Important Resource Material on Climate War Scenarios

Update: On August 9, 2009, The New York Times published this article by John M. Broder

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

Please click on the title to read the whole story.

Here’s a clip:

WASHINGTON — 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.

Recently, war games and intelligence studies have shown just how vulnerable to food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding many areas, already stressed, will become in the very near future. This includes sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, where US humanitarian relief or military response will likely be necessary.

“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…

“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.”

Reports by US intelligence on the impact of dangerous climate change on countries such as India and China are being developed to study alternative fuels and ”how major power relations could be strained by a changing climate.”

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Below are useful links, dating from 2003, to five and a half years of various reports and articles on possible future conflicts related to dangerous climate change, an important reference for governmental and non-governmental decision makers.

Posted by Admin, July 26, 2009

Hiroshima Day, August 6, is approaching, and still, 64 years since the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, people still join with others to remember the great loss of life that took place that week in August and to remind each other of the terrible cost of war to humanity. It would be appropriate, this August, to take heed of the major present-day threat to our civilization: Climate Wars.

Historically, wars have been, by nature, largely political and religious. Now, however, most are either directly or indirectly related to climate change, and this would include the wars for energy resources that are taking place in the Middle East. In the future, tragically, the many of wars on our Planet will be caused by lack of food, water and shelter, as many millions of desperate climate refugees are forced to flee their homes because of flooding and drought. There is the ever-present danger that one of these conflicts could escalate to nuclear war.

Climate wars will be a huge problem for all of the World’s people, especially the disadvantaged, and it appears that world leaders are at last taking notice of this.

In October of 2003 Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall wrote a classified report for the Pentagon entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security: Imagining the Unthinkable. It is described as follows:

“The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable – to push the boundaries of current research on climate change so we may better understand the potential implications on United States national security.
 
“We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario with these experts. The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.

“We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately.”

Following the trail of the story of the Pentagon Report on the web, we see that on February 22, 2004, The Observer leaked it in this article: 

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us:
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.. 

“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

“The document predicts 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 threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

“‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’”

The Pentagon Report has been leaked and re-leaked over the last few years, in spite of the fact that the .pdf version became readibly available by Googling the exact title: http://www.gbn.com/articles/pdfs/Abrupt%20Climate%20Change%20February%202004.pdf

On February 25, 2004, the “trusted” site of the Competive Enterprise Institute (trusted that is, only if you’re a climate change denier) published Iain Murray’s ”rational take on this week’s silliest story:”
The Unthinking in Pursuit of the Unthinkable: Disingenuous global-warming nonsense. Here are a few lines, just in case you don’t already know what we’re up against with these people:

“When a “scandalous” story breaks in the United States, makes no waves, resurfaces a few weeks later in the left-wing British press, and only then do liberal activists start haranguing people about it, it is safe to say that the story should be treated with a little suspicion.  That is certainly the case with the environmental cri du jour, that the Pentagon is alarmed by the national-security aspects of global warming and recommends immediate action. Even the Pentagon thinks global warming is worse than terrorism!
It’s all nonsense, of course, as you’d expect from any story touted round the media by Greenpeace.”

We think the November 23, 2007 article posted by Zoe Kenny of GreenLeft in Australia may be closer to the truth:

UN report: Severe climate change may now be `inevitable’

“It seems that the US ruling elite is more interested in planning for a proliferation of climate change-induced wars over increasingly scarce supplies of food, water and oil than actually acting to stop climate change.

“In February 2004, Fortune magazine reported that the Pentagon’s latest planning for future wars is centred on “the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies”.

“The article reported that the Pentagon’s planners envisage the US building “a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands — waves of boat people pose especially grim problems.”

“This the barbaric “vision” that the rulers of the world’s richest country have for dealing with the social consequences of rapid onset of global warming.”

The last “leak” of the report we can find was as late as February 2, 2008, by PoliticsDaily.com:
Pentagon Climate Change Report Alarming

“UK newspaper The Observer obtained a secret report by the Pentagon that projects a horrific future for the planet due to the influence of global climate change. According to the report, As early as 2020 major European cities will be lost beneath the sea and the climate of the UK will resemble the current climate of Siberia.

