August 8, 2009
The changing global climate will pose profound
strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the
prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms,
drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments,
feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts,
experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are
taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
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. If
the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption
and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a
series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises
loom that the nation will urgently have to address. This argument could prove a fulcrum
for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy
legislation passed in June by the House. Lawmakers
leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national
security argument for approving the legislation. Senator John Kerry, the
Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee
and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway
Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill. Mr. Kerry
said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided
senators on the matter. He did not identify those senators, but the list of
undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South
and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any
carbon emissions control program. “I’ve
been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has
not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said
he had urged President Obama to make the case, too. Mr.
Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and
displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of
deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a
much larger scale,” he said. The Department of Defense’s assessment of the
security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues
in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary
Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators.
The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air
Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Pentagon and the
State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources
of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming
in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate
section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State
Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and
Development Review. “The sense that climate change poses security and
geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and
the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State
Department’s top climate negotiator. Although military and intelligence
planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some
years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus. A changing
climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical
installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead
Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and
Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military
planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va.,
and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.
Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian
Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the
Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level. Arctic melting also presents
new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is
proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping
channel that must be defended and undersea resources that are already the focus
of international competition. Ms.
Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said
she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in
the past year. “These issues
now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security
strategy, she said. The
National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence
analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications
of climate change just last year. It concluded that climate change by itself
would have significant geopolitical impacts around the world and would
contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation
and the weakening of national governments. The assessment warned that the
storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a warming planet in
coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies. “The demands of these
potential humanitarian responses may significantly tax U.S. military
transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness
posture and decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.
The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the
impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and India, a study
of alternative fuels and a look at how major power relations could be strained
by a changing climate. “We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony
C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote
recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory board on
energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “We
will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an
economic hit of some kind. “Or we will pay the price later in military terms,”
he warned. “And that will involve human lives.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?_r=1&hp