Pentagon to rank global warming as destabilising force

[Peikko 1,575]

The Pentagon will for the first time rank global warming as a destabilising force, adding fuel to conflict and putting US troops at risk around the world, in a major strategy review to be presented to Congress tomorrow. The quadrennial defence review, prepared by the Pentagon to update Congress on its security vision, will direct military planners to keep track of the latest climate science, and to factor global warming into their long term strategic planning.

"While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world," said a draft of the review seen by the Guardian.

Heatwaves and freak storms could put increasing demand on the US military to respond to humanitarian crises or natural disaster. But troops could feel the effects of climate change even more directly, the draft says.

More than 30 US bases are threatened by rising sea levels. It ordered the Pentagon to review the risks posed to installations, and to combat troops by a potential increase in severe heatwaves and fires.

The review's release coincides with a sharpening focus in the American defence establishment about global warming – even though polls last week showed the public increasingly less concerned.

The CIA late last year established a centre to collect intelligence on climate change. Earlier this month, CIA officials sent emails to environmental experts in Washington seeking their views on climate change impacts around the world, and how the agency could keep tabs on what actions countries were taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The CIA has also restarted a programme – scrapped by George Bush – that allowed scientists and spies to share satellite images of glaciers and Arctic sea ice.

That suggests climate change is here to stay as a topic of concern for the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, in acknowledging the threat of global warming, will now have to factor climate change into war game exercises and long-term security assessments of badly affected regions such as the Arctic, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

Military planners will have to factor climate change into war game exercises and long-term security assessments of badly affected regions such as the Arctic, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

"The leadership of the Pentagon has very strongly indicated that they do consider climate change to be a national security issue," said Christine Parthemore, an analyst at the Centre for a New American Security, who has been studying the Pentagon's evolving views on climate change. "They are considering climate change on a par with the political and economic factors as the key drivers that are shaping the world."

Awareness of climate change and its impact on threat levels and military capability had been slowly percolating through the ranks since 2008 when then Senators Hillary Clinton and John Warner pushed the Pentagon to look specifically at the impact of global warming in its next long-term review.

But the navy was already alive to the potential threat, with melting sea ice in the Arctic opening up a new security province. The changing chemistry of the oceans, because of global warming, is also playing havoc with submarine sonar, a report last year from the CNAS warned.

US soldiers and marines, meanwhile, were getting a hard lesson in the dangers of energy insecurity on the battlefield, where attacks on supply convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq inflicted heavy casualties.

"Our dependence on fuel adds significant cost and puts US soldiers and contractors at risk," said Dorothy Robyn, deputy undersecretary of defence for the environment. "Energy can be a matter of life and death and we have seen dramatically in Iraq and Afghanistan the cost of heavy reliance on fossil fuels."

She told a conference call on Friday the Pentagon would seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions from non-combat operations by 34% from 2008 levels by 2020, in line with similar cuts by the rest of the federal government.

In addition to the threat of global warming, she said the Pentagon was concerned that US military bases in America were vulnerable because of their reliance on the electric grid to cyber attack and overload in case of a natural disaster.

The US air force, in response, has built up America's biggest solar battery array in Nevada, and is testing jet fighter engines on biofuels. The Marine Corps may soon start drilling its own wells to eliminate the need to truck in bottled water in response to recommendations from a taskforce on reducing energy use in a war zone.

But not all defence department officials have got on board, and Parthemore said she believes it could take some time to truly change the military mindset.

Parthemore writes of an exchange on a department of defence list-serv in December 2008 about whether global warming exists. It ends with one official writing: "This is increasingly shrill and pedantic. Moreover, it's becoming boring."

Link

[luckytxn 2,265]

You just know that Obama the Socialist has told them and every department to get with the program or ship out.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

q20cnn8vOfg

[Peikko 1,575]

The unwillingness of scientists at the University of East Anglia to release climate data to people who choose not to believe in climate change was a mistake. Science advances through openness, through the ability of others to replicate the same findings or demonstrate error in discovery and interpretation. Reluctance to disclose – revealed last week in the wake of the release of private email exchanges between climate researchers – invites suspicion. The hacked email exchanges were an embarrassment, and the refusal to disclose data was a bad call, but neither episode casts much doubt upon the science of global warming. The ­evidence for climate change driven by man-made discharges of greenhouse gases is now decades old, has been independently confirmed by researchers all over the world, and is – as the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said yesterday – overwhelming.