“Pentagon adviser Andrew Marshall commissioned The report, which paints an apocalyptic future consisting of anarchy, nuclear threats, dwindling food and water, limited access to energy–a collective threat that dwarfs terrorism. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the report says. “Once again, warfare would define human life.” The report also recommends that climate change “be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.”

The PoliticsDaily story that was “leaked” was by that time four years old. Better late than never, we suppose.

The defititive book on the subject of possible climate conflict scenarios was published October 28, 2008. Climate Wars was written by military historian Gwynne Dyer. From Amazon’s product description:

“From one of the world’s great geopolitical analysts, a terrifying glimpse of the none-too-distant future, when climate change will force the world’s powers into a desperate struggle for advantage and even survival.

“Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead, and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Prescient, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research and interviews, Climate Wars promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years.”

Dyer has just completed a three-part series of talks on Climate Wars aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program, Paul Kennedy’s IDEAS. The podcast is available here. 

“Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters – the United States, China and India – were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered – all of them controversial.”

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We are now at the end of July of 2009, when interest in the political instability dangerous climate change will cause has spiked. This may be due to the recent release of numerous scientific reports from Britain and the U.S. showing Earth will become dramatically warmer during the course of this century and the recognition by world leaders that this will occur in spite of every effort we make to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

See “Climate Change Models” – A Shocking Graphic From the UK Met Hadley Centre, December 11, 2008 and Gambing With Climate Change, May 21, 2009, our article on MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. On April 16, 2009, the U.S. released the report: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  Much of it is available online, and you can also download the entire document in .pdf format.

Important note: The wording in current reports on climate change scenarios has changed slightly from older ones. No longer do we read, “might occur,” as the phrase used to describe  future effects of dangerous climate change. “Will occur” is now used instead. 

Here are links to important and recent documents:

On July 6, Oxfam published a 61 page briefing paper, Suffering the Science: climate change, people and poverty. It outlines the devastating effects global warming is already causing and what we can expect in the very near future.

The climate wars of the future will be about resources – minerals, oil and gas- but they will also be about water, our most precious element. Rivers are drying up, and glaciers on all continents are fast diminishing, depleting drinking water supplies. Heat and drought is a reality for much of China, the entire continent of Africa and in Latin America. Oxfam reports that:

“There is potential for conflict around many rivers that run through a range of nations, especially the Indus, the Nile, and the Tigris-Euphrates. A recent study of 60 years of records of 925 major rivers, between them providing 73 per cent of the world’s water supply, found that a third of them were significantly affected by climate change, mainly in terms of diminished flow. These included the Ganges, the Niger, the Colorado, and the Yellow River.”

“The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report says that the Himalayan glaciers – which form the largest body of ice outside the polar caps and which are the source of water for the ‘innumerable rivers that flow across the Indo-Gangetic plains’ – are receding faster than in any other part of the world, primarily because of climate change. The report adds that, at their current rate, the glaciers are likely to disappear by 2035, if not sooner. The Ganges basin alone is home to 500 million people. Between one and two billion people in China face water shortages this century if supplies from the Himalayan glaciers begin to fail.”

Oxfam reports: “This April, the Lloyds of London risk analysis contained this statement, “Access to water will increasingly be seen as a potential strategic weapon.”

On July 12, The Independent published this article by Jonathan Owen:

The planet’s future: Climate change ‘will cause civilisation to collapse’

Owen writes of authoritative new study, “2009 State of the Future” to be released in August, setting out a grim vision of shortages and violence. 6700 pages long, it is the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet and presents a stark warning for us all. It was sponsored by leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, describes it as providing “invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society”.

The report was produced by the Millennium Project – a think-tank formerly part of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations. It’s authors write of emerging environmental security issues: “The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability.”   

The report says, “coordination for effective and adequate action is yet incipient, and environmental problems worsen faster than response or preventive policies are being adopted”.

