It has long been accepted that tales of a dystopian future have only a limited impact when attempting to encourage the sacrifices necessary to avoid further global warming. For that reason, most effort has been concentrated on convincing people that, courtesy of a changing climate, they already live in a dystopian present. Every severe weather event is reported upon with the added message that this was caused by climate change and that you can expect even worse in the future. This strategy is so well-established and has been so successful that very few people now even attempt to challenge the narrative.

No doubt emboldened by this success, climate activists have added a new storyline to the mix. If a heightened risk of future human conflict can be attributed to climate change, does it not follow that existing conflicts are at least partially the consequence of the changes we have experienced thus far? And if we can lay the blame of a recent war on climate change, surely that can only add to the credibility of those who warn of even worse conflict to come.

Climate and conflict

There has certainly been no shortage of serious thinking into the national and international security risks that may accompany a warming planet. Take, for example, the US Department of Defense Climate Risk Analysis, in which it is stated:

To keep the nation secure, we must tackle the existential threat of climate change. The unprecedented scale of wildfires, floods, droughts, typhoons, and other extreme weather events of recent months and years have damaged our installations and bases, constrained force readiness and operations, and contributed to instability around the world.

It is the last point regarding increased global instability that has particularly focused minds. For example, an increased risk of droughts and floods is deemed to lead to increased competition for scarce natural resources resulting in “heightened social and political tensions, an increase in migration, conflict and/or competitors using instability to expand influence.” These may be plausible future scenarios, but it remains the case that future scenarios are simply a matter of conjecture and speculation. The important question is whether or not this is already happening. If someone were able to point to an existing, significant conflict that has its origins in climate change, we would indeed be justified in treating the matter with a great deal more urgency. Which, of course, is why the Syrian war crops up so often whenever this topic is discussed.

A showcase war

As far as Australia’s think tank, Breakthrough — National Centre for Climate Restoration, is concerned there is no doubt that climate change provided the catalyst for this conflict. In a document titled, ‘Disaster Alley: Climate Change Conflict and Risk’, Ian Dunlop and David Spratt write:

From 2006-2010, 60% of Syria had its worst long-term drought and crop failures since civilisation began. 800,000 people in rural areas had lost their livelihood by 2009. More than two million people were driven into extreme poverty, and 1.5 million people migrated to cities. The cities grew very rapidly, as did food and housing prices. The Syrian regime was unable to safeguard the people and protect their way of life, resulting in social breakdown, state failure, the rise of Islamic State and foreign military intervention. Global and regional climatic changes were major underlying causes and continued to exacerbate this already explosive situation.

That’s a pretty good yarn that I can imagine would impress any casual reader – except for one critical detail. The severity of the drought is being described here in terms of its human impact, and yet a drought is a climatic event, the scale of which must be defined in purely climatic terms, i.e. how increased temperatures and lower precipitation affected soil moisture levels. If we stick to such measures, was the 2006-2010 drought the worst since civilisation began? Because if the drought wasn’t nearly as unprecedented as portrayed, that would mean that climate change may have played no role whatsoever. Could it be instead that the outcome was due almost entirely to vulnerabilities brought on by political and infrastructural failures?

To answer those questions we shouldn’t be taking our advice from a couple of pundits who have no in-depth knowledge of Middle Eastern history or politics. We should instead be consulting a domain expert, such as Marwa Daoudy, Associate Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) and the Seif Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), previously a lecturer at Oxford University in the department of Politics and International Relations, a fellow of Oxford’s Middle East Center at St Antony’s College and a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Unlike many of the West’s armchair experts peddling their climate change narrative, Daoudy ensured that she gained her insights from first-hand authorities:

I analysed official records as well as debates between domestic experts engaged in 2005–2010 within the Syrian Association for Economic Sciences – the powerful voices of insiders often disregarded by foreign analysts in discussions about Syria. I also carried out interviews with local experts, refugees, activists and dissidents under conditions of anonymity.

