Adapt to climate change
Elisabeth Kolbert, in an article titled, Unsafe Climates (The NewYorker Magazine Dec. 7, 2015) writes of climate conditions in Syria that allegedly have caused the displacement of large numbers of people. John Kerry has voiced a similar view that national insecurity in the Mideast is connected to climate change.
It is particularly interesting that ISIL is the acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Isn’t Israel also a part of the Levant? Why, therefore, isn’t Israel experiencing the same effects of climate change? Possibly the reason is because Israel has sought ways of adapting to climate change that the rest of the Levant has not. It is my contention that the attention of Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) should be directed more at ways to adapt to climate change rather than solely directing time, energy, and resources at tackling climate change itself. The pledges of nations like China, Russia and Iran should be considered in light of other promises made and broken in the past. The U.S. and our allies are prone to imposing their values on nations that operate under a very different set of standards.