In my news feed today comes this pathetic excuse for a press release that tries to tell us that weather events, which span hours to days to sometimes weeks in length (such as a blocking high), are actually climate events. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, after all it has the mark of Schellnhuber on it. But really though, they ought to be ashamed about the press release, because as anyone knows, climate spans decades, and does not exist on a smaller temporal scale. Here, they are also trying to make the argument that climate change is enhancing “ethnical fractionalization”. It’s just another thinly veiled attempt to try to link climate to the war in Syria, as has been so popular with the left. Document and identity thief Peter Gleick for example, argues in a paper “As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions.” Water, sure, climate not so much. For example, take the flag of Lebanon, note the cedar tree:
The Epic of Gilgamesh describes vast, unexplored cedar forests dominating the lands of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Now, deforestation makes scenes like this in Lebanon fairly common:
Now, with so many trees being cut for building, fuel, and export, there’s little remaining. A reforest Lebanon campaign hopes to reverse the problem.
In Syria’s case, the same thing is happening as this article from 2013 illustrates:
When armed political conflict occurs, the first causuality is stable supply lines. Any soldier, rebel, or general can tell you this. Yet climate crusading people like Gleick and Schellnhuber look for correlations, find what they are looking for, and discount the real human driven issue. Droughts start occurring when deforestation kills the local evapotranspiration – robbing the atmosphere and clouds of much needed moisture, resulting in less rainfall. It’s a age-old human pattern of land use abuse, and a textbook climate case of correlation is not causation.
At least, with increased CO2, the remaining trees can use water more efficiently.
Climate disasters increase risk of armed conflict in multi-ethnic countries
Climate disasters like heat-waves or droughts enhance the risk of armed conflicts in countries with high ethnic diversity
This finding, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can help in the design of security policies even more so since future global warming from human-made greenhouse-gas emissions will increase natural disasters and therefore likely also risks of conflicts and migration.
“Devastating climate-related natural disasters have a disruptive potential that seems to play out in ethnically fractionalized societies in a particularly tragic way,” says lead author Carl Schleussner from the Berlin think-tank Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Almost one quarter of conflicts in ethnically divided countries coincide with climatic calamities, the scientists found; importantly, this is even without taking climate change into account. “Climate disasters are not directly triggering conflict outbreak, but may enhance the risk of a conflict breaking out which is rooted in context-specific circumstances. As intuitive as this might seem, we can now show this in a scientifically sound way,” says Schleussner, who has also been a research fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin, at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRITHESys).
“We’ve been surprised to which extent results stick out compared to e.g. inequality”
Previous research often either focused on climatic variables such as temperature increase that cannot be directly translated into societal impacts, or has been limited to case studies. The new study moves beyond that by focusing directly on natural disaster-related economic damage data, collected by the international reinsurance market leader Munich Re. Using the mathematical method of event coincidence analysis, this is combined with a conflict dataset established by security research, and a common index for ethnical fractionalization. The study looks at the period 1980-2010.
“We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalized countries stick out compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality,” says co-author Jonathan Donges, co-head of PIK’s flagship project on co-evolutionay pathways COPAN. “We think that ethnic divides may serve as a predetermined conflict line when additional stressors like natural disasters kick in, making multi-ethnic countries particularly vulnerable to the effect of such disasters”
“A very special co-benefit of climate stabilization: peace”
The study cannot provide a risk assessment for specific states. Since armed conflicts and natural disasters are fortunately rare events, data from single countries is necessarily limited and does not suffice for statistical analyses.
“Armed conflicts are among the biggest threats to people, killing some and forcing others to leave their home and maybe flee to far-away countries. Hence identifying ethnic divide and natural disasters as enhancing destabilization risks is potentially quite relevant,” says co-author Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Human-made climate change will clearly boost heatwaves and regional droughts. Our observations combined with what we know about increasing climate-change impacts can help security policy to focus on risk regions.” Several of the world’s most conflict-prone regions, including North and Central Africa as well as Central Asia, are both exceptionally vulnerable to human-made climate change and characterized by deep ethnic divides. “So our study adds evidence,” Schellnhuber concludes, “of a very special co-benefit of climate stabilization: peace.”
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Article: Schleussner, C.-F., Donges, J.F., Donner, R.V., Schellnhuber, H.J. (2016): Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition, EE) [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601611113]
Weblink to the article once it is published: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1601611113
“Almost one quarter of conflicts in ethnically divided countries coincide with climatic calamities, the scientists found; importantly, this is even without taking climate change into account.”
So CAGW has nothing to do with conflicts up to the present time. And there is no measureable CAGW now. So far, so good.
If CAGW ever does show up, then maybe we can revisit this speculation about CAGW causing the climate to change to the point that it causes wars. Until then, nothing to see here.
For humans, a climate disaster is any place on the long term stadial/interstadial oscillation that is not at the brief peak warm period (stadial). That is to say, in reality, humans spend most of their time on earth in a climate disaster riding up or down the interstadial). The lucky few spend time at the relatively stable peak. The rest of humanity suffers the vagaries of the slide down or the climb up.
Whenever you compare one weather measurement to another that is climate. It has no temporal constraint. Taking many values of a weather measurement and producing distribution graphs to assign probability of event magnitude is climate, on any time scale.
