The Age of Consequences

Climate Refugees and Resource Wars, Part 2

It's been such a long time, so much life under the bridge, since I wrote Climate Refugees and Resource Wars Part 1, that I was contemplating just blowing off writing Part 2, despite the research I'd done. The thesis of both parts was the attempt to answer the question What Does Global Climate Change Have to Do with World Peace and Why Does Al Gore Deserve This Prize? A Question being asked with scorn and derision by the Wingnut crowd after Al Gore and the IPCC won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

In Part 2 it was my intention to focus on the fact that the governments of several developed nations, most notably Australia, Great Britain, and our own Pentagon, are quite aware of the dangers to national and international security and peace posed by the effects of global climate change. The Pentagon commissioned a report in 2003 called: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. The report was pretty scary, predicting that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The few experts privy to the contents of the document evidently said the same thing that Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty did: that the threat from climate change to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism. I had the devil's own time trying to find the actual Pentagon report, as it had disappeared from every link to which I was directed, including the site of the organization that prepared it, The Global Business Network. What the Pentagon or any other government officials may have done with this document remains a mystery. It appears to have been what my Navy relatives call "deep-sixed." I did eventually run it to ground and am more than pleased to offer it to anyone interested in a thrilling read: An Abrupt Climate change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.

But wait...you thought I said I was considering blowing off writing about this??? Well, yes, I was. Until, that is, this morning, when I came across this article: Experts say climate change threatens national security. This is yet another report, prepared for The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank boasting that it:"serves as a strategic planning partner for the government by conducting research and analysis and developing policy initiatives that look into the future and anticipate change." There appear to be differing views on the CSIS. I found it referred to as "right-wing," and "neoconservative;" it calls itself simply "bipartisan." It has received a good deal of funding from major oil companies, and has ties to such luminaries as Richard Cheney and Henry Kissinger. Sourcewatch profiles it here. Whatever the chequered past and purposes of the CSIS, this report, The Age of Consequences, was prepared by a diverse panel of nationally recognized leaders from the fields of climate science, foreign policy, political science, oceanography, history, and national security.

The expressed mandate of the exercise was to employ the best available evidence and climate models, and imagine three future worlds that fall within the range of scientific plausibility....

The scenarios in this report use the timeframe of a national security planner:30 years, the time needed to take major military platforms from the drawing board to the battlefield.The exception is the catastrophic scenario,which extends out beyond fifty years to a century from now.The three scenarios are based on expected, severe,and catastrophic climate cases. The first scenario projects the effects in the next 30 years with the expected level of climate change. The severe scenario, which posits that the climate responds much more strongly to continued carbon loading over the next few decades than predicted by current scientific models, foresees profound and potentially destabilizing global effects over the course of the next generation or more. Finally, the catastrophic scenario is characterized by a devastating“tipping point” in the
climate system, perhaps50 or 100 years hence. In this future world, global climate conditions have changed radically, including the rapid loss of the land-based polar ice sheets,an associated dramatic rise in global sea levels, and the destruction of the existing natural order.

For each of these three future climate scenarios, we asked a national security expert to speculate about what the likely consequences for peace and stability might conceivably be of the environmental conditions proposed. Further, we enlisted a historian of science to consider whether there was anything to learn from the experience of earlier civilizations confronted with rampant disease, flooding, or some other form of national disaster.

The entire report is accessible as a 124 page pdf doc, something that will take me longer than I may have left in this lifetime to read on a computer monitor. At this link you can find a chapter excerpt, and if you download the report itself there is a 13 page "executive summary" included in the table of contents. Even a brief dip into The Age of Consequences convinced me that I do need to find the time to read it, and that it is devoutly to be hoped that our lawmakers in Congress now considering a comprehensive global warming bill would also make time to do more than skim its pages. It might even be a great idea to send the link to each of our Senators and Representatives right now. I lie awake at night imaging a future society for my four-month-old greatniece that most resembles the world of Blade Runner, or Children of Men. If there is anything within our power to stop this from becoming reality, what say we get started right now?
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