Could Climate Change Spur Revolutions?

WNYC News | Mar 3, 2015

Climate change has been blamed for a lot of things, but can it make groups of people rise up in arms against one another? A new research study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asserts that a three-year long drought in Syria was made more likely by global warming and set the stage for the civil war there.

Professor Richard Seager of Columbia's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory is one of the co-authors. He said 1.5 million Syrians were displaced after a drought in northern Syria between 2007 and 2010. They and another 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq headed to Syria's urban centers, which lead to shortages in food, housing and jobs. 

"We're not saying climate change caused the war," Seager told WNYC. "But what we are saying is that the way that Syrian society unraveled and the war took root was influenced by this drought which we feel was made much more likely by climate change."

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