Friday, August 29, 2008

Global Warming, Military Style


Those Looney Lefties also known as Pentagon analysts are again warning of global wars driven by climate change. From the Environmental News Network:

"...governments in the US and UK are already being briefed by their own military strategists about how to prepare for a world of mass famine, floods of refugees and even nuclear conflicts over resources.

Gwynne Dyer is a military analyst and author who served in three navies and has held academic posts at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and at Oxford.

"[There will be] huge falls in the amount of crops that you can grow because there isn't the rain and it's too hot," he said. "That will apply particularly to the Mediterranean... and so not just the north African countries, but also the ones on the northern side of the Mediterranean. "The ones in the European Union like Spain and Italy and Greece and the Balkans and Turkey are going to be suffering huge losses in their ability to support their populations.

Climate refugees.

He says a fall in crops and food production means there will be refugees, people who are desperate. "It may mean the collapse in the global trade of food because while some countries still have enough, there is still a global food shortage," he said. "If you can't buy food internationally and you can't raise enough at home, what do you do? You move.
So refugee pressures - huge ones - are one of the things that drives these security considerations."


In Climate Wars, even the most hopeful scenarios about the impact of climate change have hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation, mass displacement of people and conflict between countries competing for basic resources like water. "India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed countries. All of the agriculture in Pakistan and all of the agriculture in northern India depend on glacier-fed rivers that come off the Himalayas from the Tibetan plateau. Those glaciers are melting," Dr Dyer said.

"They're melting according to Chinese scientists to 7 per cent a year, which means they're half gone in 10 years. "India has a problem with this. Pakistan faces an absolutely lethal emergency because Pakistan is basically a desert with a braid of rivers running through it.


"Those rivers all start with one exception in Indian-controlled territory and there's a complex series of deals between the two countries about who gets to take so much water out of the river. Those deals break down when there's not that much water in the rivers." And then you have got the prospect of a nuclear confrontation, Dr Dyer says.

"It's unthinkable but yet it's entirely possible. So these are the prices you start to pay if you get this wrong," he said. "Some of them, actually, I'm afraid we've already got them wrong in the sense that there is going to be some major climate change." Dr Dyer explains the least alarmist scenario for the next couple of decades still involves enormous pressures on the US border. "That border's going to be militarised. I think there's almost no question about it because the alternative is an inundation of the United States by what will be, effectively, climate refugees," he said. "

http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/38054
If you're interested in global warming as a source for global conflict you might also check out the speech given by Gareth Evans (president of International Crisis Group) on this subject:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

www.gwynnedyer.com

One of the few people who gets it.