Right now, the worst climatic crisis is taking place in the arid swath of South and Central Asia stretching from Iran to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This area, a volatile soup of despotism, militarism, booming population, poverty, racial and religious rivalries, fragile economies and ecologies, seems about to be fired by the match of global warming.

The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction at Columbia University (IRI) reports that Central and Southwest Asia over the past three years represents the largest region of persistent drought on earth. A three-year drought -- the worst in 50 to 100 years -- now besieges Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, threatening 60 million people.

In Afghanistan, 12 million are impacted, parched by thirst and starved by crop failures. By autumn 2001, civil unrest and drought caused a million internally displaced persons, plus several million more refugees to leave the country entirely. But those fleeing found little relief in Iran or Pakistan -- there's as little water there as back home.

In Iran, the drought has affected over half the population. In some northwest provinces, there has been no measurable rainfall in 30 months. Orchards yielding almonds, apricots and mangoes have withered. Two hundred thousand nomadic herders have lost their flocks. Nationwide, 800,000 livestock died in 2000 because of the drought. By 2001, some 80 percent of all farm animals had been sold rather than face slow death. The U.N. estimates damages at $2.5 billion last year.

In Pakistan, where the urban population is exploding, outstripping the country's ability to feed it, the drought has caused soil and seeds to blow away, vegetation to burn brown, and parched livestock to be slaughtered. 349,000 Pakistanis are impacted so far, not counting the influx of thirsty Afghans. At one refugee camp inside Pakistan wells had to be drilled a mile deep to find water. All of this in a volatile nation whose dictatorial Islamist-dominated regime supported the Taliban and possesses nuclear weapons.

Is global warming responsible for the central Asian drought? It is impossible to say for sure, but there is reason to suspect it is. IRI notes that global temperatures rose steadily over the past four years (1999 was the hottest year on record, with 2001 taking second place, and 2002 poised to steal the record). And all this warming may have contributed to the Central Asian drought.

The immediate cause of drought guessed at by IRI is a prolonged "La Niña" effect: unusually warm waters in the western Pacific Ocean colliding with cooler waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. La Niña is cousin to El Niño (a warming of central and eastern Pacific waters). El Niño is expected to become stronger under climate change, but the global warming impacts on La Niña are less known.

IRI scientists also note that hotter temperatures make any drought more severe: Hotter air causes greater evaporation rates, drying soils and reducing stream flows. That's why a summer drought is worse than a winter drought.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that decade-long climate trends from 1990 to 2000 point to a world in which global warming is at work, causing extreme weather events, intensifying droughts and storms. Insurance loss data concurs. In the 1980s, insurers worldwide paid out just $2 billion each year for weather-related disasters. In the '90s (the hottest decade on record), figures jumped to about $12 billion annually.

In 2001, the U.N.'s Environmental Programs Financial Services Initiative issued a study estimating that climate-change damage will top $304 billion annually by mid-century, potentially bankrupting some developing nations.

According to another U.N. study, crops worldwide will be negatively affected by climate change. It forecasts a 10- to 15-percent decline in grain yields in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia -- poor regions with exploding populations that can ill afford the loss. One in eight people could face famine in just 50 years due to global warming.

Still, climatologists have no smoking gun. They're unable to point to any single climatic occurrence, such as the Central Asian drought, and declare that it is due to climate change. That's because climate is a weather average taken over many years; therefore, no single event can ever be called a trend. The Bush administration has used this argument to deny climate change and continue burning fossil fuels. But it is a high-stakes gamble. Add U.S. plans to develop new fossil fuel fields and refineries in the region, and the dangers mount still higher.

The Caspian Sea Basin has been called the "new oil El Dorado," the most promising untapped oil field on earth. In 1997, the U.S. Department of State estimated the oil underground at 200 billion barrels -- a third of Persian Gulf reserves. So it is no coincidence that at the height of the Afghan war, George W. Bush rushed to meet with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Since then, U.S.-Russian pipeline agreements have been forged to start tapping the Caspian.

Nor was it a coincidence that the U.S. sought permission to launch aircraft from Uzbekistan during its Taliban offensive. The stationing of planes in Central Asia escalates a U.S. military buildup begun in 1997, one that was all about oil long before it was ever about terror. Oil also explains why Afghanistan's Taliban got $43 million in U.S. aid early in 2001. The gift was supposed to smooth the way for a pipeline stretching from the Caspian through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea -- a pipeline the Taliban blocked but which the new U.S.-friendly Afghan government now welcomes.

But our energy strategy in Central Asia -- whose architect was not the current Bush, but former President Jimmy Carter -- may undermine homeland security, not protect it. As we exploit Central Asian oil, we may destabilize the region by backing dictators who repress their citizenry. In the long run, using Caspian oil to fuel our cars and culture may further destabilize the region by adding to global warming. Marginal climates like that of Central Asia are likely to be most affected by climate change.

Imagine the year 2010 and a super-powerful, climate-change-induced Central Asian drought, with crop failures leading to an uprising of the hungry and thirsty Arab populations of Islamabad, of Uzbek dissidents, of the Afghan and Iranian countryside. Such tumult could cut off Caspian oil. In a worst-case scenario, our fossil fuel-dependent nation might decide it had no alternative but to throw its military might into the fray, escalating resentment and violence.

Is there a better formula for fueling global terrorism? From those angry, hungry, thirsty, dispossessed masses, many of them sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, may come the terrorists of tomorrow, bent on revenge against energy-glutted America. And next time it could be accomplished with nuclear weapons seized from Pakistan's ruling military dictatorship.

Journalist Ross Gelbspan calls the resulting political nightmare "the coming permanent state of emergency." Gelbspan predicts that "a significant surge in terrorism is the likeliest result of the desperation that is overtaking many people in environmentally disrupted countries." In his book about global warming, "The Heat Is On," he offers the following warning from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Henry Kendall:

"The world's food supply must double within the next 30 years to feed the population, which will double within the next 60 years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century [the 2000s] -- as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops -- population will outrun food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change -- a series of droughts or crop-destroying-rains -- and we're looking down the mouth of a gun."

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