There is plenty of room for argument about the rate at which the world is warming, the degree to which humans are culpable, the likely outcomes and the most effective steps to be taken. But there is not much argument about the big picture. The climate researchers at East Anglia were early in the field, but they were not alone. Their conclusions have been backed by scientists at the Met Office, from other British universities, and from the British Antarctic Survey; by oceanographers from Germany, California and Massachusetts; by planetary scientists from Nasa and the European Space Agency; by naturalists in a Europe-wide network of botanical gardens; and by climate historians, foresters, zoologists, palaeontologists, glaciologists and geographers on six continents. Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have repeatedly released findings that broadly confirm the same big picture, and for eight of the past nine years those researchers were funded by a Republican administration that would have much preferred to hear a different story. In 2001, the national science academies of 17 nations – including Britain's Royal Society – urged governments to avert future calamity by agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions; within three weeks, the US National Academy of Sciences had joined the chorus, and begun to sing from the same hymnal. Although any single piece of evidence is open to reinterpretation, the mass of data assembled all seems to point in one direction: towards a warmer and increasingly uncomfortable world.

Global average temperatures have gone on rising. Nine of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred in the past decade. In the past three decades, glaciers have receded at alarming rates in Alpine Europe, tropical Africa and sub-Arctic Alaska. The Greenland icecap has begun to melt and the north polar sea ice has become both smaller and thinner. The northern hemisphere growing season has been extended by 11 days. For reasons connected with human pressure, but also possibly with global warming, arid regions have become more arid, floods more catastrophic, hurricanes and cyclones more destructive. Millions of very poor people have been forced to abandon their homes, to kill their cattle, to walk away from their farms. Oceans have become more acidic, and coral reefs have been bleached. Forests have burned; rivers in the drier regions have slowed to a trickle, or dried up altogether.

Some events may be considered as consequences of natural variation in a climate cycle, but the intensity and frequency of such extreme events is expected to grow as the world warms. The lesson to be drawn from the latest round of questions about climate science is not that scientists make mistakes, and could get the future wrong. It is that we still don't know enough about our own planet, and should be spending more on research, instead of cutting science budgets. Knowledge is expensive, but wilful ignorance could cost immeasurably more.

Link

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

It's stealth data. That's why they can't share it. The Chinese might use it to change the weather.

[SMR 368]

The unwillingness of scientists at the University of East Anglia to release climate data to people who choose not to believe in climate change was a mistake. Science advances through openness, through the ability of others to replicate the same findings or demonstrate error in discovery and interpretation. Reluctance to disclose – revealed last week in the wake of the release of private email exchanges between climate researchers – invites suspicion. The hacked email exchanges were an embarrassment, and the refusal to disclose data was a bad call, but neither episode casts much doubt upon the science of global warming. The ­evidence for climate change driven by man-made discharges of greenhouse gases is now decades old, has been independently confirmed by researchers all over the world, and is – as the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said yesterday – overwhelming.

There is plenty of room for argument about the rate at which the world is warming, the degree to which humans are culpable, the likely outcomes and the most effective steps to be taken. But there is not much argument about the big picture. The climate researchers at East Anglia were early in the field, but they were not alone. Their conclusions have been backed by scientists at the Met Office, from other British universities, and from the British Antarctic Survey; by oceanographers from Germany, California and Massachusetts; by planetary scientists from Nasa and the European Space Agency; by naturalists in a Europe-wide network of botanical gardens; and by climate historians, foresters, zoologists, palaeontologists, glaciologists and geographers on six continents. Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have repeatedly released findings that broadly confirm the same big picture, and for eight of the past nine years those researchers were funded by a Republican administration that would have much preferred to hear a different story. In 2001, the national science academies of 17 nations – including Britain's Royal Society – urged governments to avert future calamity by agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions; within three weeks, the US National Academy of Sciences had joined the chorus, and begun to sing from the same hymnal. Although any single piece of evidence is open to reinterpretation, the mass of data assembled all seems to point in one direction: towards a warmer and increasingly uncomfortable world.

