Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, vol. 112 no. 11, pp. 3241–3246, doi:10.1073/pnas.1421533112:

This paper presents evidence on how the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. 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 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone.