Climate according to the pentagon MUST READ info

October 5, 2004

Pentagon report warns of nuclear war, mega-droughts, famine, mass migrations and widespread rioting around the world by 2020 as abrupt climate change due to global warming causes massive disruption of the world's food and water supplies.

According to the U.K. Guardian, a Pentagon report warns that major European cities could be sunk beneath rising seas, Britain plunged into a "Siberian" climate by 2020, and nuclear war, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world as global warming increasingly disrupts the global climate and food and water supplies around the world.

Unlike most climate change studies which examine global warming over more than a century, the Pentagon study is based on an "abrupt climate change" that scientists say has happened in the past and could happen again soon, according to Knight Ridder. The planning document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop nuclear weapons to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the experts privy to its contents.

"Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," concludes the Pentagon analysis. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

Key findings of the report include:

· Future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology or national honor.

· By 2007 violent storms will smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands inhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California, levees in the Sacramento river delta are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

· Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6°F. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia.

· Deaths from war and famine run into the millions until the planet's population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope.

· Riots and internal conflict tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia.

· Access to water becomes a major battleground. The Nile, Danube and Amazon are all mentioned as being high risk.

· A "significant drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population will become apparent over the next 20 years.

· Rich areas like the U.S. and Europe will become "virtual fortresses" to prevent millions of migrants from entering after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops. Waves of boat people pose significant problems.

· Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt and North Korea. Israel, China, India and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.

· By 2010 the U.S. and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90F. Climate becomes an "economic nuisance" as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.

· Europe will face huge internal struggles as it copes with massive numbers of migrants washing up on its shores. Immigrants from Scandinavia will seek warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa.

· Mega-droughts affect the world's major breadbaskets, including America's Midwest, where strong winds bring soil loss.

· China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming.

· Bangladesh will become nearly uninhabitable because of rising sea levels which contaminate inland water supplies.

· Military showdowns could be fast and furious: In 2015, conflict in Europe over supplies of food and water leads to strained relations. In 2022, France and Germany battle over the Rhine River's water. In 2025, as energy costs increase in nations struggling to cope with warmer and colder weather, the United States and China square off over access to Saudi Arabian oil.

The Pentagon report's findings will prove embarrassing to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said the report will also make unsettling reading for a president who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on U.S. military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the U.S. military under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed "Yoda" by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is also credited with being behind the Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defence.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is "plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately," say the authors, Peter Schwartz, a CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

Climate change "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern," Schwartz and Randall conclude after warning that as early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall said the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. "This is depressing stuff," he said. "It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat."

Randall added that it is already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. "We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he said. "The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile."

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who say it cherry-picks science to suit its policy agenda and suppresses studies that it doesn't like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said suppression of the report for four months is a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change: "It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue."

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies is vital in understanding why climate change is received sceptically in the Oval Office. "This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies," he said.

Senior British climatologists believe their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. A group of eminent U.K. scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Reportedly, U.S. officials were extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with the British scientists' complaints that the U.S. public stance appears increasingly out of touch. One source even claims that the White House has written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the U.K.'s leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the "tipping point" in persuading Bush to accept that global warming-driven climate change is real.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: "If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed."

Robert Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored."Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. It's hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defense. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon," said Watson.

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the U.S. elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are reportedly threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

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Apparently there is a significant and very interesting split developing among the ruling elite over what to do about the potentially disastrous impacts of global warming, as evidenced by following article on the Pentagon report - Climate Collapse: The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare - from Fortune magazine:

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade - like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies - thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia - it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed - in some cases, just a few years.

The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics - that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.

But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity - and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades. Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.)

Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities - mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.

Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.

Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely. Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue - next summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.

Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying. But what would abrupt climate change really be like? Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda" - a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.

When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks - he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from - at least in public.

The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with Fortune. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies. Here is an abridged version:

A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill - its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:

At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation - allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.

Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands - waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.

Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location - the conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope - its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.

China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.

As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible - history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia - which is weakened by a population that is already in decline - for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights - fisheries are disrupted around the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats.

Growing tensions engender novel alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.

Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.

The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity" - the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisis - it is too widespread and unfolds too fast.

As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.

Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are prepared to accept. In light of such findings, we should be asking when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we can prepare - not whether it will really happen. In fact, the climate record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point, regardless of human activity. Among other things, we should:

· Speed research on the forces that can trigger abrupt climate change, how it unfolds, and how we'll know it's occurring.

