Vermont
Public Radio Comment for April 3rd, 2014
INTRO:
The latest warning of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, is that things are bad and going to get worse. This morning,
commentator and veteran ABC News foreign correspondent Barrie Dunsmore examines
one consequence that sometimes gets lost in the headlines.
TEXT:
We don’t really need United Nations climate experts to warn us. If we merely
look around America, we see polar vortexes in the deep south, record droughts
in the south and west that starve crops and feed forest fires, excessive
tornados churning through the country’s mid-section and once rare powerful hurricanes
and blizzards plowing up the Atlantic coast seemingly every weekend. We know
instinctively that our weather is profoundly changing- and yet far too many of
us are seemingly oblivious or resigned to nature’s warnings. What will it take
to shatter this indifference?
What
if I were to tell you that what set off the current civil war in Syria, in
which 150,000 people have been killed and millions made refugees - was not
initially a dispute over democracy- or dictatorship - or religion. It was ignited by climate change. That was the
conclusion in a lengthy report titled Understanding Syria, published last year
in the Atlantic. The author is William Polk, one of America’s true renaissance
men - diplomat, academic, adventurer and Middle East specialist for more than half
a century. I wrote about his analysis at the time, but in view of the latest
U.N. global climate update, it’s very much worth revisiting.
-Four
years of devastating drought from 2006 to 2011 turned Syria into a land like
the American dust bowl of the 1930s. It was the worst drought ever recorded in
Syria.
-Over
a decade, extreme weather patterns dramatically reduced the arable land, the
water and the crops needed to support a rapidly increasing population.
-Those
years of drought and dust storms caused 800,000 farmers to lose their livelihood
and a quarter of them simply gave up their land. Crop failures reached 75%. As
much as 85% of livestock died.
Having
set the scene, historian Polk then described what happened next. Tens of
thousands of frightened, angry, hungry and impoverished former farmers jammed
into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch
fire.
The
spark was set on March 15th, 2011, when a relatively small group
gathered in the town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help
them. Instead of meeting with the protestors and hearing their complaints, the
government saw them as subversives. President Bashar Assad ordered a military
crackdown which backfired - and riots soon broke out all over the country. What
had begun as a food and water issue, had turned into a political and religious
death struggle.
That
brief summary is a classic case study of how climate change can provoke violent
breakdowns in civil order - and in Syria’s case become a full scale civil war.
Syria is an early omen. Climate change, if left unchecked, will eventually lead
to water and food shortages on a global scale that will threaten the very
survival of millions of people. It’s an open question if any political system
will be able to contain the kinds of anarchy that could be unleashed by such a
human catastrophe.
I welcome your comments. To post your thoughts, click the word "comments" below.
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