Quantcast

the terrorism/global-warming nexus

$tinkle

$tinkle

Expert on blowing
Feb 12, 2003
14,591
6
Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism

must admit, i've never considered this angle:
LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.

"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the
United Nations, told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around."

He cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.

Experts at the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute said it was likely that global warming would create huge flows of refugees as people tried to escape areas swamped by rising sea levels or rendered uninhabitable by desertification.

Tickell said terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created.

"Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can't move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try and make their point."

BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people." [did i read that right - the cave-dwelling OBL has credibility on global warming???]

Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, said any attempt by countries to build fortress walls to keep out climate change refugees -- what he called the "barbarians at the gate" mentality -- was doomed to fail.

"If you just take the example of Bangladesh, if 60 million of 140 million people could not survive in Bangladesh yet they were kept there, you would have A) gigantic human suffering and B) progressive very deep radicalization -- very, very angry people -- and that is not in anybody's security interest."

Bangladesh, with a 580 km (360 mile) coastline on the Bay of Bengal, is acutely vulnerable to rising sea levels, cyclones and droughts.

Climate scientist Mitchell said the Mediterranean and Middle East were likely to receive less rainfall as a consequence of climate change, adding to existing tensions over water.

John Ashton, special representative for climate change at Britain's Foreign Office, voiced concern that this could further destabilize a region already beset by conflict.

"Given the volatile nature of that region, given the global consequences of that volatility, yes I'm hugely worried by that," he told Reuters.
Click to expand...
 
rockwool

rockwool

Turbo Monkey
Apr 19, 2004
2,658
0
Filastin
$tinkle said:
Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism

must admit, i've never considered this angle:
Click to expand...
Didn't that ex World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, or what ever his name was, just recently say something pretty close to that? Of course he went more into economical figures of what GW would cost the economies of the world.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people."
Click to expand...
Yeah N8 you stuborn mf, that's your presidents evil doing! Don't forget that he in the spring of 2001 also gave companies the right to deside if they wanted to clean up their waste or not, without any limit, and that was on the UN's "world natures day" too.

How will a few ethonol powered cares make that up for all those lost years?
 
$tinkle

$tinkle

Expert on blowing
Feb 12, 2003
14,591
6
kidwoo said:
That's probably because you haven't seen an inconvenient truth:D


He addresses this.
Click to expand...
that makes as much sense as incinerating 6 millions jews as the cause of temperature drops in the mid 1940's
 
$tinkle

$tinkle

Expert on blowing
Feb 12, 2003
14,591
6
isn't like i didn't see this coming, as i was a pretty big siouxie & the banshee fan back in the day:

92 degrees (tinderbox)

The day drags by like a wounded animal
The approaching disease, 92 degrees
The blood oin our veins and the brains in our head
The approaching unease, 92 degrees

Long ago in the headlines, they noticed it too
But too late for the loved ones and nearly for you .....

Shaky lines on the horizon
Snakey lines invade each person
Watch the red line creeping upwards
Watch the sanity line weaken
The volcanic depths of Hades' ocean
Bubble under, these crazed eruptions
It wriggles and wrythes and bites within,
Just below the sweating sun

I wondered when this would happen again
Now I watch the red line, reach that number again
The blood in our veins and the brains in our head .....

Drink the water with jagged glass
Eat the cactus with bleeding mouth
Not 91 or 93, but 92 Fahrenheit degrees

Shaky lines on the horizon
Snakey lines invade each person
Not 91 or 93, but 92 Fahrenheit degrees



yes, i had my liberal phase, which coincided with my acid-dropping, potsmoking, roadie, criminal phase
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom