Is it ISIS? Al-Queda? Hamas? Iran? Israel? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Russia? The U-S-A?

How about none of the above. Actually, the greatest killer of people in the Middle East is -- Climate Change.

The UN’s Environmental Agency (UNEA) released a report in May calculating that the harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in West Asia (the Arabian Peninsula and the fertile crescent), making it a greater killer than war. By somewhere between 2070 and 2100, predicts Dr Elfatih Eltahir, professor of climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the temperature in much of the Gulf could have reached levels beyond which any exposure for more than six hours would be intolerable even for the fittest of humans. Current highs might seem like a normal summer day. Mecca’s outdoor pilgrimage could become hazardous. “We’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg,” he adds. “Extreme temperatures will be much worse in the future.”

Back in the 1970's, the climate in Basra, Iraq was similar to the Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. There were so many canals running through and around the delta area of Iraq that Basra was called called the Venice of the Middle East. Millions of orchards of date palm trees supported hundreds of thousands of people engaged in working the land in the region, and the dates they harvested supported thousands more involved in the export business. Now, however, as temperatures have risen over the last four decades, much of the Shatt al-Arab area previously covered by verdant wetlands and orchards has been reclaimed by the desert, or invaded by salt water from rising seas.

Over-irrigation has also taken a toll as the Midle East's fresh water resources are rapidly being depleted, turning much of the land there into dust bowls. The capitol of Yemen, Sana’a, will likely run out of water by 2019. Southern Yemen already has seen its water table collapse. Sand storms have increased, spreading the toxic, often radioactive, detritus of past and current wars to urban civilian populations. Two thirds of the countries in the Arabian peninsula and the "fertile crescent" have exhausted their available water resources to the extent that that they lack the "minimum [amount] viable for human survival." These nations have become net water importers, in other words.

It goes without saying that the constant upheaval of war upon war has hindered efforts to ameliorate the effects of drought and the ever hotter and more frequent heat waves in a part of the world where so many people live as refugees in "tent cities" exposed to the elements. Indeed, as has been frequently mentioned, drought in the rural regions of Syria led to a mass exodus to the cities. That upheaval in the demographic structure of the country was one of the main causes of the current conflict there between the Assad regime and various groups of rebels and ethnic groups. The same military conflict that has now drawn into the fighting so many of the larger regional powers - the Saudis and their allies, Iran, Turkey - as well as two of the greatest military powers, Russia and the US.

And yet how much time did either major party's political convention devote to addressing climate change as the not only our single greatest national security threat, but a deadlier force for death and destruction than any of our ongoing wars against terror? And establishment Democrats wonder why the Green Party, for all its flaws, looks ever more appealing to me and others with each passing day.

I'm not afraid of a few terrorists, but I am scared out of my wits by the failure of our political elites to even attempt to do what's necessary, now, today - not ten or twenty or thirty years from now - to deal with the deadly forces our dependence on fossil fuels has unleashed. Our "political leaders" are killing not just our future, but our present, all for a few millions of dollars in campaign contributions from industries tied to the extraction of non-renewable energy resources. Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said this: "That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes." Certainly, this past year has convinced me of the truth of that statement.