I guess I must give more of my tax $$$ to the mofo DoD so they can protect me from Global Warming by driving their Hummers and cargo planes around for another few decades to no end.

Wake up America.

I'm sure Raytheon and LockMart will save us from Climate Change by shooting shit at the sun. The contracts are being lined up....$ to be made people!

This makes me want to know more. Can I take this to possibly be another case of inventing bogus reports to justify a department goal?

The Downing Street report comes to mind. Bush and Blair planned to fabricate intelligence to justify the Irag war when they knew that Irag was not a real threat.

Isn't this kind of DoD sponsored report the same kind of culture? Did the NYT help them once again? Why?

Bob Spencer

Global warming is a popular subject that gets funded. Can you guess which department gets the most money that can be siphoned off in research dollars? If you read Winslow Wheelers “The Wastrels of Defense,” you’ll know practically everybody and their second cousins tries to tap into DoD funding for whatever they want.

I hardly think the suggestion in the CNA report (which is not new, incidentally - over 2 years old now) is that migration from Bangladesh to India, to take your example, is suddenly America's, and no longer India's problem.

But surely a stable international environment is in the American national interest and thereby a security concern. An India stressed by the additional burdens of large population influx should surely be of concern to the US, because of India's increasingly pivotal place in global politics and cooperation with the US on other global issues of concern.

The point that shouldn't be lost is that the language of 'threat multiplier' reflects exactly that - exacerbating existing threats, not necessarily a wholescale change in new ones. In this sense, what might now be issues of minor concern may in the future become ones of major concern and climate change is one driver in that direction.

And I think there's a bit too much cynicism in the tone that this is all just rhetorical fluff to rally public support. There is surely some of that in attempting to shift public attitudes and provoke interest from previously ambivalent quarters. But there's a very real warning about the implications of climate change for governance and state stability from resource stresses, migration, shifting seasonal patterns that shouldn't be casually dismissed either.

How much Climate Change is caused by the day-to-day operations of the US DoD?

How much of the necessity to project force in the middle east in order to secure oil resources is due to the necessity of supplying the very forces doing the force projection with petroleum products?

Perhaps the DoD can fix global warming by exploding a few thousand ~400 kT nuclear warheads in order to induce a nuclear winter?

Climate change and DoD go hand-in-hand like a pedophile and a 6 year old.

I think this is clearly threat inflation: now that Rumsfled and Cheney have STFU, there is much less methane being emitted from their mouths.

Here is a project for the DoD -- kill all the cows:

http://purpleslinky.com/offbeat/cow-farts-and-global-warming/

The article seems to be a vehicle to promote the idea that if it comes from the Department of Defense it must be wrong, rather than whether or not climate change should be considered in defense planning. The CNA report is corroborated by many, including FP's own article "The Last Straw: If you think these failed states look bad now, wait until the climate changes." http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/failed_states_index_the_last_straw
One particularly pertinent paragraph states:
"In 2007, the London-based NGO International Alert compiled a list of countries with a high risk of armed conflict due to climate change. They cited no fewer than 46 countries, or one in every four, including some of the world's most gravely unstable countries, such as Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru."

"In 2007, the London-based NGO International Alert compiled a list of countries with a high risk of armed conflict due to climate change. They cited no fewer than 46 countries, or one in every four, including some of the world's most gravely unstable countries, such as Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru."

That is the problem of Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru.

Not the USA.

Stop driving around Hummers and get rid of of the US dependence on imported oil -- that is the solution. The solution will certainly not be farted out of the ass of the over-bloated Pentagon, even if the generals and contractors there are sitting on gold-plated toilet seats.

Climate change will unfold over the next 100 years, to a degree which has been estimated within parameters but at the end of the day is unknown. What we are dealing with here is uncertainty. An uncertainty exacerbated by the fact that IT IS NOT CLEAR WHAT WILL BE IN AMERICA'S INTERESTS IN 10, 30, OR 50 YEARS. In the year 2000 Afghanistan was not on the top list of "I'm Interested in you, in that special national security way" list. It's amazing what a difference a single year makes. So your statement that a refugee crisis on India's border is India's problem, may or may not be true. Multiply that by climate change's effects on every country on earth, and you will likely get a grab bag of a few countries in which climate change has screwed over America's interests in the pertinent timeline. One example of current relevance would be Pakistan, which in many part of the country has failing water infrastructure and supply, which would be further screwed by a drought provided by climate change. 'Fugees, less faith in the competence of the incompetent government, angry youth, you could get it all.

If anything the DoD report should be critiqued as a statement of the obvious. But regardless the ways in which climate change affect and is affected by national security priorities is an area that deserves more study, and yes, to be vulgar, research cash-money.

No matter what you believe about global warming, everyone by now knows that humanity will refuse to muster the resources to actually change Earth's climate, at least we will not do any substantial climate modification for a decade. Why knock the Pentagon when they engage in military planning for possible outcomes? At least their planning costs us far fewer resources than anything else the military does.