Having gained a deep understanding of the issues, she then wrote up her analysis in an article whose title says it all: ‘The Syrian Revolution: A Story of Politics, not Climate Change’.

The political perspective

To set the scene, Daoudy acknowledges the role that the Syrian conflict has in the minds of many analysts:

Academic and policy debates have conflated the drivers of climate change and conflict, warning policymakers about the violent effects of drought, famine and migration. As Syria’s 2011 Arab Spring uprisings devolved into conflict following brutal repression by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the country became a showcase for ‘climate-induced’ displacement and unrest.

But she then asks the question that should have been on everyone’s mind:

To some, climate change caused a major drought in Syria from 2006–2010; the drought caused agricultural failure in the country’s breadbasket region in the northeast; and agricultural failure caused poverty, migration and discontent – ultimately culminating in the uprisings. Yet droughts have plagued the country for decades. Why 2011 and not before?

Indeed, as she goes on to explain, the 2006-2010 drought was far from unique:

A longitudinal analysis shows that the environmental effects of the 1998–2001 drought (Drought I) were more severe than the 2006–2010 drought (Drought II). During Drought I, temperatures increased by a yearly average of 5.07%, impacting soil moisture levels. Drought II only averaged a 3.93% temperature increase from pre-drought years. A similar discrepancy is reflected when comparing the variability and mean of precipitation levels between the two droughts. The second drought’s larger impact on food and water insecurity must therefore be traced as a function of political and economic factors.

Contrary to the popular storyline, her research paints a picture of structural inequalities and governmental incompetence:

First, my research shows the combined effects of climate change, drought and massive migration by rural communities in northeast Syria did not produce the protests. Unemployed farmers – the biggest casualties of the drought – were not the instigators of the 2011 uprisings. Second, the seeds of discontent were planted by unsustainable government practices and structural inequalities, which aggravated poverty and food insecurity.

The picture is quite complex, and so a full understanding requires that Dauody’s article be consulted. However, in brief, the problems were caused by a botched political transition between Ba’athist socialism and a new social market economy:

The uneven transition from Ba’athist socialism to the ‘Social Market Economy’ shaped the vulnerability of the Syrian northeast. The Ba’athist infrastructure legacy combined with bureaucratic corruption led to failing irrigation plans, widespread illegal well digging, groundwater overconsumption and soil deterioration. In the words of Yassin Haj-Saleh, in discussion with the author, ‘Syrians have become dependent on “Vitamin W” [for wasta, bribe]. It is required for everything’.

Still, those who are convinced that the Syrian war was largely due to climate change will argue that these political upheavals merely rendered the populace more vulnerable to the underlying problem of global warming. The problem with this idea, however, is that it fails to explain why Syria has endured so many previous, equally severe droughts without the ensuing civil unrest. As one local expert put it:

I defy anyone to claim that the displaced populations triggered unrest. We Syrians have always lived in arid areas, and climate variability has been historically high. The problem was not about climate change but about the mistakes made by the government. There was no transparency in food-security policies, ideological paralysis, heightened corruption, and the relevant ministries did not recognise their mistakes. No one dared to say anything out of fear. The main triggers of the Revolution were corruption, lack of justice, and the mistakes made in the government’s development plans’.

Unfortunately, these testimonies do not assist the favoured narrative and so fail to influence the thinking of Western think tanks.

A failed example

There is a profound illogicality to the argument that climate change caused the Syrian war, and it starts with a failure to appreciate that a drought is a climatic phenomenon that has to be measured in climatic terms. One cannot argue that a greater human impact is evidence of a greater role played by climate unless one has been able to properly isolated all causal factors. In the case of the Syrian war, a drought’s greater impact has been taken as a measure of increased scale, but this conclusion is far from certain when one looks at the climate data. And even if there are long-term climatic trends, a much stronger correlation clearly points the finger towards trends in political instability and infrastructural degradation.

