 20 percent," Rovinsky said....

The Kalmius River in Donetsk, Ukraine, shot by AndrijKo.ukr, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Threat of disease in Iraq villages flooded by militants

IRIN: Flooding caused by the forced closure of a major dam on the Euphrates river has destroyed villages and farms across a 200sqkm area west of Baghdad, leaving tens of thousands homeless and at high risk of waterborne diseases like cholera.

Aid agencies - already stretched to the limit trying to respond to the 434,000 people displaced by fighting in the troubled province of Anbar - are now scrambling to get food, shelter and hygiene kits to the estimated 40,000 families affected by the flooding in Abu Ghraib and surrounding areas in April.

The water - which at the height of the flooding was reported to have reached just a few kilometres short of Baghdad International Airport - is now slowly receding from Abu Ghraib and some families are starting to return home. But
Nuaimiyah Dam, in the city of Fallujah in Anbar province, is still believed to be under the control of militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and it is feared they could cause more flooding at any time.

“The government does not yet have full control of the area or the dam,” said Eliana Nabaa, spokesperson for the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). “There is no reason to relax because it [the flooding] could happen again.”

Despite these risks, however, some families, who had sought refuge on higher ground and in neighbouring governorates, are starting to return to the flood-hit areas to assess the damage and recover what is left of their homes and farms....

The Fallujah Barrage in Iraq. It's unclear whether this has anything to do with the dam in the story. US Army Corps of Engineers photo

The age of climate warfare is here. The military-industrial complex is ready. Are you?

Nafeez Ahmed in the Guardian (UK): During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a "creeping national security crisis" that will require the armed forces to "respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food."

The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.

A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a "threat multiplier," but now
- even worse - a "catalyst for conflict", the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades: ".... will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions - conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

To be sure, the link between climate change and the risk of violence is supported by many independent studies. No wonder, reports NBC News citing various former and active US officials, the Pentagon has long been mapping out strategies "to protect US interests in the aftermath of massive floods, water shortages and famines that are expected to hit and decimate unstable nations."

But the era of climate warfare is not laying in wait, in some far-flung distant future. It has already begun, and it is accelerating - faster than most predicted. Pentagon officials and the CNA's new study point to the Arab Spring upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa as a prime example....

A map of the Arab Spring (no legend for the precise meaning of the colors), created by 48Lugur, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Disaster-prone Central America shows it means business on climate legislation

Nelson Renteria at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: In El Salvador’s Chalatenango hills, hit hard by civil war in the 1980s between the army and Marxist insurgents, many trees were damaged or destroyed in the hail of bombs and bullets.

After the conflict ended in 1992, the inhabitants of Montañona, a small town 98 km north of San Salvador, began mobilising to restore the 21 hectares they owned, and to protect the surrounding forest landscape of more than 1,400 hectares.    

These days, however, the local vegetation has a new enemy: ranchers. Some are starting fires on hillsides to clear the land so they can grow grass there to feed cattle. Sometimes the fires burn out of control, affecting wooded parkland.

For that reason, Juan Calderon, a 50-year-old ex-guerilla who is now a forest ranger, walks every day into the pine woods to make sure no one is cutting down trees or lighting fires there. “This (conservation) project is effective - it is the best, because before many people were coming into the woods to fell trees, hunt or do whatever, but now it is not possible,” Calderon told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Montañona reserve is the biggest in the northern department of Chalatenango. Not only does it help keep the air clean and healthy, but the 70 water sources in its river basin supply at least 70,000 families in nearby urban areas....

Dawn at Cerro El Pital, highest point in El Salvador. Shot by ElmerGuevara, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

War, late rains spark Somalia 'crisis' warning

Africa Daily via AFP: War and delayed rains in Somalia are putting thousands of lives at risk, especially in areas where African Union troops are battling Islamist extremists for control, the United Nations said Friday. Seasonal rains crucial for farming and usually lasting from April to June are yet to start in key southern areas of Somalia, as well as in far northeast
ern regions.

If rains fail this month, "combined with sustained insecurity, we might see new levels of crisis unfold," said Daniel Molla, chief technical advisor from the UN's Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU).

"Delayed rains, rising food prices and persistent insecurity in Somalia is likely to worsen the country's food security situation in the coming months," FSNAU added in a statement, with more than 850,000 people requiring "urgent humanitarian assistance".

The southern regions of Middle and Lower Shabelle are the worst affected, frontline battle zones where African Union troops fighting alongside Somali government forces are battling Al-Qaeda linked Shebab insurgents.

