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Nation Mag: CO2 called the ‘other poison gas killing Syrians’ – Declares CO2 ‘a far more deadly gas’ than nerve agent Sarin gas

 

Full The Nation article here: 

By JUAN COLE – Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan ( [email protected])

The gas attack in Syria on April 4 consumed the world’s attention and galvanized the Trump White House, leading to the launch of 59 cruise missiles on a small airport from which the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been bombing the fundamentalist rebels in Idlib province. The pictures of suffering children, Trump said, had touched him. Yet the president and most of his party are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of tons of a far more deadly gas—carbon dioxide. Climate scientist James Hansen has described our current emissions as like setting off 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs each day, every day of the year.

The Syrian civil war has left more than 400,000 people dead, among them graveyards full of children and innocent noncombatants. About half the country’s 23 million people have been left homeless, and of those, 4 million have been driven abroad (some of them contributing to Europe’s refugee crisis and its consequent rightward political shift). The war occurred for many complex reasons, including social and political ones. The severest drought in recorded modern Syrian history in 2007–10, however, made its contribution.

The mega-drought drove 1.5 million farmers and farmworkers off the land to the seedy bidonvilles ringing cities such as Homs and Hama. In the northeast, 70 percent of the farm livestock died in those years. These displaced and dispossessed day laborers, who seldom found remunerative new work in Syria’s stagnant urban economy, joined in the demonstrations against the regime. Some were later drawn into the civil war as militiamen. Others in the end fled their country.

Of course, Syria has had milder periodic droughts all through history. Moreover, some countries in the region, such as Israel, have been much better at water management than the decrepit Baath state in Syria. It matters how such crises are handled. A team of scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, however, found no natural explanation for how rapidly Syria has been drying out over the past century or for the withering severity of the latest drought. Human-caused climate change, which has raised the temperature of the planet 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, they concluded, made this Frankendrought as much as three times more likely to happen than if our coal plants, factories, and automobiles had left Mother Nature alone.

In 2016, as with the previous two years, the world put 32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. CO2 is a deadly greenhouse gas that turned Venus into a torrid hellhole hot enough to melt lead. Corporate news outlets celebrated this level of emissions as “flat,” i.e., the number did not increase from the previous year.

The United States, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, put up 5.17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2016 all by itself—some 16 percent of the total. Although the US government announced that US emissions fell by 1.7 percent over the previous year, again, such a slight decrease is meaningless if we keep in mind that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is constantly increasing. So we only set off 393,000 atomic bombs in the atmosphere every day last year. So what? We need zero emissions, not almost as many as last year.

Full The Nation article here: 

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Climate Depot related articles:

CO2 Nears 400 ppm – Relax! It’s Not Global Warming ‘End Times’ — But Only A ‘Big Yawn’ — Climate Depot Special Report

National Security Advisor Susan Rice Blames Climate Change For Conflict in Syria – AGW is ‘advancing menace’

2013 conflict in Syria blamed on drought caused by global warming — Flashback 1933: ‘YO-YO BANNED IN SYRIA – Blamed For Drought By Moslems’

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