President Obama made headlines Monday when he said during his remarks at COP21 that the climate change conference taking place in Paris is an "act of defiance" against terrorists who attacked the city earlier this month. Later on the same day, Bill Nye took that link a step further, explaining to HuffPost Live that the brutality in Paris was "a result of climate change."
"You can make a very reasonable argument that climate change is not that indirectly related to terrorism," said Nye, who discusses global warming at length in his new book Unstoppable. "This is just the start of things. The more we let [climate change] go on, the more trouble there's going to be."
Nye's reasoning hinges on a water shortage in Syria, which researchers have blamed on climate change. As Nye explained, the shortage has stunted farming and pushed young people to look for work in more densely populated areas.
"Young people have gone to big cities looking for work. There's not enough work for everybody, so the disaffected youths, as we say -- the young people who don't believe in the system, believe the system has failed, don't believe in the economy -- are more easily engaged and more easily recruited by terrorist organizations, and then they end up part way around the world in Paris shooting people," Nye said.
Watch Nye explain the connection between climate change and terrorism above, and click here for his full HuffPost Live conversation.
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