On Tuesday, July 1 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing on Climate Change and Global Security: Challenges, Threats and Diplomatic Opportunities.

On July 22, Tom Schueneman of Global Warming Is Real posted video of the hearing, and his article, Military, Policy Experts See Climate Change as National Security Issue, can be seen at http://redgreenandblue.org

“Experts appearing before a Senate Foreign Relations hearing on Tuesday told legislators that climate change should be treated as a grave national security threat, with retired Navy Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn saying “climate change poses a clear and present danger to the United States of America.”

“The hearing, entitled Climate Change and Global Security: Challenges, Threats, and Diplomatic Opportunities, was chaired by Senator John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts with John Lugar as the ranking minority member on the committee. Witnesses on the hearing panel included former senator John Warner of Virginia; Sharon Burke, vice president of the Center for a New American Security; retired Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, a member of the Center for Naval Analysis Advisory Board; and retired Navy Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, president of the American Security Project.”

Here’s a clip from the end of Tom’s article:

“The Pentagon was directed by congress in 2008 to consider climate change in its contingency planning, a process ongoing with the current Quadrennial Defense Review. Previous studies done for the Defense Department have considered the consequences of worst-case scenarios (pdf) in terms of national security, yet the issue of climate change as it relates to national security has been “largely absent from the debate,” said Senator Kerry, “Today’s hearing’s purpose is to put it at the front and center, where it belongs.”

“With the military’s “public embrace” of the threats posed by climate change, the support of the American public to take substantive action will hopefully follow. Burke told the Committee that “poll after poll, the military is the most trusted institution in this country.”

“While supporting the efforts of the committee, and acknowledging the need for public understanding of the climate issue for long-term success of U.S. policy, Warner cautioned that lawmakers cannot wait for public acceptance to take action, saying the time is now for Congress to lead: “I just think that this is the time Congress has got to forcefully lead. We can’t follow the public; we’ve got to lead it.””

Tom’s article includes Senator John Kerry’s opening remarks. Here’s a clip:

“In 2007, eleven former Admirals and high-ranking generals issued a seminal report from the Center for Naval Analysis, where Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn serves on the Military Advisory Board. They warned that climate change is a “threat multiplier” with “the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today.”

“This is because climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. Places only too familiar with the instability, conflict, and resource competition that often create refugees and IDPs, will now confront these same challenges with an ever growing population of EDPs—environmentally displaced people. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.”

Finally, and interestingly, on July 24, several Canadian newspapers carried versions of this story: Think-tank espouses future climate horrors – Cataclysmic disasters predicted. An excerpt:

“The culmination of disasters, needed cleanups, permafrost melting, lower agricultural yields, growing health problems and the like are taking a much terrible toll, much greater than we anticipated 20 years ago.”
This presidential diary entry is, of course, fiction. But its inclusion in the 120-page November 2008 report by the National Intelligence Council, a Washington security think-tank, illustrates a grim and troubling reality that is causing worry in such diverse places as the Pentagon and British Defence Ministry, major aid agencies, the United Nations and, of course, among environmentalists.

“Real life 21st-century threats due to climate change — massive flooding, droughts, population explosions, massive migrations of uprooted and desperate people facing life-threatening food and water shortages — have made “climate security” a buzzword that now extends far beyond the war rooms of western capitals.
The trepidation is very real that this will be the driver for war on a scale we have yet to see on this planet, bringing tension to stable parts of the world, making the tense places worse.

“Don’t dismiss this as military-driven paranoia: the alarm is being sounded by non-military actors — United Nations agencies, leading philanthropists, the World Bank, as well as major international aid agencies that have always strived to maintain a healthy distance from the world’s military establishment.

“Here in Canada the connection between climate change and global instability is not publicly discussed, and no one seems to really know why.”

Editor’s note: We have added the hot link to the .pdf file of the National Intelligence Council report, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” to the clip above. The document was not referred to by title in the news stories in Canada. Please click here to read the complete Canada.com news story, with reaction from Canadian public officials.