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Turkey Rejects Drought Claims: “Who Does NASA Think It Is?”

Turkey has slammed claims by NASA that a region in the country is experiencing its worst drought in 900 years.  Forestry and Waterworks Minister Veysel Eroglu criticised NASA’s technology as being “inadequate” and, addressing parliament, asked “Who does NASA think it is?” Middleeasteye.net reports: A report released by the US government’s space agency last month found that a drought affecting the eastern Mediterranean since 1998 is “likely the worst… of the past nine centuries”. The report used tree-ring records to track the history of human-induced climate change, concluding that “the recent drought in the Levant region, from 1998 to 2012, stands out as about 50 percent drier than the driest period in the past 500 years”. Eroglu rejected the findings, arguing that NASA’s weather forecasts for the past year had been inaccurate. NASA’s report also found that the eastern Mediterranean region, which includes Turkey, is likely to be one of the worst affected by human-induced climate change in coming years. Responding to Eroglu’s comments on Monday, the agency tweeted a video of one of its astronauts in orbit at the International Space Station, singing part of David Bowie’s 1969 hit Space Oddity. Watch our astronauts leaving International Space Station after Veysel Eroğlu’s [...]