Over 200,000 children aged under five are "acutely malnourished", with more than a quarter of those assessed as severe cases who "face a higher risk of death", FSNAU added. Somalia was the hardest hit by extreme drought in 2011 that affected over 13 million people across the Horn of Africa, with famine zones declared in large parts of the war-ravaged south....

Somali refugees in 20011, shot by Oxfam Horn of Africa famine refugee.jpg: Oxfam East Africa, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy

Tom Bawden in the Independent (UK): Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy, a forthcoming UN report will warn.

The second of three publications by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be made public at the end of this month, is the most comprehensive investigation into the impact of climate change ever undertaken. A draft of the final version seen by The Independent says the warming climate will place the world under enormous strain, forcing mass migration, especially in Asia, and increasing the risk of violent conflict.

Based on thousands of peer-reviewed studies and put together by hundreds of respected scientists, the report predicts that climate change will reduce median crop yields by 2 per cent per decade for the rest of the century – at a time of rapidly growing demand for food. This will in turn push up malnutrition in children by about a fifth, it predicts.

The report also forecasts that the warming climate will take its toll on human health, pushing up the number of intense heatwaves and fires and increasing the risk from food and water-borne diseases. While the impact on the UK will be relatively small, global issues such as rising food prices will pose serious problems. Britain’s health and environmental “cultural heritage” is also likely to be hurt, the report warns....

Albrecht Durer's woodcut of the book of Revelation

Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage

Stephen Lewandowsky in Skeptical Science: "Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles." Iraq is progressing towards "dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile." An Iraqi defector "tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites...

Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. ... A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war's six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.

A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.

...One notable difference between pre-invasion reporting on Iraqi WMD and climate change is that, in contrast to the near-hegemony of war-supporting reporting (at least in the U.S.), the public has a broader choice now when it comes to climate change: While there is a large supply of disinformation that threatens the public's right to being adequately informed, there is also no shortage of actual scientific information, both in the mainstream media and beyond.

The diversity of sources empowers the public to select their information wisely, but it also provides a playing field for the dominant influence of people's cultural worldviews or "ideology", which can override even education. People whose core personal values are threatened by possible responses to climate change, such as a price on carbon or regulatory measures, are known to rely on media sources that are more likely to create confusion about climate change than disseminate scientifically accurate information....

Orwell plaque shot by Simon Harriyott, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Philippine conflict-displaced on Mindanao now hit by floods

IRIN: Still recovering from three weeks of fighting between government troops and Muslim separatists that left tens of thousands displaced, battle-scarred Zamboanga region in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao is now dealing with flooding in already congested evacuation centres.

Rains brought by the annual southwest May-October monsoon and the effects of Typhoon Danas (locally known as Ramil) starting on 4 October wreaked havoc on the islands of Western and Central Visayas, Palawan and Mindanao, affecting close to 138,000 people and displacing 100,000, according to the government’s latest update on 10 October.

Worst-hit was the Zamboanga peninsula in Minadao, which includes the port city of Zamboanga where an almost month-long siege displaced about 119,000 people in the city plus another 8,100 in neighbouring Basilan Province, killing a total of 140 as of 29 September.

...The two sides are negotiating for the creation of what is envisioned to be an expanded autonomous region for Mindanao's Muslim population that would supersede the one handed to the MNLF, a development that Nur Misuari, its founder, and a number of fighters oppose...

The Zamboanga Peninsula on Mindanao, by Scorpion prinz, Wikimmedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Libya's beleaguered government faces water threat

Space Daily via UPI: Libya's fragile government, grappling with marauding militias that have virtually shut down the country's vital oil industry, has another big problem in its struggle to impose control -- water supplies.

Militants loyal to the late Moammar Gadhafi seized control of the Great Man-Made River, a $33 billion project that taps a vast acquifer under the Sahara desert to supply the entire country, Sept. 3. They did so to secure the release of the daughter of Gadhafi's former spy chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, who's scheduled to stand trial for crimes committed during Libya's eight-month civil war in 2011 that toppled Gadhafi.

What made it doubly embarrassing for the government was that Anoud al-Sanussi, 22, was snatched Sept. 2 in an ambush in the capital by elite forces as police escorted her to the airport to board a flight to Sebha, hundreds of miles south of Tripoli, to join relatives there.

The government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan settled the issue and restored control of the water supplies by the end of last week after Senussi's daughter was released unharmed Sunday. She had been seized less than 100 yards from Tripoli's al-Rayoumi where she had served a 10-month sentence for entering Libya with a forged passport in October 2012....