Global average temperatures have gone on rising. Nine of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred in the past decade. In the past three decades, glaciers have receded at alarming rates in Alpine Europe, tropical Africa and sub-Arctic Alaska. The Greenland icecap has begun to melt and the north polar sea ice has become both smaller and thinner. The northern hemisphere growing season has been extended by 11 days. For reasons connected with human pressure, but also possibly with global warming, arid regions have become more arid, floods more catastrophic, hurricanes and cyclones more destructive. Millions of very poor people have been forced to abandon their homes, to kill their cattle, to walk away from their farms. Oceans have become more acidic, and coral reefs have been bleached. Forests have burned; rivers in the drier regions have slowed to a trickle, or dried up altogether.

Some events may be considered as consequences of natural variation in a climate cycle, but the intensity and frequency of such extreme events is expected to grow as the world warms. The lesson to be drawn from the latest round of questions about climate science is not that scientists make mistakes, and could get the future wrong. It is that we still don't know enough about our own planet, and should be spending more on research, instead of cutting science budgets. Knowledge is expensive, but wilful ignorance could cost immeasurably more.

Link

Is there data to support these claims? Because this sounds like more of the same that has been repeated by the global warming crowd for the last 20 years. The fact that they wouldn't disclose any supporting data and that they were proven to be doctoring the data hasn't fazed them. This article cleverly acknowledges that "mistakes were made" but then continues to make the same claims without correcting the mistake by providing the actual data.

It's stealth data. That's why they can't share it. The Chinese might use it to change the weather.

Actually, it's ninja data. Not only is it stealth but it throws shurikens and can teleport.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

MC, it's futile. The Global Warming Deniers here have won. There's no amount of rationale or logic that you can throw at them that will change their boneheadedness. I take my hat off to the Manufactured Doubt Industry for making P.T. Barnum proud.

[SMR 368]

MC, it's futile. The Global Warming Deniers here have won. There's no amount of rationale or logic that you can throw at them that will change their boneheadedness. I take my hat off to the Manufactured Doubt Industry for making P.T. Barnum proud.

Still waiting on the data. Or are you just trying to prove my point? Repeating the same tired, disproven arguments without adding data is exactly what I am criticizing here. But you can play with your pictures if you want.

[Tinkerbell TX 0]

by all means.......keep researching it. Take monies away from other more important things like feeding the starving masses or building earthquake rated buildings in 3rd world countries or..............<GASP>.............finding ways to use warming to our advantage!

But until you can prove (you know, as in peer reviewed by all sides of the argument) your data, keep your hands out of my pockets.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Still waiting on the data. Or are you just trying to prove my point? Repeating the same tired, disproven arguments without adding data is exactly what I am criticizing here. But you can play with your pictures if you want.

Try here: American Meteorological Society

and here: American Geophysical Union

and here: American Association for the Advancement of Science

and here: World Meteorological Organization

and here: National Academy of Sciences

and for more scientific opinion on climate change

No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion since the American Association of Petroleum Geologists adopted its current position in 2007.^[2]

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Steve loves his wikipedia!

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

q20cnn8vOfg

[luckytxn 2,265]

And one can also google for the science to show that global warming is wrong and finds ton of data and doing so will show that there are more scientists against the bunk science than for it. The many agencies that support it are also shown to get most funding from the Feds and they have to toe the line to keep receiving the funding.

[NickD 203]

We spell destabilising, destabilizing in this country. Just thought you would like to know.

Good thing we weren't around 65 million years ago on this good old planet during the time all the dinosaurs were wiped out. But maybe if we had a Pentagon with a destabilizing force, that wouldn't have happened.

[Peikko 1,575]

I don't care how the US spells destabilising, these are articles published in UK newspapers.

I'm glad to see so many swimming against the tide. How do you explain the observable phenomena, exactly? The acidification of the oceans for example. That's not a theory it's fact.

Edited February 1, 2010 by Madame Cleo