Once again President Obama proved that he believes Americans are really stupid. Discussing the threat of climate change with noted “climatologist” Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, on Monday. President Obama bloviated that “powerful” studies suggest “the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war, and those droughts were caused by climate change.
“There’s already some really interesting work — not definitive but powerful — showing that the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war. Well, if you start magnifying that across a lot of states, a lot of nation states that already contain a lot of poor people who are just right at the margins of survival, this becomes a national security issue. And, that’s why even as we have members of Congress who scoff at climate change at the same time as they are saluting and wearing flag pins and extolling their patriotism they’re not paying attention to our Joints Chief of Staff and the Pentagon who are saying this is one of the most significant national security threats that we face over the next fifty years.”
There only one problem with the president’s claims…they’re bogus.
Let’s start with droughts. The science that states there has been no increase in droughts world-wide. In other words even if you believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket due to global warming, scientists say that climate change is not increasing the number of droughts in the world.
“It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Professor Roger Pielke Jr. said in his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
In May of 2014 Professor Pielke published a graph that shows the intensity of the planet’s droughts from 1982 to 2012. The graph shows that neither droughts nor their intensity have seen a growth trend during that 30-year period.
In January 2014, a paper published by Francesca de Chatel, a Dutch specialist on water issues in the Arab world concluded “[T]here is very little solid evidence” that climate change “will lead to more frequent and harsher droughts, [or] higher temperatures and lower and more unpredictable precipitation levels.”
And lets not forget at the time the Syrian Civil war started in 2014, there had been no global warming for sixteen years.
As far as the Syrian civil war goes, it 2011 Arab Spring which included major uprisings in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Bahrain, and smaller demonstrations in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Oman. But the “drought” Obama spoke of was in Syria. The war is now being fought among several factions: the Syrian Government, a loose alliance of Syrian Arab rebel groups, the Syrian Democratic Forces, Salafi jihadist groups, including al-Nusra Front and of course ISIS which started in Iraq thanks to Obama’s negligence in pulling US troops out too early, and not Syria.
So to summarize, Obama’s claims are wrong on three levels,
- There is no evidence that Climate Change causes drought, nor is there evidence that the number/scope of droughts are increasing.
- At the time the Syrian civil war started in 2014 the Earth’s temperatures hadn’t warmed for 16 years
- The Syrian civil war grew out of the Arab spring, not a drought.
In other words A+B+C=Obama is Full of Crap