Work on the Great Man-Made River in Libya, shot by Jaap Berk, public domain

How could a drought spark a civil war?

NPR: The background of the Syrian conflict can seem obscure to outsiders, but the spark that started it all is often traced back to the city of Dara'a, in February of 2011. A group of young people writing Arab Spring protest slogans on a wall are arrested and beaten.

"When that news broke there was a massive demonstration on the street, and that was the first spark one can call of the Syrian uprising," Nayan Chanda tells NPR's Jacki Lyden. But long before a single shot was fired in Syria, there was drought in Dara'a, laying the groundwork for social unrest.

Chanda, the editor-in-chief the YaleGlobal Online Magazine, argues that there are many ways to look at civil war: ethnic factions, economic divides and religions differences. But increasingly, he says that we should also look at climate change as a factor.

Syria faced a devastating drought between 2006 and 2010, affecting its most fertile lands. The four years of drought turned almost 60 percent of the nation into a desert. It was a huge amount of land that could not support cattle trading and herding, Chanda says, killing about 80 percent of cattle by 2009.

The water shortage and drought drove up unemployment, in agriculture. So hundreds of thousands of farmers, Chanda says, went to where they might find work: the cities. He says they were met "almost callously" by the Syrian government....

How climate change warmed Syria up for war

Brian Merchant at Motherboard: ...As was the case with many of the nations touched by the Arab Spring, a large swath of Syria's citizenry wasn't just poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised by an authoritarian regime—they were starving, too. And they were starving because Syria had been stricken by a five year drought believed to be exacerbated by climate change. There was eventually too little rain to even grow crops or to feed livestock.

William Polk, an ex-US State Department advisor, has written a meticulously detailed account of the genesis of the conflict over at The Atlantic. As Digby writes at Alternet, "It is the most cogent recitation and analysis of the Syrian crisis that I've seen."

It is also an exceptionally detailed case study of how, exactly, climate change can directly influence—even precipitate—a violent conflict. Considering Syria's path to war, step-by-step, provides a powerful breakdown of what might continue to happen in the future, so as long as the globe continues to warm, the food system continues to be in thrall to commodity traders and market swings, and vast swaths of the global population remain impoverished.

"Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance," Polk writes. "Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it."...

Cool heads likely won't prevail in a hotter, wetter world

Morgan Kelly in News at Princeton: Should climate change trigger the upsurge in heat and rainfall that scientists predict, people may face a threat just as perilous and volatile as extreme weather — each other.

Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley report in the journal Science that even slight spikes in temperature and precipitation have greatly increased the risk of personal violence and social upheaval throughout human history. Projected onto an Earth that is expected to warm by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, the authors suggest that more human conflict is a likely outcome of climate change.

The researchers analyzed 60 studies from a number of disciplines — including archaeology, criminology, economics and psychology — that have explored the connection between weather and violence in various parts of the world from about 10,000 BCE to the present day. During an 18-month period, the Princeton-Berkeley researchers reviewed those studies' data — and often re-crunched raw numbers — to calculate the risk that violence would rise under hotter and wetter conditions.

They found that while climate is not the sole or primary cause of violence, it undeniably exacerbates existing social and interpersonal tension in all societies, regardless of wealth or stability. They found that 1 standard-deviation shift — the amount of change from the local norm — in heat or rainfall boosts the risk of a riot, civil war or ethnic conflict by an average of 14 percent. There is a 4 percent chance of a similarly sized upward creep in heat or rain sparking person-on-person violence such as rape, murder and assault. The researchers report that climate-change models predict an average of 2 to 4 standard-deviation shifts in global climate conditions by 2050.

..."We think that by collecting all the research together now, we're pretty clearly establishing that there is a causal relationship between the climate and human conflict," Hsiang said. "People have been skeptical up to now of an individual study here or there. But considering the body of work together, we can now show that these patterns are extremely general. It's more of the rule than the exception....

The researchers analyzed 60 studies from a number of disciplines that have explored the connection between weather and violence in various parts of the world, and throughout human history. A sampling of existing results (graphed above) show a correlation between temperature on violent personal crime and rape in the United States (A, B); drought and global civil conflict (H); temperature and the ouster of leaders worldwide (J); deviation from normal rainfall and large-scale violence in Africa (K); and global civil conflict and the intensity of El Niño (L). The darker areas indicate a stronger connection between climate and violence. Panel titles indicate the type of violence studied, the location, the unit of analysis and sample size, and the study citation. (Image by Science/AAAS)