Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited: A rejoinder Jan Selby a, * , Omar Dahi b , Christiane Fr € ohlich c , Mike Hulme d a Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QN, UK b School of Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College, 893 West Street, Amherst MA 01002, USA c Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), University of Hamburg, Grindleberg 7- 9, 20144 Hamburg, Germany d Department of Geography, King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK article info Article history: Received 24 July 2017 Received in revised form 31 July 2017 Accepted 1 August 2017 We are grateful to Peter Gleick, Cullen Hendrix, and Colin Kelley and colleagues for taking the time to comment on our work. Here we respond on five issues. 1. ‘Nothing refutes this’ In our article (Selby et al, 2017), we do not contest the idea that anthropogenic climate change may have been a contributory factor in civil war onset in Syria. This is for two reasons. For one, given that everything in today's world is at least indirectly connected e through no more than ‘six degrees of separation’, according to popular lore e it would be absurd to insist that there are absolutely no causal links between greenhouse gas forcing and the Syrian uprising. And second, even if there were no causal links between the two, this would be impossible to demonstrate, since, as we point out in our article, claims of the ‘contributory factor of unknown or un- specified significance’ variety are essentially unfalsifiable. Gleick (2017) and Kelley et al.'s (2017) continued insistence, in their commentaries, that climate change was ‘one of many contributing factors to the unrest’ in Syria, that ‘nothing’ in our article ‘refutes this’, and that our article ‘fails to debunk earlier studies that identify … such links’ should be read in this light. For, given the unfalsifiability of contributory factor-type claims, it is difficult to imagine what new evidence or arguments could refute e or what Gleick or Kelley et al. would consider as refuting e the Syria-climate conflict thesis. More than this, it is worth reflecting on what Gleick and Kelley et al. mean when they insist that climate change was a contributory factor to the uprising. Does this mean that climate change-related drought was one of a small handful of factors behind Syria's descent into civil war; or that it was one amongst a thousand, or even a million, others? Is their claim that climate change was a significant factor behind the uprising; or that it was a frankly trivial one? We do not know. Gleick (2017) implies that his position is merely that ‘there was some non-zero’ link between climate change and the unrest e which, if this is indeed his view, would place climate change alongside an infinite number of other influences on civil war onset. By contrast, Kelley et al (2015: 3242) seem to lean towards the view that climate was either a ‘primary or substantial factor’. In short, the thesis that climate change was a contributory factor in Syria's unrest is, by itself, without clear meaning, impossible to falsify, and hence close to meaningless. 2. ‘Straw men’ Gleick (2017) claims that our article misrepresents the existing literature as claiming that climate change was the only, or a major, cause of unrest in Syria, and that our analysis is therefore founded on ‘straw men’. We reject this. The second section of our article explicitly recognises that ‘no one seriously believes that climate change and drought were the sole causes of Syria's civil war’. Neither our framing questions as set out in this section, nor our conclusions to the article, depict the literature as making mono- causal arguments. And in between we repeatedly note that this literature does discuss contextual factors: we note, for instance, that no one thinks that pre-civil war migration from northeast Syria was ‘caused by poor rains alone’. It is Gleick, we believe, who offers straw man arguments here. 3. ‘No validity scientifically’ Our actual analytical strategy is neither to ask whether climate change was a contributory factor behind the Syrian uprising, nor to * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: j.selby@sussex.ac.uk (J. Selby), odahi@hampshire.edu (O. Dahi), christiane.froehlich@uni-hamburg.de (C. Fr€ ohlich), Mike.hulme@kcl.ac. uk (M. Hulme). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.08.001 0962-6298/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Political Geography 60 (2017) 253e255