“While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore’s recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere – a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they’re finding is not at all comforting.” —Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams
The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare: “The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Recent studies of temperature data locked in Arctic ice cores indicate that warming trends push the climate to a ‘tipping point’ with a sudden lurch from one state to another over a timespan of less than a decade. The major impact on the northern hemisphere would, paradoxically, be drastic cooling, not warming; the major mechanism appears to be the disruption of the Gulf Stream (which warms northern latitudes) induced primarily by decreases in the ocean’s salinity caused by icemelt and rainwater runoff. Although not caused in the past by warming induced by greenhouse gases from human activity, research establishes these drastic flip-flops in the past.
The Pentagon’s concerns arise from the fact that dramatic shifts in climate may overwhelm certain societies’ ability to cope and drastically upset geopolitical strategic balance. The focus in climate research is thus shifting from gradual to rapid change. Hollywood is getting the concept too. Next summer’s disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, already being advertised at your local cineplex, envisions an ice age caused by global warming. While the climate scientists have far less than the filmmakers to say about the human drama of the coming ice age, the details are what Pentagon planning is all about. Some of the Defense Dept’s visionaries in long-term strategic threat assessment have apparently turned their attention to this scenario. Fortune magazine here summarizes an unclassified Pentagon report from this think tank, which spins an environmental and geopolitical forecast based on a sudden ‘conveyor collapse’ over the decade beginning in 2010. Suffice it to say it is not a pretty picture, and could reduce humanity to a brutal struggle for basic survival resources unlike anything seen in recent centuries but, with the technological capabilities of modern warfare including nuclear weaponry, of unheard-of brutality.
The Pentagon report does not indicate what recommendations its planners are making and it certainly does not indicate how they will be received by the dysadministration, who are the environmental equivalents of Holocaust deniers. Because of the US’s resources, climate diversity, technological superiority and military might, it fares better than other regions in the ‘wargame scenario’, and it is likely that Pentagon planners are focusing on protecting us against the anticipated hordes of starving have-nots. As Fortune‘s essay euphemistically puts it, “we should… identify ‘no regrets’ strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security” and “form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.” Since ecological catastrophe is at our doorstep, and it is too late to do anything to avert it, it’s every man for himself, ‘no regrets’, in other words. And for me it’s too late to regret having brought children into such a world.