Although there remain legitimate reasons to speculate regarding future, climate-related conflicts and mass migrations, the Syrian war cannot be used as a means of raising the conjecture to the level of established fact. A great deal has been made of bodies washed upon UK shores being the casualties of climate change, but these are ideas that are fanciful at best and, at worst, a cynical and hysterical response designed to instil fear into the hearts and minds of those who are deemed to be apathetic in the face of a supposedly existential threat. We need better analyses than these, and we need better journalism.

31 Comments

  1. Interesting John. I suggest that THIS is the best and most accessible debunking of the supposedly existential threat.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. There are so many relevant factors that a focus on blaming climate change for the Syrian civil war is absurdly simplistic.

    The population of Syria increased six-fold between 1950 and 2011, and that increase spiked dramatically before the trouble kicked off, driven in large part by mass immigration from refugees fleeing conflict in the region, conflict which was not caused by climate change.

    Throw in to the mix the catalyst that was the Arab spring, and the hopes it generated that a vile repressive regime might be overthrown, and it becomes immediately apparent that there are many factors that led to the Syrian civil war. That climate change (as opposed to climate) was a contributory factor seems extremely unlikely.

    Of course , if climate change really does represent the threat to our security that is sometimes claimed, then maybe we should (at a global, not at a damaging local level) try to do something about it. Instead we get this:

    It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Mark,

    I should stress that when I say that it is plausible that a warming planet could heighten the risk of increased conflict, I am not saying a lot. ‘Plausible’ means ‘seemingly reasonable’, but that doesn’t mean to say that it is possible, only that it is seemingly possible. It is seemingly possible that the Syrian war was caused by climate change, until you look into it properly. As for the idea that environmentally friendly armies will render future conflict less likely, that idea doesn’t even clear the low bar of plausibility.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Old-time climatology had a word for places such as Syria. That word was “arid”. It saved having to repeat oneself by having to repeat the word “drought” for events regarded as the norm. Indeed conflating the two was considered bad form or lazy usage as it debased the concept of drought reserved for unusual and extreme events. But those days have passed I’m afraid as those old-time climatologists return their mortal remains to the grand biogeochemical cycles in the sky (and soil).

    Liked by 4 people

  7. Oh come off it Jaime. Place all the blame for the present instability on the Zionists, ignore the fact that a good percentage of Israeli society is Islamic and live in relative peace. When I visited more than twenty years ago I was struck by the mutual fear everyone went through. When we expressed a desire to see the Dead Sea this involved a major operation, both because of the human threat and because of the searing temperatures. I could not voluntarily live in such an environment, and upon reflection later realised we should not imposed our desire upon our friends. Then, and I presume now, it is a remarkably fragile environment for almost all involved.

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  8. It’s probably a little late for me to be saying this but the Wikipedia entry for the Syrian war has links to a few good articles debunking the supposed role played by climate change. In particular, there is this excellent paper:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822?via%3Dihub

    Given how thoroughly debunked the idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” is, it is dismaying to see it still playing such a central role in current thinking about climate change risk. It just goes to show the power of a plausible narrative.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. The Daoudy article is a great find. The origins of the Syrian war are all so familiar: a sudden change in societal structure which sets off a cascade of ensuing dysfunction. By contrast, the cocky Australian super-academics just have a shallow grand narrative that boils down to “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. No in-depth knowledge of a vast and deep foreign culture or its political history required, just slap a few statistics together and “Bob’s your Uncle” as an older generation of Australians were fond of saying. It’s the self assured shallowness that gets my goat with that type of academic. But well done, a very enjoyable take-down indeed.

    You ought to slightly rejig it to make it new again and get it onto Spiked, Critic or UnHerd. Or since it’s deflating a couple of Aussie academics with truly Raygun-esque obliviousness to real talent, maybe trade places with Tony Thomas and get it onto Quadrant. Deserves a very wide audience.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Ian,

    Thank you for the feedback. In fact, I think there are quite a number of articles that have appeared on Cliscep over the years that were deserving of a wider audience. I even suspect our detractors would agree on this, but for quite different reasons, of course.