I see climate as the overall general description of temperature and precipitation which is the result of the combination of current topography and GPS within an ecosystem boundary. Weather pattern variations are patterns that exist within the ecosystem boundary. Sometimes the pattern tends towards one extreme or the other within that ecosystem, but the overall climate description remains valid. The key take-away is that weather pattern variations do not constitute climate change.
Many agencies have worked on creating climate designations tied to ecosystems:
http://nws.weather.gov/lcat/resources/ref_docs/GuttmanQuayle_1996.pdf
http://geography.unt.edu/~mcgregor/Earth_Science/The_Koeppen_Climate_System.pdf
https://www.britannica.com/science/Koppen-climate-classification
The National Weather Service has developed a finer scale for the purpose of weather forecasting:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mirs/public/prods/maps/pfzones_list.htm
Re conflict and “climate garbage”
These morons never ever heard of “campaign season” otherwise they will blame almost every roman war of conquest on climate change
Fast becoming “POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR Pseudo-intellectual garbage”
Gleick is a proven liar, possible criminal and as such is not even worth quoting
Anthony, I have a question about this, say an area, gets weather events, say thunderstorms, regularly, and they get these year after years. Do they not become part of the expected climate in that area?
I find this is different than places like say San Diego, where the weather is very regular, and storms, weather events are very rare.
Just looking for your opinion, and to better understand the place regular weather affects climate.
“I have a question about this, say an area, gets weather events, say thunderstorms, regularly, and they get these year after years. Do they not become part of the expected climate in that area?”
From my experience our weather does have a definite general overall pattern, that varies slightly, and continuously.
As an example: I live in the central U.S. and can confidently predict that it will get very hot during the summer here. Roughly 70 percent of the time, during a normal summer, a persistent high-pressure system will setup over the central U.S. and cause high temperatures and dry weather, and can last for months (even longer during the decade of the 1930’s).
Occasionally, the weather will do like it is doing this year, and the jetstream will push weather systems across the central U.S. the entire summer, which means that high-pressure systems don’t hang around long over one place, as they are pushed east by the jetstream, so it does not get as hot, and the circulation brings moisture into the central U.S. which also leads to milder temperatures.
Here in Oklahoma, we consider it a blessing to get any rain in the month of July, or later in the summer, but we just got a real good rain yesterday, and it might rain again today. This is considered very mild weather for this time of year. We love it.
But this kind of weather pattern is the exception rather than the rule. Usually, the jetstream will not push weather systems across the U.S. quickly but will allow high-pressure systems to build up over the U.S. and stay there for a while, which really heats things up.
I suppose the “exception” to our normal summer weather pattern is caused by ENSO and its aftermath.
You *can* predict the weather within certain parameters. You *cannot* correctly say, that one year will be exactly like another year.
The areas of Lebanon denuded of trees are located at or near where the largest part of the population lives. The loss of the cedars far predated any notion of “climate change” or even of “climate”.
BTW I have and order of the Cedar 3rd Class (Now called “Lebanon Medal of Merit” 3rd class. Kind of like the equivalent to the Commendation medals in are armed forces.). I and several members of the MTT (Mobile Training Team) I was on were awarded the medal by the LDF (Lebanese Defense Force) commander at the time for actions Jan to April, 1984.
Wish I had dime for every time someone asked me “What the hell is that?” when they saw that cedar tree ribbon while looking at my salad bar when in Class A uniform.
Jordan has also suffered the depredations of the Turks to their forests. There aren’t any since the trees were clear cut for railroad ties and railroad fuel. They have a long term program to reestablish vegetation on the hills, started under King Hussein, but will be many more decades coming. They have begun with acacia trees and many miles of drip irrigation, but it will be generations before the climate will once again be affected in the positive. It is interesting that the tour guides going from Amman to Petra will often stop to show the 4 or 5 oak trees along the road that were missed by the Turkish locusts in their short sighted greed.
pbh
Dec 8, 2015 Climate Change is Unfaslifiable Woo-Woo Pseudoscience
Karl Popper famously said, “A theory that explains everything explains nothing.” So what do you make of the theory that catastrophic manmade CO2-driven “climate change” can account for harsher winters and lighter winters, more snow and less snow, droughts and floods, more hurricanes and less hurricanes, more rain and less rain, more malaria and less malaria, saltier seas and less salty seas, Antarctica ice melting and Antarctic ice gaining and dozens of other contradictions? Popper gave a name to “theories” like this: pseudoscience.
https://youtu.be/huKY5DzrcLI
A question, with the end of the last ice age, +/-20,000 years ago surely the area in the middle east and North Africa has warned some. Lived for about 8 years in North Africa, weather, or if you prefer climate, sucked. In the desert saw several days with local temps approachinf 140F. If my memory is correct when I lived there the record high temp, in the 130sF, was from a little crossroad town in Libya about 20 miles from the coast, which used to interest me, seemed like an unlikely spot for a record temp (it was an old British military location).
And here was I digging my toes in to insist to the world that weather and climate are exactly the same thing, viewed in different time frames. At any given time it is weather. If you want to build a climate data base you start with 365 consecutive days’ weather data.