The Kelley et al study is increasingly looking like a politically bought panic paper, designed to send out a certain message and mislead the public.
What is especially tragic about the whole nonsense is that the paper only serves to shift the focus away from the real causes behind the worsening tragedy in the Syrian region.
A couple of days ago I wrote about a Spiegel piece that shredded the paper and exposed it as very shoddy work of science.
At Twitter the author of the Spiegel piece, Axel Bojanowski, got a reply from another rather high caliber German journalist, Gabor Paal, who confirms that the situation in Syria has much less to do with climate change, and much more to do with lousy land-use and agricultural practices.
https://twitter.com/GaborPaal/status/574993158850879488
On March 7 Bojanowski wrote:
Did climate change really spark the Syria War as claimed? The basis for that is flimsy.”
On March 9, Paal responded to Bojanowski:
@Axel_Bojanowski I was in Syria in 2008. Scientists acquired funding with reference to ‘climate change’. Land-use was clearly the bigger problem.”
So what we have here is yet another journalist casting grave doubt on the claims made by Kelley et al.
Paal provided the link to a 2008 radio documentary on Syria he had produced with the focus on the crop failures that the Middle Eastern country had been experiencing and their causes. The radio documentary was featured at SWF South German Broadcasting. Throughout the documentary the emphasis on the reasons for the crop problems in Syria was squarely on land-use and poor agricultural practices, with climate change not playing any real role.
The documentary begins by explaining how Syria is divided into 5 different climate zones. In Zone 5, the largest and most arid, groundwater has been pumped out to such an extent that vegetation can no longer thrive. At the 10-minute mark:
More than half the country belongs to Zone 5, the steppes and desert region. Here it rains less than 200 mm per year. Zone 5 is government property. There are no privets lots. Agriculture would be possible here only with irrigation, but the water table has dropped so much that the steppes have become so barren that the government has forbidden all use. The blame for this is not climate change, but rather the way the land is managed.”
The documentary explains how 75% of all farmers raise sheep to earn a living, and that millions of sheep are living where less than 150 mm of rain falls yearly. Vegetation has no chance. “15 – 20% of the steppes are lost and maybe we cannot recover them.” The documentary adds that there are 15 million sheep in Syria and that the figure is 4 times more than 10 years ago.
“Media fixated on climate”
Another problem the region faced, Paal said, was the threat of the UG 99 fungus that threatened the region’s grain crop.
At the very end of the SWR report Paal stated:
In the public media reporting, agricultural research has not made any progress. The media are fixated on climate and the focus on the ground beneath their feet has been lost. And now in the wake of the food crisis, international agricultural reseach has the chance to benefit once again.”
Today, some 7 years later, Kelley et al tells us that this has not come to pass – tragically. The focus still remains on the bogus problem of climate change and people are suffering more unimaginable misery than ever because of it.
Someone needs to go to jail.
Well, the main problem of Syria is of course that the USA wants to take out a Russian-aligned government come what may. By arming the mythical “moderate rebels”.
EXPERIMENT with CENTRIFUGE MACHINE REFUTES the RADIATIVE GREENHOUSE HYPOTHESIS
This experiment* (written up only last year) is a real breakthrough because it proves that a force field like centrifugal force or gravity does in fact create a temperature gradient at the molecular level, cooling at the top where potential energy is greatest.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is all about entropy maximization, and that is achieved when the sum of mean molecular kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy is homogeneous at all altitudes. This explains the temperature gradient, not back radiation, because temperature depends only on mean molecular kinetic energy. Thus the assumption by James Hansen, Roy Spencer and others of isothermal temperatures is wrong and so is the whole conjecture that water vapor and carbon dioxide are what cause the surface temperature to rise.
So, the whole greenhouse hypothesis is now proven wrong empirically in this new centrifuge machine and also in the vortex cooling machine which works on the same principle. See also my video, book and scientific papers linked from this website …
* http://whyitsnotco2.com
EXPERIMENT with CENTRIFUGE MACHINE REFUTES the RADIATIVE GREENHOUSE HYPOTHESIS
This experiment* (written up only last year) is a real breakthrough because it proves that a force field like centrifugal force or gravity does in fact create a temperature gradient at the molecular level, cooling at the top where potential energy is greatest.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is all about entropy maximization, and that is achieved when the sum of mean molecular kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy is homogeneous at all altitudes. This explains the temperature gradient, not back radiation, because temperature depends only on mean molecular kinetic energy. Thus the assumption by James Hansen, Roy Spencer and others of isothermal temperatures is wrong and so is the whole conjecture that water vapor and carbon dioxide are what cause the surface temperature to rise.
So, the whole greenhouse hypothesis is now proven wrong empirically in this new centrifuge machine and also in the vortex cooling machine which works on the same principle.
Has anyone here read even the aBSTRACT OF THE PAPER BEING DISCUSSEDß
“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.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/02/23/1421533112
“For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest.”
and that’s what they CLAIM but in the next sentence do not claim to SHOW …. (rendering the “catalytic effect” claim a baseless assertion)
Words, they have meanings… and these “scientists” are just warmist propagandists. Their own words show it. And you didn’t notice.
Simple question: Have you read the article which we are discussing here? Or are you simply dismissing the findings, because they do not fit into your version of the world?
Here are at least some graphs out of it:
“Syria gets almost all of its rain during its six-month winter, from November to April. In 2007-08, winter rainfall across Syria fell by a third, with some areas receiving no rain at all. The winter was the driest in the observed record, the researchers say.
The decreasing rainfall (shown in the top graph below) combined with rising temperatures (second graph) resulted in a decline in soil moisture (third graph), the researchers say. This had dramatic consequences for Syrian agriculture.”
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/03/scientists-discuss-the-role-of-climate-change-in-the-syrian-civil-war/
Can anyone here explai to me, how bad agriculture techniques have influenced the rainfall?
Droughts occur routinely in Syria. Moreover, the models disagreed widely on precipitation. Again the big problem is mismanagement, which has nothing to do with climate change.
sod, I cited your excerpt, and explained to you how you failed to understand a single word of it, what more can you ask for.
So, they have century long precipitation and temperature records… (those would be interesting to see)
then they have to use climate models ??????
seriously???
roflmao !!!
you are getting it wrong. They agree with all the other reasons that people bring up. They even mention those very things in the abstract of the paper!
They are talking about “unusual severity of the observed drought” and they are looking at measured rain.
Most people commenting have obviously not even looked at the abstract!
“strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region”
Same old, same old, crystal ball garbage..
All based on baseless model speculation, from models that have never been validated and can’t even get the most basic of things, temperature, anywhere near reality.
You surely are a gullible twit, sob !!
This paper and particularly the marketing of it is yet another example of the practical consequences of the “Big player” problem:
http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/08/big-players-and-the-climate-science-boom/
in order to obtain research funding you need to able to suggest that your research is somehow in line with the research policy of the Big player: in this case climate change, and in order to secure future funding for your research you need to link the results of the paper again to that research policy. Therefore there is no end to what phenomena can be caused by climate change, everything depends on the skillfulness of the researches to sell the research to the Big player. A lot of scientists not only avoid biting the hand that feeds them, they are also getting better at developing new tricks that they expect the Big player to be pleased with.