Bernie Is Absolutely Right: Climate Change Makes Terrorism Worse

[azmom]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/11/14/bernie_sanders_was_right_on_climate_change_and_terrorism_at_the_debate.html

Even though the wounds in Paris are still very fresh after Friday’s attacks, Sanders appropriately used this moment to highlight the current and future global tragedies that unmitigated climate change will surely cause. A landmark study earlier this year provided convincing evidence that a multiyear drought linked to global warming helped spark the catastrophic Syrian war, which helped give rise to ISIS. The Pentagon has consistently called climate change a “threat multiplier.” “If we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say,” Sanders said at tonight’s debate, “you're going to see all kinds of international conflict.”

In just two weeks, more than 100 heads of state will gather in Paris to negotiate the world’s first global agreement on climate change. Their job, in the aftermath of the tragic attacks, has never been more important.

[starroute]

1. Here's the earlier Slate article that lays it out in detail

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/03/02/study_climate_change_helped_spark_syrian_civil_war.html

We know the basic story in Syria by now: From 2006-2010, an unprecedented drought forced the country from a groundwater-intensive breadbasket of the region to a net food importer. Farmers abandoned their homes—school enrollment in some areas plummeted 80 percent—and flooded Syria’s cities, which were already struggling to sustain an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Iraq. The Syrian government largely ignored these warning signs, helping sow discontent that ultimately spawned violent protests. The link from drought to war was prominently featured in a Showtime documentary last year. A preventable drought-triggered humanitarian crisis sparked the 2011 civil war, and eventually, ISIS.
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A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science provides the clearest evidence yet that human-induced global warming made that drought more likely. The study is the first to examine the drought-to-war narrative in quantitative detail in any country, ultimately linking it to climate change.

“It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” said Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a meteorologist who’s now a professor at Penn State University. After decades of poor water policy, “there was no resilience left in the system.” Titley says, given that context, that the record-setting drought caused Syria to “break catastrophically.”

[starroute]

2. And this interview from two years ago

It's amazing to me that Western analysts missed what was happening up until the very moment it all fell apart.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/10/drought-helped-caused-syrias-war-will-climate-change-bring-more-like-it/

This drought — combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques — led to significant devastation. According to updated numbers, the drought displaced 1.5 million people within Syria.

We found it very interesting that right up to the day before the revolt began in Daraa, many international security analysts were essentially predicting that Syria was immune to the Arab Spring. They concluded it was generally a stable country. What they had missed was that a massive internal migration was happening, mainly on the periphery, from farmers and herders who had lost their livelihoods completely.

Around 75 percent of farmers suffered total crop failure, so they moved into the cities. Farmers in the northeast lost 80 percent of their livestock, so they had to leave and find livelihoods elsewhere. They all moved into urban areas — urban areas that were already experiencing economic insecurity due to an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. But this massive displacement mostly wasn't reported. So it wasn't factoring into various security analyses. People assumed Syria was relatively stable compared to Egypt.

[eridani]

3. Possibly the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was the first water war

Israel warned that for Lebanon to keep taking water from the Jordan in what were regarded as excessive quantities would be regarded as an act of war.

[eridani]

4. Sanders Correctly Rattles Sabers—at the Climate Change Enemy

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/11/15/sanders-correctly-rattles-sabers-at-the-climate-change-enemy-part-1/

For everyone who understands climate change as humanity’s gravest existential threat ever, there was ONLY ONE winner of Democrats’ first presidential debate—Bernie Sanders. Frankly, so immeasurably superior is Bernie’s understanding of humankind’s climate emergency that no one else belonged on the same stage. If these debates were really about informing voters rather than providing a façade of democracy while Democrats coronate Hillary Clinton, the moderators would have silenced all other debaters while Bernie elaborated at length on his courageous, astute identification of climate change as our nation’s gravest security threat.

Clinton, by contrast, with characteristic spinelessness and hidebound views, gave no thought to climate as a security threat, and simply rubber-stamped the Beltway’s lunatic, unspoken consensus on continuing Bush’s “long war” on terror that will prove Obama’s worst legacy—with some gratuitous saber-rattling at Iran to boot. This at a time when our globally overextended military, needlessly making new enemies daily, is the world’s foremost burner of dirty fossil fuels. And when peace between nations is an essential prerequisite for addressing humanity’s encroaching climate catastrophe.

Unsurprisingly, news of Bernie’s overwhelming superiority on climate has filtered through to opinion leaders like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, who best understand our climate emergency, being in close, speed-dial touch with the world’s best climate scientists. They know which candidate will best defend climate; they form our sturdiest defense against mainstream media’s criminally irresponsible refusal to frame elections in climate rather than “horse-race” terms—a refusal that allowed Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to waltz nonchalantly through their whole series of presidential debates without mentioning our planet’s gravest crisis at all. Unfortunately, the climate movement they lead has a virtual allergy to brass-knuckle, in-the-trenches politics. Because Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein routinely dodge the controversy of endorsing candidates and naming reprehensible names—perhaps understandably, considering their desire to build a “big tent” climate movement—we have to discern their preferences by more subtle signs.

[thesquanderer]

5. Tricky to blame ISIS on *both* the IWR and climate change

Despite the link you can make between climate change and the likelihood of increased international conflict, I don't think that the debate's discussion of the attacks in France were the right time/place/context for that bit of conversation, I don't think that served him well.