Pentagon Highlights Climate Risks

The Pentagon has singled out global climate change as a potential enemy of the state. The environmental havoc it stirs is making the world a more dangerous place by increasing the stress on millions of people living on the front lines of environmental degradation worldwide.

Climate change, in fact, "may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world."

That's the conclusion laid out in the Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, the Defense Department released on Monday.

The QDR is a strategic report prepared every four years by our top defense analysts. It guides Pentagon planners in assessing the risk landscape and preparing U.S. forces to confront it.

"Climate change and energy will play significant roles in the future security environment," the QDR states, explaining that "climate change will affect the operating environment, roles and missions that we undertake."

Here's what it says, in part:

"Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration," the QDR states.

"While climate change itself does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world."

The environmental community has sounded such warnings before. This, though, comes from the men and women who defend our country. If someone wants to argue the point now, these are the people they're arguing against.

Just last September, the CIA opened a center to assess the national security risks posed by climate change. The State Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department and ten other federal agencies concluded a 20-year study just last June - one of the most exhaustive undertakings in the annals of scientific inquiry - that pointed to the growing dangers of climate change.

 "The U.S. Global Change Research Program, comprised of 13 federal agencies, reported in 2009 that climate-related changes are already being observed in every region in the world, including the United States and its coastal waters," the QDR reports. "Among these physical changes are increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the oceans and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows."

The Pentagon is wisely factoring these trends into its future threat analysis - and putting in place the plans we need to prepare for the looming impact.

As deserts widen, competition increases for fresh water, clean food and ample grazing lands. That can lead to skirmishes, as we've already seen in parts of Kenya, hostilities, like those befalling the people of Darfur, and even anarchy, as embodied by the failed state of Somalia.

Climate change isn't the only reason for the suffering that plagues these countries; no one contends that it is. The fact is, though, that weak states are made weaker, poverty made worse, disease spread further and families put to flight by the harsh impacts directly flowing from climate change.

The Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum reported last May that some 330,000 people die each year as a result of climate change. Read the report yourself and you'll see the estimates are conservative.

It's time we saluted the men and women who put their lives on the line to keep the rest of us safe, and recognized, as they do, the real risks presented by climate change.

More than that, it's time we did something about it.

Write your U.S. Senators today and urge them to support the clean energy and climate legislation now pending in Congress. It will cut the carbon pollution that's causing climate change. It will reduce our dangerous reliance on foreign oil. It will put Americans back to work developing the energy-efficient homes, cars and workplaces of tomorrow. And it just might save us from one more conflict that puts American lives in harm's way.