Last week the Times was honoured to have a guest editorial from Calvin Beisner, founder and spokesperson for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which is located in Burke, Virginia.
Beisner's guest editorial, “How strong is the connection between climate change and Brexit,” was in response to the previous week's editorial titled, “Brexit vote is result of climate refugee crisis.”
For those who are not aware, Beisner has been described as “the most influential evangelical anti-environmentalist in the United States.”
(Incidentally, not all evangelical Christians are climate change skeptics. For example, look up climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe or the World Evangelical Alliance on the Internet).
Why such a high profile opinion-leader took the time to respond to an editorial in a small Canadian weekly is not clear.
However, we are pleased that he did. And we are also pleased to have the opportunity to show the weaknesses of his position.
In the previous week's editorial, your editor argued that climate change was a major factor in causing the Syrian civil war, which resulted in a major increase in refugees fleeing into Europe. The European Union failed to respond adequately to the crisis, which in turn was a major factor in the Brexit vote.
Beisner in his response said that Brexit was only slightly influenced by a climate refugee crisis, if at all.
It all comes down to a scientific article: “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought.”
The article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in 2015.
The article's authors state, “Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a three-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 two to three times more likely than by natural variability alone.”
Two or three times more likely are pretty big numbers.
How does Beisner argue against those numbers? He doesn't. He just states that they are not enough to explain the drought.
By what authority does he dismiss the article's findings?
Beisner has a Ph.D. in Scottish history, not climate science.
Does he cite other research that contradicts the PNAS article? No.
The article in question was published in a highly respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
If there were faults in the article's findings, there has been ample opportunity for other scientists to refute them in other peer-reviewed journals.
Beisner quoted retired U.S. Navy rear admiral David Titley as saying, “there was no resilience left in the system” and “you just set everything up for something really bad to happen” - like ISIS.
The Titley quote comes from an article in Future Tense, which is produced by Slate magazine. The full text reads: “'It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,' said retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a meteorologist who’s now a professor at Penn State University. After decades of poor water policy, 'there was no resilience left in the system.'”
Titley says, given that context, that the record-setting drought caused Syria to “break catastrophically.'
"'It’s not to say you could predict ISIS out of that, but you just set everything up for something really bad to happen,' Titley told me in a phone interview. Given the new results, Titley says, 'you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.'”
In other words, the rear admiralthat Beisner quoted believes there is a strong connection between climate change and ISIS and, by necessary implication, the Syrian civil war. Why doesn't Beisner believe that?