worst case

it's too bad that there's so much muscle behind global warming denial... i mean, it would be hard enough trying to convince people even if the AEI and exxon and heartland etc etc weren't pouring millions into denial... it's something that people just dont want to believe, anyhow.

...is second hand, as israel must have american protection as it cleanses the west bank high ground of palestinians.

so america spends trillions on wars to protect israel, with a slight chance of gaining enough control over energy that consumption can be limited.

that's a hell of a long shot... and it seems like the big money guys have given up, mostly because of peak oil, which is a more immediate threat... the only thing the wheeler dealers want is to suck america dry as it goes under, which increases the threat to israel...

what if america collapses from oil shortages and looting before israel is secured from sea level rise?

.
of course, the best thing to do would be to tell everyone the truth about peak oil and global warming, lock the looters up, bring the troops home, and use the money to figure out the best thing to do, then do it.

but nobody can tell the truth because peak oil and global warming were most likely the reasons the neocons said they needed a "new pearl harbor", which then so miraculously happened soon after the they got into positions powerful enough to make it happen.

it's a problem.

maybe if america is looted fast enough, it will crash before we hit some greenhouse gas tipping point...

maybe the global economy will collapse so badly that oil and coal consumption will crash completely.

maybe enough loot will find its way to israel so israel can buy security.

in the meantime, it would probably be a good thing if you learned how to grow potatoes.

I have made my point in Walt's comments as well (which I note with irritation that Rothkopf put much more neatly), but this does bring to mind another problem beyond simply the fact that we cannot assume that climate change will respect borderlines. Much of the United States is already abroad in areas where the problems are expected to exacerbate precarious situations. We are there through our businesses, our citizens, our soldiers, our resource requirements, and the diaspora from those areas who live in the United States itself.
As we saw almost eight years ago now, it is entirely possible for a geographically distant problem like Al Qaeda to appear right next to us. Our economy relies on the constant flow of resources, many of which arrive from abroad. Any military or diplomatic defeats in other nations decreases our image across the entire planet. Simply put, if the world has a problem then it is also a problem for the United States.

We need more intelligent discussion about climate change and peak oil, since today's debate on these subjects is completely polarized and scrambled in the political drive for power for competing groups. Climate change is as likely to be a cooling as a warming, and the cooling would be much, much more disruptive from a national security standpoint. Regarding peak oil, which may be a political artifact in the first place, the debate only delays and masks a more rational discussion of the long term trend for higher petroleum prices, as production costs rise due to less accessible oil deposits.

Calling people ignorant for disagreeing with you is not productive. Criticizing the military for planning for all possible outcomes is like bovine flatulence - ubiquitous, and ultimately probably harmful, but in any event not likely to result in any coherent action.

is not to say it is not a serious medium-term challenge, or a threat to the nation's well-being. Threats don't need to be termed "national security" to be recognized as real and serious. Your points clearly demonstrate it is the latter. You do not define terms enough to be able to claim it is the former. How do we say whether something is a national security threat versus a threat of critical magnitude that just doesn't fall in the national security sphere? This is a borderline case that depends on definitions; it doesn't lend itself to such a clear statement that "x person is wrong" about the question. According Walt's definition it doesn't; according to yours it apparently does. It's not really provable.

First, there are the immediate consequences associated with potential sea level changes in our neighborhood. As one Bahamanian minister once said to me, "For you, a shift of a foot or two or three is something you can adjust to. For us, it is a matter of life and death. If some of the estimates are to be believed, we won't exist as a country." Well, don't take the most dramatic estimates. A modest shift in sea-level will have new waves of immigrants pounding at our doors too ... from the Caribbean, from Mexico, from Central America.

It was foolish of Walt to say that these wouldn't be threats to the US, but in his defense, Walt had a rather narrow definition of "threat" (he usually means "military threats", befitting his background as a Realist), and he didn't say that climate change wasn't a threat to the US, period.

Third, global warming will produce major consequences for agriculture as climatic conditions change, droughts increase, etc. Food shortages and increases in the cost of food are another likely consequence that we will feel here at home, in our neighborhood and in volatile regions where we have vital interests.

