Climate change helped cause Brexit, says Al Gore

By Ian Johnston Environment Correspondent

Brexit was caused in part by climate change, former US Vice-President Al Gore has said, warning that extreme weather is creating political instability “the world will find extremely difficult to deal with”.

Mr Gore, speaking at an event in which he previewed a sequel to his landmark 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, said the “principal” cause of the Syrian Civil War had been the worst drought in 900 years, which forced 1.5 million people to move from the countryside to the cities.

There they met a similar number of Iraqis who had fled the conflict in their homeland, creating powder keg conditions that Syrian government officials privately feared would explode.

The resulting war brought more refugees into Europe, causing political instability and helping convince some in the UK to vote to leave the European Union.

One of the most controversial Leave campaign posters showed a queue of refugees stretching into the distance with the caption “Breaking point: The EU has failed us all”. The then-Chancellor, George Osborne, described the poster as “disgusting and vile” and, like others who explicitly compared it to Nazi propaganda, said it had “echoes of literature used in the 1930s”.

Mr Gore, whose new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is due out in the UK in August, told an audience at the Advertising Week Europe event in London: “This collision between the power of industrial civilisation and the surprising fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem now poses a great danger that could even threaten the future of human civilisation itself.…

Der Spiegel Demolishes Syria War-Climate Paper By Kelley et al.: ‘Hardly Tenable’…’Distraction From Real Problems’

Bojanowski writes that the decisive evidence in the paper is based on climate models, which show drier conditions for Syria as the greenhouse effect intensifies. However Bojanowski later points out that the climate system in Syria is highly complex and that even the IPCC questions the capability of models reliably simulating the climate system of Syria and that the models are in wide disagreement:

The region lies on the boundary of three climate regions where the weather patterns are hardly understood, the IPCC report says. Foremost the climate simulation models diverge widely from each other when it comes to precipitation. It thus appears unwarranted to use the results of models as a way of confirming the effect of greenhouse gases, believes [William]Briggs.”

Sparse data

Another problem with the study, Spiegel reports, is that the data used were way too sparse, and quoted climate scientist Tim Brücher of the Max Planck Institute for Meterology: “The data should have been handled more critically.”

“Renders a poor service on behalf of climate science”

Probably seeing the paper more as an embarrassment rather than a contribution to science, even warmist institutes were unable to refrain from critique. Bojanowski quotes Thomas Bernauer, a conflict researcher at ETH in Zürich: “The entire paper is problematic as it renders a poor service on behalf of climate science.”

“Study is problematic at a number of levels”

In total Bojanowski says scientists criticize the paper on five aspects, saying that after the criticism, nothing is really left of the paper. According to Spiegel, University of Hamburg expert Tobias Ide says, “The study is problematic at a number of levels.” Peace scientist Christiane Fröhlich of the same university says the civil war “had more to do with wealthy citizens provoking it“.

“A distraction” from the real causes

Francesca De Châtel, Syria expert at Radboud University in Nijmegen, called the paper “a distraction” from the real causes of the war, and pointed out that drought periods are more the norm for the region. The problems stem foremost from land mismanagement and shoddy agricultural practices. Bojanowski quotes De Châtel: “The role of climate change is not only irrelevant, emphasizing it is even damaging.”

No evidence linking drought to civil war

Also Norwegian doctoral candidate Ole Magnus Theisen states that there is no evidence of a relationship between drought and conflict, Spiegel writes.…

Flashback 1914: Royal Geographical Society: ‘Is the world drying up?’ – ‘Professor Gregory said that in recent years they had often been warned that a great climatic change was now carrying the world, slowly and irresistibly, towards world-wide drought.’

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/100-years-since-crack-scientists-warned-of-great-climatic-change-and-world-wide-drought/

The Mercury  Saturday 6 June 1914

Professor J. W. Gregory, F.R.S., has discussed a most interesting problem before the Royal Geographical Society—Is  the world drying up?

“Professor Gregory said that in recent years they had often been warned that a great climatic change was now carrying the world, slowly and irresistibly, towards world-wide drought.

06 Jun 1914 – CLIMATIC CHANGES