Prince Charles ‘wrong’ on climate link to Syria war

By Paul Homewood

From The Times:

Scientists have accused the Prince of Wales of exaggerating the link between climate change and the civil war in Syria.

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 horror 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”.

The study, published in the journal Political Geography, concludes: “Given the urgency of the climate change challenge and the contestation around it, plus the media’s preference for striking, overblown stories . . . it is incumbent on analysts not to exaggerate climate-conflict linkages, or to champion false but headline-friendly statistics.” Jan Selby, lead author and director of the Centre for Conflict and Security Research at the University of Sussex, said: “It is extraordinary this claim has become so widely accepted when the evidence for it is so thin.

“Climate change is a very real challenge, and will undoubtedly have significant conflict and security consequences, but there is no good evidence this is what was going on in this case. It is vital experts and policymakers resist the temptation to make exaggerated claims about climate change. Overblown claims only risk fuelling climate scepticism.”

Mike Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, said: “The drought in northeastern Syria was undoubtedly severe, but is not necessarily part of a desiccating trend and cannot unambiguously be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.”

The study said commentators should have been cautious about linking the civil war to climate change because a similar false claim about the 2003-05 war in Darfur had already been debunked by scientists.

That conflict was widely described as the “first climate war” and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was among those who made the link to climate change. Several studies between 2008 and 2014 found no evidence that climate change caused the Darfur war.

The prince’s theory was supported by a 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that “human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict”.

Clarence House declined to comment on the new study.

http://ift.tt/2vKAkMy

This study only confirms the analysis carried out by Roger Andrews at Euan Mearns’ site a while ago.

While the great British public are accustomed to the drivel often spouted by our future King, the statement by Jan Selby is highly significant: