Thursday in London at Advertising Week Europe 2017 during an interview with Empire Editor-in-Chief Terri White, former Vice-President Al Gore said climate change was a “principal” cause of the Syrian Civil War and Brexit.

Gore said, “I was just in the Persian Gulf region and the scientists for the lat couple of years, one of the lines of investigation they have been pursuing has led them to the conclusion that significant areas of the Middle East and North Africa are in danger of becoming uninhabitable. And, just a taste of this, to link it to some of the events that the UK and the European Union are going through and I know that’s another source of stress because we are now on the eve next week of the Brexit process – but think for a moment about what happened in Syria. You know we look at the gates of hell opening, they long since have opened, but before the gates of hell opened in Syria, what happened was a climate-related extreme drought.”

“The scientists have published these peer review studies for several years now showing exactly why it’s related to the climate crisis. From 2006 to 2010, 60 percent of the farms in Syria were destroyed and had to be abandoned and 80 per cent of the livestock were killed. The drought in the eastern Mediterranean is the worst ever on record – the records only go back 900 years, but it’s historic. And 1.5 million climate refugees were driven into the cities in Syria, where they collided with refugees from the Iraq War. And Wikileaks revealed the internal conversations in the Syrian government where they were saying to one another ‘we can’t handle this, there’s going to be a social explosion’. There are other causes of the Syrian civil war, but this was the principal one. And those in the region recognize that. And it has unleashed, with other factors an incredible flow of refugees into Europe which is creating political instability in Europe and which contributed in some ways to the desire of some in the UK to say ‘Whoa we’re not sure we want to be a part of that anymore.’ And you can go through the list of countries around the worlds where stability and political success of governance is really challenged. Some countries have a hard time even in the best of seasons but the additional stress this climate crisis is causing really poses the threat of some political disruption and chaos of a kind the world would find extremely difficult to deal with.”

(h/t Grabien)

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