Commentary: Drought Influenced Syrian Civil War; So What, Says U.S. Congress
//by Keith Schneider
U.S. Congress on an island of reflexive denial.
Australia, which suffered the severe consequences of a deep drought that ended in 2012, made big investments in coal production and export infrastructure. The question is, will that investment have substantial value over the 35-year design life of the facilities? Here, a coal loading terminal near Sydney. Photo © Aaron Jaffe / Circle of Blue
By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
A paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States added fresh, peer-reviewed details about how a malicious four-year (2007 to 2010) drought in Syria played a role in touching off a calamitous civil war in 2011. The long rein of water scarcity ruined the farm economy and drove over 1 million farmers and their families into unstable resource-scarce cities inspired by the Arab Spring to rebel against authoritarian rule.
The paper, like others before it, identifies climate change as the primary cause for the deepest and most economically disastrous drought in Syria’s history. The paper makes a powerful case for explaining that at least a portion of the anguish and fury of the civil war, the bedlam of obfuscation and bloody torment that has spread from Syria to Iraq to Beirut to Paris, is due to the Earth’s response to mankind’s ecological abuse.
This singular thought, that climate change can stir dangerous human conflict, is gaining salience across much of the world. One of its lone holdouts is the U.S. Congress, which apparently abhors science and prefers existing in an illusory landscape riven by the fury of its own ideology. More on that later.
A vicious climate change-influenced flood in Uttarakhand, India killed thousands in 2013 and wrecked the Himalayan state’s hydropower sector, which hasn’t recovered. Here a dam in Okund, on the Mandakani River, was smashed by boulders carried by floodwaters at the speed of a stampede. Photo © Dhruv Malhotra / Circle of Blue
We’ve Seen It Up Close
Those of us who’ve witnessed firsthand the power of the Earth now to disrupt previously stable hydrological cycles, and cause global havoc, bear no such doubts.
California now reckons with a four-year drought that is putting grave pressure on groundwater supplies and that several climatologists theorize is a facet of an enduring cycle of water scarcity unfolding in the American West.
Last year I reported on a vicious Himalayan flood that killed as many as 30,000 people and wrecked the hydropower dams of Uttarakhand, India. The cloudburst that dumped a foot of rain on high Himalayan shoulders, and caused the banks of a big alpine lake to rupture, was later deemed by scientists to be one of the year’s significant examples of the hazards of climate change. The economic and technical consequences of the Uttarakhand flood also caved in India’s hydropower construction sector, and damaged the country’s ability to diversify its electrical generating industry with carbon-free energy sources.
In Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley, industrial, water-wasting poultry farms proliferate. The farms compete with smaller family farms for scarce groundwater in a region where surface water supplies are not assured much of the year. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
In 2008, my colleagues and I spent time in Australia’s Murray-Darling basin, that country’s primary food-producing region, to report on the consequences of a 12-year drought. As a result of the long dry spell Australia’s rice industry, the largest in the southern hemisphere, collapsed. More than 1 million metric tons of rice vanished from world markets, contributing to steep price increases for grain. The collapse of Australia’s rice harvest was one case in point. Another was wheat. Australia’s wheat growers during those dry years managed to harvest just over half of the 20 million metric tons of grain they normally produced. Australia was typically the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat. Recall that the Arab Spring in 2010 was touched off by rising food prices.
A year earlier my colleague, J. Carl Ganter, produced a project in Tehuacan, Mexico that showed how deep drought in one of that country’s prime grain producing regions closed farms and forced young men to seek work outside the region. Many migrated to the United States, a factor in the immigration concerns that roiled American policy circles.
Governments Respond, At Last
The Obama administration has proposed new federal rules to limit carbon emissions from U.S. coal-fired power stations, like this one owned by CPS Energy near San Antonio, Texas. Coal-state lawmakers are battling the White House, contending that climate change is a “hoax,” and the rule is costly to implement and unnecessary. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
As climate change and drought fray the fragile linen of the Earth’s human community, we’re also witnessing how governments are yielding to its unmistakable power. Earlier this month President Obama cancelled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that would have transported Canadian tar sands oil, the dirtiest carbon source on Earth, to refineries along the Gulf Coast. The New York attorney general is investigating ExxonMobil for securities fraud, a charge derived from the company’s campaign to shelve its own science of carbon dangers and instead foster groups and policymakers that deny the science of climate change.
This week, like divers surfacing above a sea of noise and ambivalence, the United States and other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents the world’s richest countries, agreed to eliminate export subsidies for the least efficient coal plants. It’s a measure that takes effect in 2017 and is another indicator that world powers now take climate change seriously and are prepared to make the United Nations climate negotiations, which begin in Paris later this month, a turning point for global ecological and economic security.
One Holdout
While the indifference that distinguished global attitudes about the Earth’s safety is giving way to needed measures of responsibility, there’s one vital place on the planet where the sediments of illusion remain undisturbed. The U.S. Senate this week voted to block the Obama administration’s proposal to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. The vote, almost entirely along party lines, is another perfect distillation of the dazzling assortment of abstract beliefs that Republican lawmakers express, not only about the rigor and accuracy of scientific research but also about the value of coal to the U.S. economy.
Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley is a global hotspot for the effects of climate change on a regional hydrological cycle. Rainfall is erratic and declining. Here a woman and child get water from a shrinking pond. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
The tissue of Republican dogma about climate change and climate science will eventually rupture. The California drought, the Australian drought, the Uttarakhand flood, the Sao Paulo drought, Syria’s civil war, and so many other recent ecological and economic disasters formally linked to climate change, are pouring the disinfecting waters of inescapable reality into the party’s dark grotto of denial.
Circle of Blue’s senior editor and chief correspondent based in Traverse City, Michigan. He has reported on the contest for energy, food, and water in the era of climate change from six continents. Contact
Keith Schneider
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