Columnist Thomas Friedman is again scaremongering about climate change. This time he is promoting the idea that global warming has been an major factor behind the "Arab spring":
All these tensions over land, water and food tell us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses. If we focus only on the former we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.
Take Syria. "Syria's current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime," write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, in a report for their Center for Climate and Security. "However, that's not the whole story."
From 2006-11, up to 60 percent of Syria's land has suffered one of the worst droughts and most severe crop failures in history.
The United Nations reported that the livelihoods of more than 800,000 Syrians were wiped out by droughts.
"If climate projections stay on their current path, the drought situation in North Africa and the Middle East is going to get progressively worse, and you will end up witnessing cycle after cycle of instability," argues Femia.
And - surprise, surprise - the "pioneer" of global warming scaremongering, Lester Brown, is the "expert" Friedman cites in his concluding warning:
Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of "World on the Edge," notes that 20 years ago, using oil-drilling technology, the Saudis tapped an aquifer far below the desert to produce wheat. Now most of that water is gone, and so is the Saudi wheat. So the Saudis are buying land in Ethiopia and Sudan, but that means they'll draw more Nile water away from Egypt.
The real threats to our security, said Brown, are climate change, population growth, water shortages and the number of failing states in the world. How many states must fail before we have a failing global civilization, he asks.
Hopefully, we won't go there. But, then, it was Leon Trotsky who said: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
You might not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in you.
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