In September I wrote a piece called For The Last Time, No, The Syrian Crisis Was Not Caused By Climate Change.
Clearly, though, my approach wasn’t subtle enough because a month later I had to write another piece called No, Charlotte Church. The Syrian Civil War Was Not Caused By Climate Change.
But there’s always one, isn’t there?
Now, it would seem, I’m going to have to wheel out yet another piece on the subject for the benefit of the dur-brain at the back. The dur-brain’s name is Windsor ‚Äì Charles Windsor, aka The Prince of Wales ‚Äì and here’s what he had to say in an interview with Sky News at the weekend.
Asked whether there was a link between climate change, Syria and terrorism, the Prince said:
“Absolutely.”
He added:
“Some of us were saying 20 something years ago that if we didn’t tackle these issues, you would see ever greater conflict over scarce resources and ever greater difficulties over drought, and the accumulating effect of climate change which means that people have to move.”
“And in fact there’s very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria, funnily enough, was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land but increasingly they came into the cities.”
Coming less than a week after the massacre in Paris, the Prince’s remarks might seem not just warped, thick, irresponsible and hysterical but also crassly insensitive.
We can perhaps let him off the latter charge because the interview was recorded three weeks ago. But the first criticisms still stand. Although Osama Bin Laden, it’s true, did towards the end of his life leap onto the global warming bandwagon, there is no credible evidence whatsoever to suggest that there is any link between “climate change” and terrorism.
The first flaw in the Prince’s theory is a technical one. The “drought” he cites was a) too short-lived to be plausibly linked to climate change and b) in any case, it didn’t actually happen in Syria. (See here for more details)
The second flaw in the Prince’s theory is a basic factual one. Islamist terrorists ‚Äì as they are never shy of telling us ‚Äì are on a holy mission to restore the Caliphate and to bring the House of War (that’s us, in the West) into the House of Submission (that’s the Islamic world).
That’s it. That’s the deal. That’s their motivation.
Were you to try asking them whether anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions were contributing to potentially catastrophic and unprecedented global warming and what should be done about it, their response would be to think for all of no seconds – and then chop your head off.