I simply have to disagree with the statement that climate change is not in the realm of security threats. One of the things that I value about the current order is that we have managed to avoid major clashes and crashes between nations, IGO's, and NGO's. True there are insurgencies, terrorists, and constant fighting in more than a few parts of the world but to date most of this has not threatened the lives of millions of people or threatened all living things with extinction. With even basic predictions for climate change (which have been shown to be too conservative in their assumptions) the data points to mass changes in the very basics of the current world.
Drought and famine in some areas is certain to cause mass population migrations and large scale violence over existing resources in poorer nations. For some of those nations it isn't inconceivable that some of them will be simply destroyed by some combination of natural disasters, widespread lack of resources, militant groups, and a lack of international ability to manage the crisis. There are tensions already between many nations over how resources are shared, Central Asia being a prime example with water. In wealthier ones the changes to food and water supply seem likely to lead to tension over how to obtain, and I will consider it a miracle of diplomacy if we can avoid a war and some kind of neocolonialism.
This may sound like fear-mongering but I earnestly feel it to be reasonable concern. The United States is already facing a difficult job in maintaining it's position in a stable world, a lack of care in an unstable one could condemn it to irrelevance.

As a note, on reflection I will admit that some of these problems are thought likely to take place over a one hundred year period (although I again feel that these may be too conservative based on what early estimates on the South and North Poles were). That doesn't mean that it's safe to ignore them. An ignorant politician makes plans based on what the voters will like on election day, and a good one on what matters will be in five years. A genius politician however will make their decisions based on how to ensure their states power fifty or a hundred years from the present.

The DoD could shoot the OpEd editor of the WSJ for a start. Must be quite cheap.

1. Put plastic on the windows at the pentagon.

2. More Awe, less Shock.

3. Hybrid Hummers in the Army

this is tooooo easy....

hahahahaha!

Most of the time I don't hear so much the "realist" in the arguments posted here. Though, I realize the ideological bias. However, today, I was struck. Oh, it was not just the last paragraph on humanitarian relief. In the end, climate change is an emotive and moral issue as its impacts are secondary to so many other things.

Yet, at another level, for exactly the reason expressed above, that is carbon footprinting predominantly arial run wars half way around the world, it seems odd that the Department of Defense would appreciate over questioning climate change. It could just as well have opposite than intended impacts. So, I guess that I see it less as "let's take global warming seriously" given possible real ramifications if we do take it seriously. More than likely it is meant as another reason to assure the strength of our defense forces as they may be needed by the possible unknown 'threats'.

One could see that as misleading, even if they disagree on the role of humanitarian aid.

What is/was the carbon footprint of the unnecessary Iraq War?

Maybe the DoD can have carbon-credits and exchange them with other countries for running their unnecessary wars in addition to ours?

Cow farts contribute to global warming -- can the DoD go and kill the cows please? Surely addressing the causes of climate change is more effective than dealing w/ the consequences...

John McCain was there in 2006 and other American lawmakers have been dragged up to this glacier by the energetic Danish minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard - in what she freely admitted, literally was a way of providing "the right background" for decisions on climate to be made. And they were duly impressed and came away convinced that 'Global warming' was taking place. Now a team of climatologists have proven that the glacier melts as a result of warm ocean currents melting it from underneath. The scientists believe that it was the same phenomenen that caused the glacier to retreat between 1929-1964.

DAVID M. HOLLAND* (New York University, New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.), ROBERT H. THOMAS (EG&G Services, Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia 23337, U.S.A.), BRAD DE YOUNG (Memorial University, St. John’s A1B 3X7, Canada), MADS H. RIBERGAARD (Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen DK-2100, Denmark), and BJARNE LYBERTH (Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Nuuk 3900, Greenland)

Acceleration of Jakobshavn Isbræ triggered by warm subsurface ocean waters (.pdf)

Observations over the past decades show a rapid acceleration of several outlet glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica[1]. One of the largest changes is a sudden switch of Jakobshavn Isbræ, a large outlet glacier feeding a deep-ocean fjord on Greenland’s west coast, from slow thickening to rapid thinning[2] in 1997, associated with a doubling in glacier velocity[3]. Suggested explanations for the speed-up of Jakobshavn Isbræ include increased lubrication of the ice–bedrock interface as more meltwater has drained to the glacier bed during recent warmer summers[4] and weakening and break-up of the floating ice tongue that buttressed the glacier[5]. Here we present hydrographic data that show a sudden increase in subsurface ocean temperature in 1997 along the entire west coast of Greenland, suggesting that the changes in Jakobshavn Isbræ were instead triggered by the arrival of relatively warm water originating from the Irminger Sea near Iceland. We trace these oceanic changes back to changes in the atmospheric circulation in the North Atlantic region. We conclude that the prediction of future rapid dynamic responses of other outlet glaciers to climate change will require an improved understanding of the effect of changes in regional ocean and atmosphere circulation on the delivery of warm subsurface waters to the periphery of the ice sheets.

Interesting assertion, but wrong. Here's a link to an article discussing the potential water issues between India and Pakistan from FP.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/failed_states_index_the_last_straw

If global warming is causing this glacier to disappear, with the result being dramatic effects on farming and food supplies in the region, then this is absolutely a U.S. concern.

In the vain of climate change use of foreign oil is of significant concern. Most readers of FP are familiar with the issues, but if we wind up fighting with Iran and the Straits of Hormuz become a war zone, the economic disruption would be worrisome. Shifting our transportation fuels toward electricity away from oil could diminish (but not eliminate) the impact on our economy.

of course our overuse of oil is a national security concern.

we are talking about if global warming is -- or rather if it should be.