That's one of the fears I've heard mentioned by climatologists - that a sufficient amount of global warming will "tip" the Great Plains climate back into desert (apparently, it has swung between plains and desert over the millenia in the Pleistocene). You'd lose a decent chunk of farmland in the process.

Similarly, if glaciers melt, much of the power capacity of regions like Latin America dwindles.

I'd be more worried about the collapse of glaciers and drying up of rainfall in East Asia. Can you imagine what will happen if the main source for all the major rivers in the area (the Himalayan mountains and Tibetan Plateau, among other areas) disappears?

it would definitely be considered a significant national security threat.

I think there is a bit of a bias among "serious" national security scholars against "soft" issues like global warming.

Again, I think it's because Walt has a much narrower definition of "threat" than you. Much of his post was about the military consequences of climate change.

John McCain was there in 2006 and other American lawmakers have been dragged up to this glacier by the energetic Danish minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegård - in what she freely admitted, literally was a way of providing "the right background" for descisions on climate to be made. And they were duly impressed and came away convinced that 'Global warming' was taking place. Now a team of climatologists have proven that the glacier melts as a result of warm ocean currents melting it from underneath. The scientists believe that it was the same phenomenen that caused the glacier to retreat between 1929-1964.

DAVID M. HOLLAND* (New York University, New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.), ROBERT H. THOMAS (EG&G Services, Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia 23337, U.S.A.), BRAD DE YOUNG (Memorial University, St. John’s A1B 3X7, Canada), MADS H. RIBERGAARD (Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen DK-2100, Denmark), and BJARNE LYBERTH (Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Nuuk 3900, Greenland)

Acceleration of Jakobshavn Isbræ triggered by warm subsurface ocean waters (.pdf)

Observations over the past decades show a rapid acceleration of several outlet glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica[1]. One of the largest changes is a sudden switch of Jakobshavn Isbræ, a large outlet glacier feeding a deep-ocean fjord on Greenland’s west coast, from slow thickening to rapid thinning[2] in 1997, associated with a doubling in glacier velocity[3]. Suggested explanations for the speed-up of Jakobshavn Isbræ include increased lubrication of the ice–bedrock interface as more meltwater has drained to the glacier bed during recent warmer summers[4] and weakening and break-up of the floating ice tongue that buttressed the glacier[5]. Here we present hydrographic data that show a sudden increase in subsurface ocean temperature in 1997 along the entire west coast of Greenland, suggesting that the changes in Jakobshavn Isbræ were instead triggered by the arrival of relatively warm water originating from the Irminger Sea near Iceland. We trace these oceanic changes back to changes in the atmospheric circulation in the North Atlantic region. We conclude that the prediction of future rapid dynamic responses of other outlet glaciers to climate change will require an improved understanding of the effect of changes in regional ocean and atmosphere circulation on the delivery of warm subsurface waters to the periphery of the ice sheets.

... and more blowback as citizens of other nations continue to hate us for our overreach? All the humanitarian aid in the world will not buy you one friend, but plenty of resentment (for not doing more, for treading on someone's sacred land, or for just being conveniently located for blame-parsing). I don't blame the military for contingency planning, of course. But global climate modeling predictions have gotten much wrong already, so assuming disaster is imminent if we don't take drastic action now (since we now know that even Kyoto targets wouldn't have made much difference by mid-century) only encourages the very policies that have us in our current mess of overreach. In many parts of the world, instability is so great that we cannot extend aid without a military presence. Thus, our problems only continue.

So Climate change is real, huh?

I guess the DoD needs to buy some hybrid Hummers, eh?

Not addressing the causes of climate change is "dangerously short-sighted".

You say:

"But he goes too far when he when he suggests that the primary consequences will be humanitarian and thus this is not really a security issue but a "philanthropic" one. If there were some other threat that was likely to increase tension in the Middle East or South Asia, likely to cause massive immigration in coastal regions worldwide, likely to have a major impact on the vulnerability of the world's poorest (thus creating unrest and opportunities for populists to exploit instability), and to do so while stressing our own resources and testing our own borders, it would definitely be considered a significant national security threat."

Why?

That is the problem of _those_ countries.

