Stop Linking Syria to Global Warming

By Craig Rucker, Exec. Dir., CFACT.org

Bringing climate change into the Syria issue does a great disservice to the innocent victims of that tragic conflict. Civil war in Syria is about people seeking to rid themselves of a bloody tyrant. Sadly, it has been exploited by religious fanatics whose endgame does not include benign democracy under rule of law.

There has been no meaningful global warming since the late nineties and not very much before that. UN IPCC computer models project significant global warming in the future. So far those models have severely over-estimated warming. The tyrant in Damascus, the fanatics seeking to establish a theocracy and certainly not the many Syrians who yearn to live in peace and freedom have not taken up arms because of what the computer models say in an IPCC assessment report.

In 1933 Syrians actually banned yo-yos when religious leaders proclaimed that the up and down action interfered with people’s prayers for rain. Anyone linking global warming to today’s upheaval in Syria follows in that tradition.

As President Obama has learned, the human calamity in Syria does not yield to easy solutions. Putting on a pair of climate blinders is the last thing we should do if we truly care about the suffering of the innocent in Syria.

(This originally appeared at National Journal.)



Craig Rucker is the executive director and co-founder of CFACT. He is a native of Buffalo, New York, who received his Masters of Public Administration from the State University of New York at Albany, Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its executive director. For over 20 years, Craig has provided expertise to a wide range of government, academic, media, and industry forums. He serves as co-host of CFACT’s daily national radio commentary called “Just the Facts” that has been airing on some 125 radio stations from coast to coast since 1993. Rucker has written extensively on numerous environmental policy issues, and his work has been featured in such media outlets as CNN, the BBC, USA Today, the Des Moines Register, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Rucker has had primary responsibility for helping build CFACT’s Collegians program on more than 20 campuses in nine states, and has attended or brought student delegations to major United Nations conferences in Istanbul, Kyoto, Bonn, Marrakesh, Cancun, and Montreal. Rucker has a wife and four sons, and currently resides in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.