WS MoreOrLess: Climate Change
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2015
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ruth Alexander investigates claims climate change has contributed to the war in Syria, and with the climate change summit COP21 underway in Paris, we answer listener’s climate change number questions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use |
| 0:07.0 | go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. |
| 0:18.0 | Later in the programme we'll be answering some of your questions about the numbers used in the Climate Change Conference in Paris. |
| 0:24.0 | This is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet. |
| 0:29.0 | President Obama has called Climate Change a serious threat to global security but hasn't already caused a war. |
| 0:36.0 | Speaking to Sky News, Prince Charles from the British Royal Family said there was absolutely a link between a long-running drought and the conflict in Syria. |
| 0:45.0 | Huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land because water ran out, their crops failed and so on. |
| 0:52.0 | And increasingly they came into the cities already full of Iraqi refugees from that horror and that crisis. |
| 1:01.0 | And this combined to create a very difficult situation. |
| 1:05.0 | But was climate change really one of the major reasons the conflict in Syria began in 2011? |
| 1:11.0 | Well for that to be correct a number of other things need to be true. |
| 1:15.0 | Firstly you need a drought that's linked to climate change. |
| 1:18.0 | Well there was a drought between 2007 and 2010 in Syria but droughts there aren't uncommon. |
| 1:26.0 | As one recent academic paper puts it droughts in Syria have occurred almost every second year over the past half century. |
| 1:33.0 | So can we pin this one on climate change? |
| 1:36.0 | Colin Kelly from the University of California was the lead author on a study which concluded that global warming played a significant part. |
| 1:45.0 | We're very careful not to say that the drought was caused by climate change. |
| 1:48.0 | In fact we say that what happened was this was a naturally occurring multi-year drought that was made much more severe by climate change. |
| 1:55.0 | And that's a very important distinction and we really are careful not to say that the uprising was sparked by climate change |
| 2:03.0 | or that it was caused by climate change or even to say that climate change was the most important factor. |
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