NewScientist (7 March 2015) suggests in “Droughts in Syria and California linked to climate change” (paywall) (print: “Syrian war’s dry roots”) that climate change may be linked to the extended drought in Syria, and be one of the precipitating factors of the Syrian war.
Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues analysed Syrian weather data since 1931, and found that the winter rainfall that is crucial for crops has steadily declined. Over the same period, temperatures have risen, drying soils faster. The only explanation lies in humanity’s greenhouse emissions, says Kelley. Climate models, his team found, predict such changes for the region.
The team used statistics to tease apart annual ups and downs in precipitation from the long-term drying that seems to be linked to climbing carbon dioxide emissions (PNAS, doi.org/2jw).
Still, correlation of drought to climate change to war seems a bit of a stretch, as the article later notes:
“Placing stress on a society tends to make violence more likely,” says Andrew Solow of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. But, he says, political unrest in the Middle East might have led to violence in Syria anyway.
Teasing out the exacerbating factors causing a war seems to be quite a hazardous occupation; on the other hand, other voices have suggested that all wars are predicated on the acquisition of arable land, no matter what facade is used as an excuse for the war. Watching how the land reacts to the warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns in the near future may yield more clues as to probable outbreaks of warfare.
From the original PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) article:
… made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.
