Paris talks thrust two threats into spotlight
Some activists say climate change, terror are linked
As world leaders convene in Paris this week to confront the long-term threat of global warming, the fact that their talks are taking place in a city still recovering from a deadly terrorist attack has amped up a long-running debate about how much climate change contributes to extremism.
The bitter disagreements the question has spawned underscore the challenge climate activists face in selling their broader message to the public.
Activists consider climate change an existential crisis that demands immediate attention. But its link to any specific occurrence, whether an individual storm or an act of terror, is tough to pin down. That makes activists’ case harder to sell to the public.
On the other side, conservative critics of climate activism have ridiculed suggestions global warming is a prime security issue.
In Britain last week, Sky News aired an interview with Prince Charles in which he declared that a clear link exists between climate change and the emergence of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years,” he said.
“Heir brained,” the tabloid Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., harrumphed in a front-page editorial.
Similarly heated exchanges have marked the U.S. political scene. As a result, Tom Steyer, the California billionaire who has spent millions of dollars on campaigns aimed at making climate change an election issue, chose his words carefully when the question of linkage came up at a recent meeting with reporters in Washington. But he insisted the link exists.
“It isn’t us who are saying that climate matters for national security,” Steyer said. “It is the CIA ... the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The national security apparatus believes that climate is a destabilizer and a creator of national security concern.”
Indeed, a week earlier, the CIA had made its most recent foray on the issue. The agency’s director, John Brennan, told a forum in Washington that extreme weather related to global warming is exacerbating food and water shortages that make populations vulnerable to extremism.
“Mankind’s relationship with the natural world is aggravating these problems and is a potential source of crisis itself,” he said.
America’s intelligence agencies and armed forces have been tracking the potential impacts of climate change on national security for years. Such efforts have stepped up lately as President Barack Obama has increased his focus on the issue. The risks that intelligence and military officials have identified range from instability caused by drought to the threat of naval bases being submerged by rising sea levels.
The report most often cited when climate activists seek to directly tie global warming to the rise of the Islamic State group is one published this year by the National Academy of Sciences. It examines the conditions that existed in Syria in the runup to its civil war.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of fighting in the spring of 2011, a severe drought in the Mideast had forced the migration of 1.5 million people out of farming areas. That helped trigger civil unrest. The international team of scientists who produced the study, led by Colin Kelley, a climatologist from the University of California at Santa Barbara, concluded global warming had exacerbated that drought.
“We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict,” the authors wrote. That’s the conclusion Prince Charles appears to have been referring to.
But the study is not without critics, who note that civil war in Syria could have broken out regardless of the drought. Ethnic and religious tensions have made the country unstable for decades. Moreover, Syria’s repressive government has previously faced — and crushed — rebellions.
The back and forth over the report highlights the political risks activists face in linking terrorism and climate change, even as the confluence of events in Paris has the world’s attention focused on the two threats in the same place.
But in the backdrop of the debate are environmental groups growing increasingly frustrated with the low priority people are placing on confronting climate change. The groups are searching for messages that are more influential.
“We have a mission,” Steyer said, “which is to prevent climate disaster.”