Global Warming, the Real Cause of the Syrian Civil War?

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By  Alec Torres
Francesco Femia has identified in a new culprit in the Syrian civil war: climate change. While it’s not the direct cause of the conflict in Syria, Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, argues that climate change created a “powder keg” in the country, creating the conditions that made the civil war more likely.
According to Femia, climate change had caused a massive drought in Syria that, coupled with the Assad regime’s resource mismanage..ment, created a “large-scale environmental and human disaster.” He believes the crisis led to massive migration into urban areas, which were already hard-pressed economically, sparking large-scale civil unrest. This unrest eventually became a civil war.
While Femia made clear, in an appearance on public television’s Moyers & Company, that he was “not making any causal claims about climate change causing conflict,” he called climate change a “threat multiplier” that ”makes other threats to human security worse.” (This February, the Center for American Progress released a report, to which Femia contributed, laying out a range of theories about global warming and the Arab Spring.)...Continue reading...