Er, food for thought? Welsh songstress Charlotte Church thinks that the unrest in Syria is due to the climate change. The opera singer revealed during a segment on BBC’s Question Time that she believes that global warming is a “big factor” between ISIS and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
While discussing British airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria, Church, 29, started to make her argument, telling the panel an “interesting thing with Syria actually…is there is evidence to suggest that climate change was a big factor in how the Syrian conflict came about."
“From 2006 to 2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history, which of course meant there were water shortages and crops weren't growing,” she continued. “There was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria into the urban centers, which put more strain and resources were scarce et cetera, which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today.”
“No issue is an island, you know, and we are trying to look at all the different factors in this,” she concluded. “We also need to look at what we are doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.”
For the record, the violence in Syria erupted in 2011 after government forces arrested and tortured a group of school children for writing revolutionary slogans on a wall. Shortly thereafter, pro-democracy protests broke out, and Assad responded by killing demonstrators, thus leading to even more chaos and rebellion.
“Can't say I had a ball on question time, that's not a Cardiff/Welsh audience that I would recognise. However thanks for your support twitter,” Church tweeted following her appearance. “And the people who dismiss my points out of hand, go do some research – come back to me and we'll have a conversation about ‘the real world.’”
In her defense, social scientists have suggested that the drought between 2006 and 2009 may have had a “catalytic effect” on the unrest, leading to social stresses, the New York Times reports.
