Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The text read... In the line of fire, losing the war against climate change.
Earth is smouldering.
From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swathes of the Northern Hemisphere.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
Later in the programme, we'll be answering some of your questions about the numbers used in the climate change conference in Paris.
President Obama has called climate change a serious threat to global security, but has it already caused a war?
Speaking to Sky News, Prince Charles from the British royal family said there was absolutely a link between a long-running drought and the conflict in Syria.
But was climate change really one of the major reasons the conflict in Syria began in 2011?
For that to be correct, a number of other things need to be true.
Firstly, you need a drought that's linked to climate change.
Well, there was a drought between 2007 and 2010 in Syria.
But droughts there aren't uncommon.
As one recent academic paper puts it, droughts in Syria have occurred almost every second year over the past half century.
So can we pin this one on climate change?
Colin Kelly from the University of California was the lead author on a study which concluded that global warming played a significant part.
Their study claims that the probability of a drought as severe as the one between 2007 and 2010 occurring was made two to three times more likely by climate change.
But Jan Selby, a professor of international relations at the University of Sussex in the UK, is doubtful.
Not only is the matter of attribution in question, the Kelly paper focuses mainly on winter rainfall in the Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from southern Russia to Saudi Arabia.
Some have suggested looking at rainfall measurement in Syria tells a different story.
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