Norm’s note:

To my mind, there is increasingly a case to be made that the ‘global warming’ issue was conceived — or at least is being used opportunistically — both to create additional money-making opportunities for Western oligarchs and to co-opt, divide and confuse progressives and activists over which issues truly constitute the crises of our era.

With respect to how the ‘global warming’ issue is being leveraged in favour of moneyed interests, three examples easily come to mind: the ‘for profit’ carbon emissions schemes ; the political/bureaucratic capture of public funds or largesses by factions of so-called ‘experts’ or ‘researchers;’ and  the ‘for profit’ mitigation schemes being promoted, subsidized and undertaken by governments (for example, the multi-billion dollar ‘for profit’ desalination plants in Australia).  Along with the aforementioned ‘profit making’ opportunities, another theft now being committed under the cover of the ‘global warming’ crisis and that also deserves mention is the newfangled divestment drive in the oil extraction sector: “Major pension funds and insurance companies have joined the universities and churches that founded the divestment movement, all of whom fear the impact of climate change on both the world and the value of their investment portfolios.” (source of quote: here) In other words, the savings of communities and ordinary people are now being plundered by a liquidation of assets that is itself the primary agency undermining the market value of the assets.  For where there are panicked sellers of cheap market impacted and impaired assets, there are sophisticated buyers keenly focused on the guaranteed future returns of the assets.

The bigger and morally more reprehensible con, however, may be the manner in which the ‘global warming’ hysteria is now beginning to be used to conceal the true causes and consequences of profit motivated war and the wholesale slaughter of innocent human beings, all instigated or directly perpetrated the world over by the Anglo-American- Japanese-and-European Empire.  The unhinged drive of our political and corporate elites for more wealth and control is no longer the actually implicated and underlying criminal motive force, but changing weather patterns driven by CO2 emissions (see, for example, this article, written by Craig Welch, for National Geographic : Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says ).

And so it is that I offer you this post by Roger Andrews:

Climate alarmists are becoming progressively more strident, unscientific and indecorous in their attempts to get their message across to a largely disinterested public, but this surely marks a new low.

Drought, Climate, War, Terrorism, and Syria

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Roger Andrews

It’s routinely claimed that climate-change-induced drought in Syria was a major factor in triggering the Syrian civil war, the Syrian refugee crisis and the rise of ISIS. But are these claims supported by the data? This post investigates this question.

We begin with this quote from a Climate and Security article, which claims that the recent drought in Syria was the worst in Syria’s long history and is not alone in doing so:

From 2006-2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced, in the terms of one expert, “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago” …… This has led to a massive exodus of farmers, herders and agriculturally-dependent rural families from the countryside to the cities. Last January, it was reported that crop failures ….. just in the farming villages around the city of Aleppo, had led 200,000 rural villagers to leave for the cities.

Now look at Figure 1, which shows the GHCNv2 annual rainfall record for Aleppo (data from KNMI Climate Explorer). Average annual rainfall during the 2006-2011 period was only 9% lower than average annual rainfall over the preceding 55 years. The driest year during the period (2011) was only the seventh driest on record and 2006-2011 was only the 13th driest six-year period on record. Clearly the crop failures in the farming villages around Aleppo – which undoubtedly occurred – weren’t caused by a drought of Biblical proportions. In fact there doesn’t seem to have been a drought at Aleppo at all:

Figure 1: GHCN v2 monthly rainfall  record, Aleppo. The graphic is as it appears on  Climate Explorer except for the added shading

But Aleppo is a single data point in a large country. What happened elsewhere?

Continue reading: Drought, Climate, War, Terrorism, and Syria / Energy Matters