Global Warming Threatens U.S. National Security
In a report released on Monday and on the heels of the first debate in the United Nations Security Council on the issue, 11 retired U.S. military leaders assert that climate change raises risks and tensions in the world’s most volatile areas, and the U.S. needs to start planning and cooperating with other nations to mitigate and respond to those risks. From the Associated Press:
“The report warns that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water and increased instability from hunger, worsening diseases, rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. ‘The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,’ the 35-page report predicts.
‘Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations,’ former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan said. ‘Everybody needs to start paying attention to what's going on. I don't think this is a particularly hard sell in the Pentagon. … We're paying attention to what those security implications are.’
Gen. Anthony Zinni, President Bush's former Middle East envoy, said in the report: ‘It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism.’”
The leaders urged the U.S. to take action now, without waiting for a total certainty on global warming’s impacts. Extreme weather like drought, flooding, rising sea levels, and shifts in habitat for plant and wildlife are some of the expected consequences. Any of these could prompt U.S. military involvement; for example, the U.S. and Europe may have to accept environmental refugees from Latin America and Africa as drought increases and food production declines. Climate change impacts could also make life more difficult in unstable locales like parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, perhaps driving the U.S. more frequently to provide stability before conditions are exploited by extremists.
Although the U.S. is the planet’s biggest emitter of global warming pollution, the report stressed that it does need to develop strong partnerships with other nations like China and India, who will be contributing significantly to the global economy and to its emissions.
The report was published by the non-partisan CNA Corporation think tank.
Associated Press, via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CNA Corporation
Globe and Mail
April 20th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Could someone please provide evidence to this statement from the article? It’s cpmpletely irresponsible to keep saying this stuff with absolutely no evidence.
“Although the U.S. is the planet’s biggest emitter of global warming pollution”
This assumes Global Warming is caused by man. No one knows this!!!!!
April 20th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
There is sufficient hard evidence and this question has beeen answered in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. CO2 is a heat-trapping gas (this has been proven and known for over a hundred years). 6 billion people on this planet emit tens of billions of tons annually, half of which cannot be absorbed. The CO2 lingers in the atmosphere and accumulates. Since about 1960, temperature began rising in close correlation with CO2 increase. Never before in prehistory has this happened. On the other hand, there is no direct evidience for other natural causes right now, even though there is much conjecture and speculation by people without scientific backgrounds.
May 7th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Scientists believe that the climate models used to prove global warming and to predict its effects are misrepresented. They point out that according to the models, the last century should have been much worse than it actually was. Temperature increases occurred before the widespread emission of carbon dioxide in the middle of the 20th century…there have been widespread temperature fluctuations throughout time.
More than three quarters of the atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and most of the rest is oxygen. The remaining 1% is a mixture of carbon dioxide, water vapour and ozone gasses, that not only produces important weather features such as clouds and rain, but also has considerable influence on the overall climate of the Earth. Humans do not produce enough CO2 to negatively impact this balance. Furthermore trees help counteract our CO2 production by turning it into oxygen!
There are lots of lies and misconception surrounding the Global Warming mantra. The biggest one claims there is “consensus” among scientists that human-caused global warming is a fact. There is no such consensus. There were 85 scientists and climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzeg Declaration which called drastic climate controls “ill-advised, lacking credible support from the underlying science; 17,000 scientists and leaders involved in climate study who signed a petition issued by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine saying there is NO evidence green house gasses cause global warming; and the 4,000 scientists and leaders from around the world, including 70 Nobel Prize winners, who signed the Heidelberg Appeal calling greenhouse global warming theories “highly uncertain scientific theories.”
June 29th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
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