Prince Charles ‘wrong’ on climate link to Syria war

Image credit: BBC News

No evidence for the Prince’s Syrian refugees theory but plenty that he’s a serial climate alarmist.

Scientists have accused the Prince of Wales of exaggerating the link between climate change and the civil war in Syria, says The Times (via the GWPF).

A new study found no evidence for the widely publicised theory that climate change was a factor in causing the war, in which more than 300,000 people have died and 11 million have been forced to leave their homes.

The researchers said making “overblown claims” based on poor evidence fuelled scepticism about the need for action on climate change, undermining the cause the prince was advancing.

The prince made the claim in November 2015 before the Paris climate change summit at which 194 countries agreed a global deal to cut emissions.

Speaking of the threat from climate change, he said: “There’s very good evidence that one of the major reasons for this terror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”

A study by King’s College London and the University of Sussex has debunked the prince’s claim, which was also made by Barack Obama when he was US president.

The researchers found that although northeastern Syria did experience a severe drought from 2007 to 2010, before the civil war started, the drought was not necessarily caused by human influences on global climate.

The scale of migration away from northeastern Syria was “on nothing like the scale which has been claimed”, the study says. Only 40,000 to 60,000 families moved, not the 1.5 million people often quoted by proponents of the climate change link.

The study said that migration was “probably more caused by economic liberalisation than by drought.”

Continued here: Prince Charles ‘Wrong’ On Climate Link To Syria War | The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)