    As for our Australian duo, I would be more than interested to hear from Tony Thomas to see if he has anything to say about them or the think tank that they have created. If you look on the Breakthrough website you can see that Spratt and Dunlop have been very busy churning out white papers designed to put the fear of God in the complacent. There’s enough material there to keep the likes of me busy for quite a while, but I think I’ll give them a rest for the time being.

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  11. No, no, no, no! I’m not having this:

    “Climate change is turbo-charging Somalia’s problems – but there’s still hope”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62rr5qe602o

    The only thing being turbo-charged here is the nonsense that climate change wars are with us already. I don’t like to see the word ‘playbook’ used but I’m going to use it anyway. This article is straight out of the ‘Climate change caused the Syrian War’ playbook. And keep in mind that it was written by Justin Rowlatt, the guy who has just published a BBC article trumpeting Lammy’s efforts to re-launch the Labour government’s net zero commitments as some sort of leadership in word security. Step aside all you superpowers. You thought that was your job, but it turns out that Starmer and his fellow demi-gods on stilts are running that particular show.

    As always, the operative soundbite is left to the last paragraph:

    There is hope. But with climate change turbo-charging the conflict here, this country will need continued international help to make peace and build resilience against our changing climate.

    If only Superman were here. Oh wait…

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Ed says that a dilemma is just a choice between two things and a trilemma is between three.

    Is he really that thick? A dilemma is when one is confronted with a choice between two things that are both undesirable, such as the Devil and the deep blue sea. Similarly for a trilemma. There is no way that those terms apply when choosing between the desirable, and there is no way I would want to take advice from the illiterate.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. On second thoughts, I suppose he is claiming a trilemma, based upon it being a choice between which necessity is to be foregone. So I have to let him off with the lesser crime of thinking he has a personality when he hasn’t — just one of the many self-delusions on show.

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  15. I know that I am declaring my bid to be pedant of the year by doing this, but I still think it is worth spelling out exactly what is wrong with Miliband’s explanation.

    He starts out by making the mistake of describing a dilemma as simply being a choice between two options, and he illustrates this by showing a choice between two delicious sweets. This is wrong. A dilemma is specifically a choice between two undesirable options, so the example should be, say, between having a turd pie or a maggot sandwich. He then simply extends this idea to three options by adding another delicious sweet to the graphic, leaving the viewer with the idea that it is now a choice between three desirable options. This is still wrong.

    However, the three relevant objectives (sustainability, affordability and security) are not akin to sweets, since they can all be seen as necessities. The choice being made is then a choice between undesirable outcomes, i.e. which necessity or necessities are we to drop. He then talks about fossil fuels having been the decision to abandon sustainability rather than abandoned affordability and security. But this example is still just a dilemma, i.e. a choice between two undesirable outcomes. To make it into a trilemma he has to explain what the other two possible undesirable combinations were that he had in mind and what policies would they have potentially resulted from. And keep in mind that he would be choosing two from a remaining five possible combinations, i.e. just drop affordability, just drop security, drop affordability and security, drop sustainability and security, drop sustainability and affordability.

    So I still say, he’s not that bright is our Eddy.

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  16. He’s taking onboard the TikTok approach to policy communication. Kindergarten stuff, really.

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  17. Max,

    I couldn’t agree with you more. But this isn’t a mastermind failing to make himself understood because of the childish method of communication he has chosen. This is someone who is talking down to his audience when he has no intellectual pedestal to stand on. If you are going to patiently explain what a dilemma and trilemma are, you need to understand that:

    a) The prefix alludes to the number of courses of action possible, not the number of objectives that are being considered.

    b) The courses of action are all problematic in their own way.

    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dilemma

    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trilemma

    Choosing between cheesecake and trifle is not a dilemma – it’s a win-win situation. Adding a cookie to the equation and saying you can still only have one makes it win-win-win.

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  18. Fortunately, Milibrain is not faced by a dilemma or a trilemma when he chooses to engage his single brain cell – when it’s not out on loan to Lammy or Rayner that is. I suppose the actual trilemma is faced by Trilateral Commission member Weird Stalin in deciding who should have the brain cell, and when, in order to communicate party policy to the plebs.