Israel may be destroyed by climate change? Great -- that is Israel's problem.

That is, the tendency of both military officers and foreign policy writers to ascribe national security concerns to everything bad in the world.

The key line in Walt's piece is that quote from Salisbury "if you believe the soliders nothing is safe".

Rothkopf seems to have misread Walt's into meaning that global warming isn't a concern to the U.S. - clearly, it is a major environmental concern (ie, the situation in low-coastal areas, in glacier-fed river systems, and for the Great Plains), it's also a major economic concern (both because of its direct effects in the U.S. and the immigration pressure it may cause), and a humanitarian one (millions of people will die in the developing world because of lack of water, or lack of dry land).

But none of these things are national security. None of them are best responded to with military force, offensive or defensive. None of them require additional military investment or capabilities - as Walt points out, only the humanitarian role even touches on military capabilities, and not core capabilities even then.

This is a short-sighted discussion. What Rothkopf is implying with his section on migration causing populist movements (ostensibly in the global south because of more stressed resources) is JUST AS APPLICABLE HERE. Remember Katrina and the US government's poor response to the flooding and the absolute chaos which resulted? We are not immune to nature.

The chaos of Katrina would likely be similar to the effects of Climate change, not including increasing levels of wildfires consuming the west (Look at the data from MODIS at UMD and other earth science projects). Yes it might just be a few feet higher of water, but it also gives a large amount of shallow water (which heats faster and strengthens Hurricanes/typhoons).
Hurricane response hasn't just been botched in Louisiana and Missisippi. Anyone on the East coast remember Isabel and Floyd? We need stronger disaster response mechanisms.
No matter how much we have confidence in our federal government, multiple chaotic climate events with poor and sparse responses from FEMA and State governments could help enlargen the militias (as laughable as they currently are) and could constitute a threat to the State's monopoly on the means of violence. Large migrations would make border control much harder.

Yes, it seems like I'm saying the sky is falling, but it really IS something for us to consider in how we craft our climate change policies, and IT WILL AFFECT US. The problem is that this is also a largely domestic disaster response problem too, which the military may be stressing because they don't have the capacity to fight multiple wars with reservists (national guard, etc) in foreign lands and still have enough of them to respond to these disasters.

Aren't were forgetting aproximately 4 million american citizens? Don't forget that Puerto Rico may not be part of the United States, but it's a non-incorporated territory according to the 1952 Commonwealth's Constitution. Puerto Rico's not only an american territory, but just as Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands, it consists of a group of islands (two municipalities are two different islands: one Culebra, and the other Vieques), so as islands they have flood inundation threats by north, south, east and west.

I think the larger issue is if we start including "soft issues" i.e. largely indirect actors on national security (AIDS, global warming, resource depletion, poverty), then every issue is a national security issues. The problem with this is that it makes the term national security intellectually irrelevant. And more importantly, it guts any attempt by policy makers/planners to actual 'make policy'. Yes, we all know everything is somehow connected, but as a national security planner, telling me that there will be a general rise in immigration is not gonna dramatically impact my forecasts for personnel or programs.

The IPCC *deliberately* chose to look at a single factor that may contribute to GW and disregard absolutely everything else that may be involved. They even state that up front.

There's a reason a small but steady stream of report authors are now distancing themselves from the report. In no small fact due to the distortion of the actual science by the absurd summary that everyone quotes as if it were the report itself rather than an agreement on what to say hashed out line by line by bureacrats and politicians.

A real discussion and/or evaluation about global warming's potential threats would involve ditching the stupendously politicized IPCC report and actually looking at all probably factors involved. Be they man made or naturally occuring such as cycles of the sun.

Especially considering the ratio of heat input into the earth's atmosphere compared to human activity is about 10,000-1.

You would think a very small change in output would have a very measurable affect so why has that been discarded as a causative?

Conclusion: It's hopeless. If the AGW camp is right, there's precious little we can do -- save for completely unplugging the transportation industry and all industries that depend on oil to any extent -- to change the heating climate.

The U.S. military is overextended now; how bad will it get when masses of angry people start moving across borders, looking for safety?

Prepare to survive as best you can; count on nothing to protect you, and hope you are dead before it gets too awful.