Taking Charlotte Church's comments on Syria seriously (for a minute or two)

****

Miss Church appeared on the BBC's Question Time. Presumably because it was in Wales and she's got herself a new reputation as a left wing activist. During the debate Miss Church had this to say:

‘Another interesting thing with Syria actually, lots of people don’t seem to know about it, is there is evidence to suggest that climate change was a big factor in how the Syrian conflict came about, because from 2006-2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history.

This of course meant that there were water shortages and crops weren’t growing so there was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria in the urban centres which put more strain and resources were scarce etc which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today, and so no issue is an island, so I also think we need to look at what we’re doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.’

On the face of it, this is nonsense. It's not exactly like there's never been a drought before in the middle east:

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.”

But there's a lot of support for the idea that the drought beginning in 2007 was a factor in creating the Syrian civil war:

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend.

It doesn't really matter whether the reason for the drought is long-term (i.e. global warming or climate change) or short-term (simply a bad run of dry weather) but it does seem plausible that the impact of that drought on a rural population will be considerable. This doesn't mean that the consequence of drought need necessarily be violent upheaval - it's clear that this hasn't occurred in the wider Fertile Crescent (and that there's some doubt about the data).

More interesting here is that idea that it is urban-rural migration that's the culprit rather than the climate. Miss Church says that there was a 'mass migration' of this sort in Syria. But this may simply reflect the world-wide trend for people in rural areas to move to cities.

Today, the words rif and medina have developed not just geographic connotations, but social ones as well. The rif not only describes village farmers but those urban poor living in the slums sprouting up around Syria’s cities. This “village-izing” of Syria’s ancient cities has changed the complexion of urban space with the growth of large unplanned, parallel communities of urban poor.

There's nothing peculiar about this pattern - it's repeated in developing countries across the world (despite the best efforts of the development industry to stop people in poor rural communities exercising this liberty). And, given that we're talking about the growth of violent revolutionary forces - in this case Islamist forces - perhaps this upheaval has contributed? It does seem that these marginal communities contributed to the rise of Islamist parties in Turkey and to the challenges in Egypt:

Shrinking opportunities in the countryside have led to a steady rural-urban migration. Cities have grown at twice the rate of the general population in the last two centuries. This has led to overurbanization, this is, more people in the cities than can be properly housed, educated, or gainfully employed...it is estimated that the population of Greater Cairo has grown from about three hundred thousand in 1800 to over twelve million in 1995. With this phenomenal demographic growth have come serious problems. Much of the discontent that has been channeled into militant Islamic activism is a direct or indirect outcome of population pressures and overurbanisation.

I've no doubt at all that the five year drought may have accelerated the movement from country to town in Syria and indeed that, as we've seen in other places, this dislocated new urban community provides a place for a radical, non-traditional and violent version of Islam to thrive. It's too simplistic - and therefore wrong - to try and claim that it's climate change that did it but, if climatic alteration contributed to an accelerated rate of internal migration, then we are equally wrong to dismiss what Charlotte Church said as complete nonsense.

....

Growth

Spring is on its way, things are starting to wake up from winter's slumber. From resting out the deep cold. Growth begins - in tiny ways at first with the shoots of snowdrops and daffodils poking up through last years dried leaves, with the little pink buds on the currants and with the pale signs of future flowers now visible on the rhododendron buds.

However, winter isn't over yet - February, the month of snow, lies between us and the full flowering of spring. It may not snow - we might have got our measure with that hard, tough month of snow and frost before the New Year. But I wouldn't count on it - they aren't called snowdrops for nothing!

I've spent this morning in the garden. Just tidying, trimming and checking stuff out - plus shifting another ten barrow loads of leaves to a place where they can rot unmolested. And I was struck by nature's ability to spring anew - fresh from what seemed a dead world. The rhododendron our neighbours hacked back almost to the ground has sprung shoots - plus one or two buds. The big copper beech is lighter, somehow feels happier for having its canopy lifted and the roses - pruned right back before the winter - are showing how they'll grow again bringing with that growth those glorious flowers.

In our mad, rushed, tangled urban lives we find the seasons inconvenient - for many they've been replaced with 'climate control'. With systems regulated to provide an even temperature all year round. So we step safely from unvarying office temperatures, to air conditioned cars and from there to hermetically sealed, temperature controlled homes. Technology has banished the seasons.

So when those seasons fight back - when the winter throws snow at us or the summer delivers a heatwave - we moan and grumble. It is so sad that we - little ants scratting on the surface of a huge planet - think ourselves so important that the audacity of nature takes us aback. Why have the government not done something, we cry! It's getting warmer - it must be man's fault, we are after all so huge, so important.

Nature will win, dear reader. She always does - we watch helpless at floods, droughts and snowdrifts trying to pretend somehow we are at fault. We are not at fault - although it is perhaps the vengeance of Caradhras that we are seeing in these things. Nature is putting us back firmly in our place, laughing in the face of our hubris.

And then blessing us with new growth. Magic.

....

Negative sympathy, hosepipe bans and weather magic - a few whimsical thoughts

****

Once upon a time we used to turn to the magician for the resolution of our weather problems – most usually for the summoning of rain. Todat drought is solved by the announcement of a hosepipe ban.

As Fraser points out control of the weather is a central requirement of a wizard:

Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old sacred grove. One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire-brands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who was called "the rain-maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides. To put an end to drought and bring down rain, women and girls of the village of Ploska are wont to go naked by night to the boundaries of the village and there pour water on the ground. In Halmahera, or Gilolo, a large island to the west of New Guinea, a wizard makes rain by dipping a branch of a particular kind of tree in water and then scattering the moisture from the dripping bough over the ground. In New Britain the rain-maker wraps some leaves of a red and green striped creeper in a banana-leaf, moistens the bundle with water, and buries it in the ground; then he imitates with his mouth the plashing of rain.

This is sympathetic magic – the imitation of rain brings on the reality of the storm. Sometimes it works – in as much as the wizard’s actions are followed by rain (we need not get all sceptical and worry about cause). Now we find a modern phenomenon – negative sympathy. Whether it’s the appointment of Dennis Howell as Minister for Drought – a magic trick that brought the great drought of 1976 to an abrupt end – or the impact of hosepipe bans on the weather, this seems to have the effect of summoning rain. It’s almost as if the act of doing something to save water offends the rain gods.

And as we know offending the rain gods can prove something of a problem.

....