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  19. Of course, when it comes to evidence of an intellectual deficit at the heart of government, the case against Lammy is overwhelming:

    Liked by 1 person

  20. I’ve been rummaging around to see if I could find an expert similar to Marwa Daoudy who could help me debunk the narrative of the Somali war being ‘turbo-charged’ by climate change. Unfortunately, thus far, I haven’t found anything that explicit. However, I have noted one thing. If one googles for the causes of the Somali war, without looking for any particular one, a great many factors are documented; and yet climate change never gets a mention. But if one specifically asks for the causal link between climate change and the war, one is rewarded with a seemingly endless list of accounts unequivocally making the link.

    It’s all very well for the likes of Justin Rowlatt to quote scientists saying this flood or that drought has been made so much more likely due to climate change, but going from that to form the link with increased conflict is just hand-waving, and no amount of emotive talk of ‘turbo-charging’ adds anything to the substantiation of this link. The question I would ask myself is how much had climate change increased the likelihood of seeing the historical levels of conflict? I suspect the risk factor has been increased by a negligible amount, if at all, when compared to causal factors such as an initial resistance to a military junta, the legacy and on-going influence of colonialism, a long-standing culture of inter-tribal conflict, chronic unemployment, a proliferation of weaponry entering the country during the Cold War, the continued ambitions of Al-Shabaab jihadists, the many failures of US and UN leaders, lawlessness due to poverty and weak government, and last but not least, man’s insatiable and often corruptible lust for power.

    Greater squabbling over water holes? Nah!

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Hypothesis: for every event that was made more likely due to climate change, there was an event that didn’t happen because of climate change.

    I am quite convinced that the quantity and damage of weather disasters will be the same as now in some hallowed future when we get back to 350 ppm CO2. But for arid areas, there is an undoubted benefit of climate change via the CO2 fertilisation effect. On net, it seems to me, that climate change will be beneficial. There will be losers as well as winners. Hence the operative word “change”. The absurd and one-sided “climate breakdown”, or whatever we’re calling it this week, cannot be representative of reality.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. Jit,

    On a similar theme, for every plausible ‘just so story’ claiming a war has been exacerbated by climate change, an equaly plausible one could be proposed explaining how the war has been rendered less severe. Baboons on the Serengeti come to mind.

    Like

  23. John R, you might appreciate this:

    “BBC’s Rowlatt Claims Climate Change is “Turbo-Charging” Problems in Somalia Despite Temperatures and Rainfall Being the Same as 100 Years Ago”

    https://dailysceptic.org/2024/09/20/bbcs-rowlatt-claims-climate-change-is-turbo-charging-problems-in-somalia-despite-temperatures-and-rainfall-being-the-same-as-100-years-ago/

    Like the Christian missionaries of old, Justin Rowlatt journeys to the benighted ‘Dark’ Continent to bring glad tidings of green salvation to endemic problems of constant warfare and poverty. Climate change is “turbo-charging” problems in Somalia, but there is hope in harnessing the bountiful breezes and sun beams, the BBC’s High Priest of Climate Alarm reports. Somalia is not always an easy place in which to live, but as usual with the neo-missionaries of Gaia worship the state-funded saviour of souls confuses individual weather events with long-term climate changes. His message of a changing climate bringing woe and misfortune might collect more believers if the five-year average temperature in the country in 2022 was not almost the same as that recorded in 1922 – 26.98°C compared to 26.92°C. No change there to worry about – or in the amount of rainfall, since the 1991-2020 period was more or less the same as that recorded 100 years ago.

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  24. Jit: Come to think of it, how come the calamity-mongers haven’t cottoned on to that arid-zone greening thing with a concocted juicy scenario for global calamity. The world needs its arid zone; Hadley Cell goes the same way as the Gulf Stream; global circulation stops circulating; we’re all doomed.