· Sponsor studies on the scenarios that might play out, including ecological, social, economic, and political fallout on key food-producing regions.

· Identify "no regrets" strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security.

· Form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.

· Explore ways to offset abrupt cooling - today it appears easier to warm than to cool the climate via human activities, so there may be "geo-engineering" options available to prevent a catastrophic temperature drop.

In sum, the risk of abrupt climate change remains uncertain, and it is quite possibly small. But given its dire consequences, it should be elevated beyond a scientific debate. Action now matters, because we may be able to reduce its likelihood of happening, and we can certainly be better prepared if it does. It is time to recognize it as a national security concern.

The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't known - in keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to be interviewed. But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea change in the debate about global warming. At least some federal thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.

If so, the case for acting now to address climate change, long a hard sell in Washington, may be gaining influential support, if only behind the scenes. Policymakers may even be emboldened to take steps such as tightening fuel-economy standards for new passenger vehicles, a measure that would simultaneously lower emissions of greenhouse gases, reduce America's perilous reliance on OPEC oil, cut its trade deficit, and put money in consumers' pockets. Oh, yes - and give the Pentagon's fretful Yoda a little less to worry about.

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Finally, two side articles (here and (here) to the above Fortune article helps to further explain the increasing urgency about the global warming "debate":

If abrupt climate change is on the way, the driving force will probably be a great ocean current that one scientist calls the "Achilles' heel of our climate system." The current, known as the great conveyor, sweeps north through the Atlantic, carrying warmth from the tropics to the eastern U.S. and northern Europe before looping south. If the current shuts down - which apparently can occur rapidly during times of global warming - the huge heat pump goes off, potentially causing drastic weather changes in just a few years.

Freezing. Deprived of the flow of warmth from the tropics, northern Europe could become more like Labrador - or Siberia.

Dust Bowl. Meanwhile, in North America, drought coupled with higher winds could ravage the Midwest's farmlands.

Wildfires. Past conveyor shutdowns are linked to massive fires in North America, which left telltale ash in ancient Arctic ice.

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Scientists used to think that major climate changes, like the onset of an ice age, took thousands of years to unfold. Now they know such dramatic transitions can occur in less than a decade. The probable trigger of abrupt climate changes, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, is the shutdown of a huge ocean current in the Atlantic Ocean. The current is driven by dense, salty water that flows north from the tropics and sinks in the North Atlantic. If fresh water is pumped into the northerly part of the current - which can occur as global warming melts Arctic ice - its salinity drops, making it less dense. This diminishing density can prevent the water from sinking in the North Atlantic, stopping the current's flow. Much of Europe and the U.S. could become colder and drier if that happened.

Many details of this big picture remain hazy, including whether recent global warming threatens to shut down the Atlantic current. But over the past few years, scientists have detected disquieting trends:

· In tandem with rising average temperatures across the globe, 3% to 4% of the Arctic ice cap has melted per decade since about 1970.

· Recently the Arctic's largest ice shelf broke up near Canada's Ellesmere Island, releasing an ice-dammed freshwater lake into the ocean. (Scientists believe that the similar melting of an Arctic ice dam 8,200 years ago triggered an episode of abrupt climate change.)

· The North Atlantic's salinity has declined continuously for the past 40 years - the most dramatic oceanic change ever measured.

· The flow of cold, dense water through a North Atlantic channel near Norway - part of the great ocean current that warms northern Europe - has dropped by at least 20% since 1950, suggesting that the current is weakening.

Scientists still don't know whether a climate disaster is on the way. But taken together, these changes appear strikingly similar to ones that preceded abrupt climate shifts in the past. Many researchers now believe the salient question about such change is not "Could it happen?" but "When?"

Posted by Oneida in categories:

October 9, 2004

Speakin of disasters, has anyone heard about the theory of the earths axis changing every so many years, as a reason behind the ice age ( the "evidence" being that mamoths descovered in Siberia had two distinct plants in their digestive system; one from a hot climate, both still in the digestive system- so assumed that they were consumed within a day of each other? - and also core samples taken from the Atlantic show different types of plankton from temerate and cold regions within very short timescales)

Apparently this is due in the next 30 years?!

http://www.crawford2000.co.uk/patrickg.htmCraig Dearth <cd39 wrote: