Don’t blame climate for Middle East war

Re: “Tackling a hot topic,” Opinion, Sept. 22

Douglas Todd, typical of climate change alarmists’ penchant for attaching blame for almost every untoward event to anthropogenic climate change, writes, “The Middle East is forecast to increasingly broil under unlivable extreme temperatures. Water shortages, crop failure and extreme drought are the new normal in the region, leading to horrible conflicts such as the Syrian war.”

Mr. Todd seems to be totally unaware of Islamic history.

Much of the violence in the Middle East stems from the divide between the two major denominations of Islam — Sunni and Shia. The civil war in Syria was started as a protest against Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, who belongs to a sect known as Alawite, which is similar to Shia.

The Alawites are a minority in Syria, the majority being Sunni. The spark for the conflict was the brutal treatment of Syrian teenagers, who demonstrated their discontent by spraying revolutionary slogans on a school in the Syrian city of Deraa. In response to this treatment, riots erupted across the country, which was the start of the Syrian civil war.

Jim Gehl, Calgary