Climate change deniers have never accepted climate change as a scientific fact. They have not been able to wrap their simple minds around this fact: The United States military’s leadership is in unified agreement that climate change is real, and that it poses a clear and present danger to the troops.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed the most important and little noticed order in recent Pentagon history. The Order states that “All DoD operations worldwide, must be able to adapt current and future operations to address the impacts of climate change in order to maintain an effective and efficient U.S. military.”
Deadly weather, rising seas and changing storm patterns will become “threat multipliers” for the United States per the Pentagon. American troops will more than likely become even more involved in simultaneous failed states caused by climate changes such as drought and their civil wars than we are presently. The armed forces will respond to more and more climate change induced disasters throughout the world while dealing with the catastrophic consequences of fossil fuel emissions in our own country. It will be a huge cluster.
Climate change denier James Inhofe just happens to be Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Senior Member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. This single Republican senator is responsible for obstructing most action on climate issues in Congress. Why would the GOP place such a ignorant individual in charge of policies attempting to save our biosphere? Because they have been bought and paid for by the corporations that run this country. This GOP obfuscation on looming climate catastrophes places our men and women in uniform in extreme danger. This is not supporting the troops, this is not caring for our veterans. This is sabotage by a US senator on both the science that guide defense policy and US military commanders on the ground. It will be interesting to see if this clown Inhofe will drag our military leaders to his anti-science hearings as he has attempted to do with silencing the scientists at NASA and NOAA who produce the critical data needed for our leaders to understand and react to abrupt climate change.
Many GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates have had a field day with what they deride as Obama’s misguided obsession with climate change at a time, they argue, that there are so many immediate security challenges that seem to be getting worse. Businessman Donald Trump has called Obama’s focus on climate and security “one of the dumbest things” ever said, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz laughs at the idea that driving an SUV is a bigger threat than the Islamic State. Former candidate Carly Fiorina called Obama “delusional.” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the presidential race last week, consistently derided Obama’s focus on global warming by saying “the climate has always been changing.”
Rubio is right. In just the last few thousand years, there’s been a “Roman Optimum,” when Hannibal could cross the Alps with elephants, a “Medieval Warm Period,” with Norse colonies in Greenland, and a “Little Ice Age,” when Swedish armies could march dry shod to Denmark.
But many big shifts in the climate — whether temperature swings, sudden droughts, or years of rain — have throughout history left terrible things in their wake. The sudden transformation of the Asian steppe from arid to well-watered in the sixth century, and again in the 14th century, midwifed a population explosion of the rodents carrying the plague bacillus that killed millions. Another came during a once-in-a-millennium rainy spell in the early 1200s that turned Genghis Khan’s Mongolia into a verdant grassland and fueled the birth of the history’s most expansive and destructive empire. The entire 17th century — “the century of the soldier,” in the words of an Italian poet who suffered through it– was a chilly catalog of famines, frosts, and rainy summers that spawned endless wars, regicides, and collapsing empires.
Man-made climate change appears to be even more dangerous: It is happening much faster than cyclical changes in the past, and the tectonic shifts are happening in unprecedented combinations. Global warming is melting the Arctic, raising sea levels, driving bugs carrying diseases like Zika, malaria, and dengue fever into virgin environments, and making dry places drier and wet places wetter — all at once. The Pentagon now defines climate change as a “present security threat, not strictly a long-term risk.”
Foreign Policy notes that a Pentagon directive stays in place for “10 years unless explicitly rescinded, a move that is rarely taken.” If the country decides to elect one of the three remaining GOP candidates in 2016, the military’s policies on climate change will continue.