The Pentagon is war-gaming climate change, and planning for major disruptions because of it. Excerpt:
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. "It gets real complicated real quickly," said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.
Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty -- not potential security challenges.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world's rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
Gen. Anthony Zinni is quoted saying that we can either deal with this stuff now, by working to combat global warming, or we can deal with it down the road, by combating human beings. Personally, I see almost no chance at all that we'll deal with it now, but this story raises an interesting question: if the Pentagon has concluded that climate change is real and permanent, and will have such an enormous effect on the national security of the United States that it affects military planning, are conservatives who deny climate change denying that the US military knows what it's talking about?
I'm not saying that the military is always right, obviously, or shouldn't be questioned. But this is an interesting position for conservatives to be in.
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I dunno, Scurvy, you sure you want to claim that the Iraq war was won? I admit the surge went better than I expected -- and for that, thank God! -- but now that US troops are withdrawing, we're getting devastating bombings, like today's. We won't know whether the Iraq war was "won" or "lost" until and unless the country holds together after the US is gone.
Conservatives never had a real scientific basis for questioning global warming. They simply hated the people sounding the alarm so much that they had to react against it. Since the 1980s, they have become so anti-intellectual that they feel no need whatsoever to even weigh facts in a scientific light. Reality is what we say it is, because we're Americans, by God, and if anyone wants to give us flak about that, we'll kill a half a million brown people to show you we mean business. They also rebel against climate change because the petroleum industry says it isn't so, and the market is never, ever wrong. It is God, and anyone who questions it must be a Socialist, or worse.
One can quibble about the rates and effects of greenhouse gas emissions-driven heat, but it is a real process. It is happening, and it will happen whether or not you hate Al Gore and Greenpeace. The mechanisms of climate change simply do not care if you're having a snit about the political implications. We will wise up and start to live smarter and try to deal with it, or we will die stupidly or give our grandchildren a world in which they will have a standard of living much much lower than ours. At least the military still has some capacity to engage reality above ideology.
Kenneth I imbibed that anti-Americanism with my mother's milk. It is the default position of leftist academics, journalists, and politicians world wide. As a mere attitude it is welcomed in polite society, it receives applause in sophisticated circles and is accepted uncritically. Yes - I am implying your belief is the anti-intellectual one.
I've come to notice something happening in America that slowed its following Europe into oblivion, but many would rather join them.
From my vantage point, the US has tended to be insular and innocent, not really aware of its shadow - a bit like a teenager but fundamentally good. The cosmopolitan, cynical, and now we see culturally exhausted Europeans tend to be the Machiavellians.
Real flexibility, real progress, real renewal can only be carried out within the resources of Western tradition (take the writing of the US Constitution) - we draw from it and recast it into forms fit for a planet that changes everyday. Traditionalists seek to hold on to that resource for the sake of those that come after us, it is Christian in motivation and character; and as revelation it is inexhaustible. It is the Bible, the tradition of reflective thought and institutions connected to it.
What we find in Europe is an almost wholesale jettison of tradition. The dominant cultural trajectory is almost completely reactionary - back to a pagan ethos. The horizon of the human is narrowed, the scope of reason restricted - to the mere instrumental or Aristotelian techne variety. You can find many thinkers who have developed past a rather superficial anti-Americanism and found instead in the US a last redoubt from which it might be possible to spring some cultural renewal. Americans resist apostasy but are being worn down.
This renewal cannot come from a culture that has returned to an ancient ethos, one that will not look at what the Christian revolution brought to the ancient world. A culture that uncritically rejects the Christian revolution and what it brought will be just an uncritical about how it proposes to organize its future.
It was a revelation of the human person to itself - a beautiful and radical anthropology. In short The Incarnation that happened to the ancient world.
What you see as cultural reaction is just the opposite IMO, it is an attempt to conserve - a duty we have to the yet born. There are not enough doing this conserving because it is demanding, rather unfashionable and requires a thick skin. There is a social wave carrying us into division and violence and the false unity of collective planetary saving from CO2 is a self deluding protection from this knowledge.
The bewitching claims of the state over against the person was the dominant paradigm in the ancient world; the state now claims to be able to manage an entire atmosphere and needs a slush fund to do it. Scientists and experts are needed to provide justification and bureaucrats to administer. The power and influence of this elite class multiplies and will self select personnel fitted to this arrangement. Data needs to be filtered so that this caste is able to justify its existence (e.g. Prussian military caste) and scientists face mercenary pressure to prostitute their science.
Vast sums are spent looking for a crisis, and very little on auditing the findings. It has mostly been volunteers who have discovered frauds and data manipulations.
When companies like ENRON vigorously promoted Kyoto because it saw how much money was to be made - I see families fleeced and the rich, as always, the camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle.
Notice that it is now called "climate change". And of course the climate will change simply because that is what the climate is always doing, but it's not going to change predictably. Still, the Pentagon is wise to start thinking about the various possibilities that could occur.
BTW, a 0.6 C increase on average over the past 100 years, plus-or-minus 0.7 C. Global temp still hasn't been well-defined, temp monitors have been surrounded by cities and so their temps have gone up due to the heat-island effect, ... The only thing approaching a good measure of temp is the satellites and those have only operated since 1978 which is an incredibly short time span.
"I dunno, Scurvy, you sure you want to claim that the Iraq war was won? I admit the surge went better than I expected -- and for that, thank God! -- but now that US troops are withdrawing, we're getting devastating bombings, like today's. We won't know whether the Iraq war was "won" or "lost" until and unless the country holds together after the US is gone."
Rod, I don't disagree with your assessment above. But all I'm claiming is that what you've just written is VERY different from what you were writing, with a high frequency of posts, for months and months in 2007-2008. At a certain point you apparently realized that the facts had fallen out from under your narrative of disaster, whereupon you suddenly avoided the topic of the Iraq War like the plague. By running from the topic rather than admitting error, you did not cover yourself with glory, I'm sorry to say. (My apologies for being so cranky, but this has bugged me for quite a while. It seems out of character for you, given how forthrightly you blog as a rule.)
My point now is that you might want to hedge your bets on AGW lest you find yourself in the same place again. During the past few years, there's been a sharp divergence between what's actually occurred with the global climate and what would have been happening (given CO2 outputs) if the CO2-driven warming theory were correct. It is still statistically possible that those models are right, but it's becoming increasingly unlikely. Anybody who maintains that the CO2-driven warming theory looks as convincing now as it did in 2000 is either poorly informed or -- yes, I'm gonna say it -- in denial.
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