Climate Change Concerns: The US Military is already involved

In several earlier blogs I encouraged readers to pick up the book ‘Climate Wars’ and shared a few comments Gwynne Dyer, the author, set forth in the introduction.

I continue my habit of reading while riding (an exercise bike) and have now read 80 per cent of the book. Very informative to say the least.

In Chapter 1, Dyer shares details from a US military report (National Security and Climate Change. April 2007) and interviews a contributor who said the following:

You already have great tension over water [in the Middle East]. These are cultures often built around a single source of water. So any stresses on the rivers and aquifers can be a source of conflict. If you consider land loss, the Nile Delta region is the most fertile ground in Egypt. Any losses there [from a storm surge] could cause a real problem, again because the region is so fragile...


[Link to Climate Change and Conflict at treehugger.com]

We will pay for this one way or another. 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. And that will involve human lives.

There is no way out of this that does not have real costs attached to it.

- Gen. A. C. Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander in chief, US Central Command

The report created quite a stir when it was published, writes Dyer, precisely because it effectively circumvented the Bush ban on treating climate change as a real and serious phenomenon.

He adds:

Whatever their motives, the American military and intelligence communities are now fully committed to playing a leading role in the struggle to contain the negative effects of climate change... This new commitment is leading to the production, both inside and outside the Pentagon, of serious studies of what the future will look like politically and strategically as global warming progresses, and what the role of the military will be in that world. (E.g., The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change)

No word was given when the US might start to reduce carbon emissions and by how much, and because of that, no word from Canada either.

(PM Harper is reportedly busy with more important matters while his government is suspended).

Again, I encourage readers to find Climate Wars.

Please click here to link to earlier entries re the book.

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