Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley told Bloomberg News over the weekend that climate change is responsible for the rise of ISIS. This is a significant flip flop for the former Maryland governor who earlier tried to separate global warming from national security.
But that bandwagon is leaving the station and O’Malley figured it was time to jump aboard.
“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria and the rise of ISIS was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the symptoms — or rather the conditions of extreme poverty — that has now led to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, told Bloomberg news in a question about foreign policy.
O’Malley’s comments echo those of the Obama administration and environmentalists who are trying to paint global warming as not just an environmental issue, but also a national security problem.
In May, Obama told graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy to prepare for the fight against global warming. The White House has been trying to shift the focus of global warming away from temperature and more towards public health and national security.
Because they’ve never had a drought in the Middle East before.
In past comments, O’Malley made a point to declare global warming a “natural threat,” distinguishing it from “man-made” threats, the greatest of which he said is a nuclear Iran.
“The greatest danger that we face right now on a consistent basis in terms of manmade threats is — is — nuclear Iran and related to that, extremist violence,” O’Malley told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos March 29. “I don’t think you can separate the two. I think they go together.”
“In terms of natural threats, clearly, it’s climate change. And we have to confront — we have to confront manmade and natural threats,” O’Malley added.
CO2 must be the most powerful substance known to man. It starts wars, creates terrorism, radicalizes Muslims, and apparently puts people in a real bad mood.
Or does it?
Even if a drought did exacerbate tensions in Syria, research shows environmental factors are rarely the cause of violent conflict. Other researchers have postulated it was the Bashar Assad regime’s response to the drought that sparked tensions, not the drought itself. Syrians are no strangers to prolonged, vicious droughts. People there have weathered their way through low rainfall.
In terms of the climate science behind the claim: there’s not much evidence of a man-made fingerprint on the climatic backdrop of the conflict.
“It is not until you dig pretty deep into the technical scientific literature, that you find out that the anthropogenic climate change impact on drought conditions in the Fertile Crescent is extremely minimal and tenuous—so much so that it is debatable as to whether it is detectable at all,” wroteChip Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels, climate scientists at the libertarian Cato Institute March 5.
In truth, scientists haven’t a clue what causes extreme weather as their confident predictions about the number and severity of storms fail to materialize. But with global warming hysterics, being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry.
You will note that the more the climate does not obey the hysterics predictive modles, the more they try to change the subject. The attempt to tie human behavior and the actions of governments to climate change is just the latest epic fail of the climate change hucksters.
