Manmade Climate Change May Have Sparked the Syrian War

Climate change may have helped spark the Syrian War. Scientists have found that a record drought that ravaged Syria in 2006-2010 not only was stoked by manmade climate change, but may have helped propel the 2011 Syrian uprising.

"We're not saying the drought caused the war," said Richard Seager, co-author of the new study, in a news release. "We're saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region."

A growing body of research points to the fact that extreme weather increases the chances of violence, form individual attacks to full-scale wars. In fact, some researchers project that manmade global warming may heighten future conflicts.

The recent drought affected the so-called Fertile Crescent, spanning parts of Turkey and much of Syria and Iraq. In this latest case, the researchers found that since 1900, the area has undergone warming of 1 to 1.2 degrees Centigrade and about a 10 percent reduction in wet-season precipitation. This actually matches neatly with models of human-influenced climate change that can't be attributed to natural variability.

Syria, in particular, was made especially vulnerable due to other factors, such as population growth in recent years. Agricultural production plummeted by a third, and as many as 1.5 million people fled from the countryside to the peripheries of cities that were already strained by influxes of refugees from the ongoing war in Iraq.

The findings suggest that human-caused climate change may exacerbate social unrest in regions. This is particularly important to note moving forward as climate change continues.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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