Climate Change
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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.
This is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet.
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.
Huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land because water ran out, their crops failed and so on. And increasingly they came into the cities already full of Iraqi refugees from that horror and that crisis. And this combined to create a very difficult situation.
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.
We're very careful not to say that the drought was caused by climate change. In fact, we say that what happened was this was a naturally occurring multi-year drought that was made much more severe by climate change. And that's a very important distinction. And we really are careful not to say that the uprising was sparked by climate change or that it was caused by climate change, or even to say that climate change was the most important factor.
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.
Many people take that claim about increasing likelihood and translate that into climate change was a cause of or a contributory factor to the drought, but that's not quite accurate. No individual weather event can be decisively attributed to climate change.
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.
Did climate change contribute to the Syrian conflict between 2007–2011?
Some have suggested looking at rainfall measurement in Syria tells a different story. But the existence of a climate change-influenced drought is not the only thing that needs to be true for the Syria hypothesis to work. This drought needs to have caused a huge internal migration from rural to urban areas. Colin Kelly's paper suggests that up to one and a half million Syrians left rural areas.
There was tension there before. The Iraqi refugees were already there and there were a lot of dissatisfaction with the Assad regime already. Then you add in another million to a million and a half people, many of whom were living in slums on the urban periphery. Basically, it comes down to a lack of resources. Not only was there a lack of employment for these internally displaced people, but there was a lack of food and water. It's not at all difficult to see how when people's basic human needs are not being met, there's going to be unrest.
So is his figure of one and a half million people leaving rural areas accurate? Here's Jan Selby again.
The figure of 1.5 million is extremely dubious. Kelly and colleagues' source for this is a very short news report simply citing a Syrian government official. There is no data to back this up. The figure, more importantly, is very much out of line with other estimates of the time, both from the UN and from the Syrian government, which put the figure of the number of migrants in the region of 200,000 to 300,000 people
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