Tag Archives: Environment

Climate Change And The Military (Part Two)

You can see the fist one here.

If you don’t think climate change can effect national security issues let me give you a simple scenario. Lets say you have a country in Africa that has basically two kinds of folks living there, herders, and farmers. Lets say that the climate gets a bit dry due to global warming, and the herders and farmers are now fighting over the same water resources. Throw in a dash of religion, some arms dealers and wham! you got yourself a failed state. Your local crazy extremist group now has the perfect safe haven to build bombs, plan attacks, etc. Those attacks of course are aimed at us.

If that isn’t realistic enough for you, try this on for size. Let say you have a country that is more or less at sea level. Lets say this country has a couple hundred million people living in what is more or less a delta. Sea level comes up a bit and you now have a lot of people who can’t live there any more. Where do they go? Maybe into neighboring countries that just so happen to hate each other, and just so happen to have nukes. The added pressure of all those people starts to strain already weak governments and some of that material leaks out to nasty terrorist groups. Or maybe the added stress for food and resources sparks a border war, maybe a couple nukes get set off, allies of each side get involved and you have a regional hot war with nuclear weapons involved.

These are just a couple of a hundred ways that climate change and global warming could cause military problems for the United States. And in case you are wondering the first scenario is more or less what happened in Darfur, and the second could be Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.