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  25. Mark,

    Although the Daily Sceptic article makes it clear that drought is not a new phenomenon in Somalia, one has to accept that recent droughts have been notable. What is missing, however, is the data that demonstrates a clear correlation between soil aridity and the numbers of Somalians meeting a violent death. That’s why I say that the ‘turbo-charging’ narrative is mere hand-waving. Also missing from article’s such as Rowlatt’s is any mention of other factors that have been contributing to the recent degradation of soil quality, such as deforestation, overgrazing and soil erosion. Of these three, deforestation, in particular, should have been given much more prominence since it has been especially acute in Somalia during the last 20 years due to the charcoal trade:

    The Sool Plateau in North Eastern Somalia, which includes the tiger bush ecosystem of this study, is one of the regions in Eastern Africa most frequently hit by drought…The progressive reduction of vegetation cover is one of the main types of land degradation in the whole country, due to different activities like livestock grazing and wood collection which cannot be sufficiently managed and controlled due to the lack of security (Omuto et al., 2009). The tree layer is well known as the main vegetation type used for fuel wood collection, fencing and construction materials. Charcoal, produced primarily from slow-growing acacia trees, is an important domestic energy source as in many African countries, but in Somalia its production is largely driven by foreign demand (UNEP, 2008). Trade in charcoal, known to many as “black gold”, has developed into a very lucrative line of business (Bakonyi and Abdullahi, 2006). Every month, shiploads of charcoal are exported to the neighbouring Arab states and the profit made by well-organized armed groups makes it difficult for the local tribes to protect and manage their trees in a sustainable way.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140196311001558

    If poor soil quality leading to famine is supposed to be the mediator by which climate change causes conflict, one has to take into account the extent to which the causation goes the other way, i.e. conflict is causing poor soil quality and not the other way round. Such vitally important details never enter into the simplistic but politically motivated narratives of the likes of the BBC, nor just about every other Western analyst. This matters, because it is such half-baked analyses that are fueling the climate change war narrative that lies behind Lammy’s ‘most serious threat to our national security’ garbage.

    There again, what can you expect from someone who thinks that radioactivity was discovered by Marie and Pierre Antoinette?

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Don’t forget the Charney mechanism explaining perpetuation of drought at desert margins through the generation of surface winds.

    Like

  27. Max,

    From what I can see, the Charney mechanism would be a natural consequence of the deforestation, i.e.:

    Albedo is lowest in a forest, which absorbs up to 80% of sunlight, thus warming surface temperatures, and is highest in a desert or snowpack, which reflects upwards of 80% of light, which cools due to the lack of retained solar radiation. Charney argued that the denudation of vegetation by grazing and human activity increased albedo, which led to cooling via a loss of radiative energy; the decline in energy ultimately weakened the Hadley circulation, which brought rain to the Sahel; this process therefore caused a decline in rainfall (Charney 1975; Charney et al. 1977).

    https://forestecosyst.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40663-017-0124-9

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  28. Yes, that’s what he is famous for but I don’t know how well his hypothesised mechanism has stood the test of time. It was certainly big news back at the time of the Sahel drought when, half a century ago, Jean Rodier of Orstom and I put together our compendium of drought knowledge for the World Meteorological Office . https://library.wmo.int/records/item/68411-hydrological-aspects-of-drought?offset=2 Much of Charney’s prominence derived from the novelty of how he came to it via dynamical modelling, perhaps why we didn’t dwell much on it, both being somewhat “old school”. Flicking through the report now, I see virtually no reference to East Africa in general, let alone Somalia in particular. Probably a no-go area even then for “mother country” development interventions.

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  29. Max,

    Thanks for the further information. Even from my limited reading, it’s clear that this whole area is far from settled science.

    Like

  31. Mark,

    Climate change is a statistical phenomenon and warmongers are not reacting to statistics. All that is needed is the right preconditions, and if the conditions that are being posited have existed before without war breaking out, then they are clearly not sufficient. Furthermore, if war has previously broken out without those preconditions, then they are clearly not even necessary. The turbo-charging idea is a thin gruel indeed.

    Like

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