The other day, I was told by a friend that the civil war in Syria was the result of global warming. I know that sounds like the punch line to a joke, but it is the truth. You see, the fighting in Syria is the result of lower crop yields in Syria due to climate change, or so I was told with a straight face. I looked on the internet and found a series of articles making this preposterous claim.
Think about that for a moment. There is a terrible civil war in Syria with more than a quarter of a million people dead, many more injured and millions homeless. The war was caused when president Assad decided to try to stop some protests against his regime by killing protesters at random. Assad's brutality did not stop the protests but instead turned them into a civil war. Now, the left wants to use this tragedy as yet another example of global warming consequences when the two things are clearly unrelated.
Because there is a supposed relationship between the crops produced in Syria which have supposedly fallen due to global warming, and the onset of the civil war, I decided to look into this. What I found is that during the period when global warming has supposedly been at its worst (1990 to present), production of the most important crops in Syria have been at historic HIGHS not lows. Here is a chart from the US Department of Agriculture showing wheat production in Syria over time. It not only shows that wheat production is more than two times higher than it used to be before global warming kicked in, but also that in the years just prior to the start of the civil war production was growing rather strongly. That means that there is no truth at all to the claim that global warming is to blame for the Syrian civil war.
I realize that these are facts, so many on the environmental left will want to ignore them. Nevertheless, it still bothers me that people who ought to know better just don't. We cannot live in a fantasy world in which leftist delusions triumph over facts.
Think about that for a moment. There is a terrible civil war in Syria with more than a quarter of a million people dead, many more injured and millions homeless. The war was caused when president Assad decided to try to stop some protests against his regime by killing protesters at random. Assad's brutality did not stop the protests but instead turned them into a civil war. Now, the left wants to use this tragedy as yet another example of global warming consequences when the two things are clearly unrelated.
Because there is a supposed relationship between the crops produced in Syria which have supposedly fallen due to global warming, and the onset of the civil war, I decided to look into this. What I found is that during the period when global warming has supposedly been at its worst (1990 to present), production of the most important crops in Syria have been at historic HIGHS not lows. Here is a chart from the US Department of Agriculture showing wheat production in Syria over time. It not only shows that wheat production is more than two times higher than it used to be before global warming kicked in, but also that in the years just prior to the start of the civil war production was growing rather strongly. That means that there is no truth at all to the claim that global warming is to blame for the Syrian civil war.
I realize that these are facts, so many on the environmental left will want to ignore them. Nevertheless, it still bothers me that people who ought to know better just don't. We cannot live in a fantasy world in which leftist delusions triumph over facts.
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