You’ve probably heard the crazed theories about how global warming is somehow the real driver behind some imagined increase in crime, because warmer temperatures create weather and climate conditions that increase tension among human populations. This is pretty much just taking that up a notch, via the Daily Caller:

According to Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, the Syrian conflict that has caught the attention of the world was preceded by the “worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent.”

The severe drought, combined with massive crop failures and poor agricultural policy on the part of the Assad regime, forced mass migrations from the countryside to cities that were already hard-pressed by refugees from Iraq, Femia argues. Military analysts overlooked these factors and argued that Syria would be immune to the civil unrest that had previously swept through authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes. …

“Climate change primarily manifests itself through water,” Femia added. “But it varies; different kinds of water, different ways. It can lead to more extreme weather events: either a drought or a major storm or an amount of rainfall that’s unusual and leads to flooding. It’s not just scarcity, it’s too much, too little and unpredictably.”

“Climate change is going to have security implications across the globe and conflict is just one area of concern,” Femia said.

Femia was clear that, oh no, he is most certainly “not making any causal claims about climate change causing conflict,” but merely that climate change is a “threat multiplier” — which is really a conveniently vague layup for claiming that just about everything and anything is partially attributable to climate change and the weather it brings about. How this means that our current weather and climate-change conditions, both of which existed long before humankind, are somehow now having more of an effect on humankind’s actions than ever before, eludes me.

Anyhow. If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read Jazz’s weekend post on the sudden, vengeful, and completely, wildly unexpected return of the Arctic ice cap, which the apparently hostage-taking scientific community assured us via “settled science” we probably weren’t destined to ever see again. Weird, right?