American Elephants

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review gives an unusual amount of attention to the issue of climate change. Brett Schaefer and Baker Spring note, at National Review, that:

Previous QDR reports did not identify climate change, global warming, or other environmental issues as major concerns for U.S. security. The 2010 QDR, by contrast, dedicates three of its 105 pages (plus executive summary) to the issue, highlighting it (along with energy) in a section dedicated to its impact on the “future security environment.”

All in all, the report mentions “climate change” 19 times. China is mentioned only eleven times, Iran five times, Russia four times, and North Korea three times. It seems that the Obama administration views climate change as a major national-security concern. The QDR sees the potential consequences of global warming — retreating glaciers, extreme weather, rising sea levels and temperatures, food security and water scarcity, disease — as potential contributors to instability and conflict. (emphasis mine)

It appears that the Obama administration which has appeared to be somewhat uninterested in national security, regards climate change as a major security threat.  Probably no one in the administration is familiar with ClimateGate, or the subsequent collapse of the authority of the UN’s IPCC and relies instead on their friend, noted climate scientist Al Gore.

This summary comes from the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP).

• Mid-August, 2009, after repeated requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it had discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures.  Makes independent review and verification impossible.

• October, 2009 annual meeting Geological Society of America: Dr. Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree-ring data from Russia showing cooling after 1961 were artfully disguised in IPCC Assessment Report 4 contained deceptions making the entire document scientifically questionable.

• November: emails and code from the CRU leaked to the public, which reveals efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions of human-caused warming.  IPCC scientific review process has systematic bias in favor of anthropogenic warming.

• Mid-December: Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the Met Office had probably tampered with Russian climate data, and the Russian station data do not support human caused global warming.  Met Office collaborates with CRU in reporting global temperatures. Reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and have a strong warming bias of unknown magnitude.

• January: Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases— those in colder climates. Thus their reported temperature trends are unreliable and likely have a strong warming bias of unknown magnitude.

• All global surface temperatures and trends announced by the three major reporting international organizations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their work scientifically unreliable.

• January: IPCC AR4 claimed that here was a probability of the disappearance of Himalayan Glaciers by 2035 or sooner. A possibility that could be devastating to India and S.E. Asia.  Investigated, it turned out to have no basis in scientific fact.

• January: Claims in the 2007 IPCC report that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest came from activist who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and had no basis in scientific fact.  The disappearance of rainforest was due to logging.

• February: No scientific basis for the claim that global warming could cut-rain-fed African crop production by 50% by 2020.

Beyond the QDR’s view that consequences of global warming could be potential contributors to instability and conflict, the approach leads to recommendations that limit the flexibility of the military.

If carbon dioxide is not a cause of global warming, and it isn’t, then just how far should we go to try to eliminate it?  And perhaps we should try to resolve more of the scientific questions before we start changing our national security strategies. And possibly we should find out if there is any warming at all, and who we can trust with those questions.

This is a very troubling basis on which to shift America’s defense strategy.  As Schaefer and Spring suggest: “In its oversight role, Congress should challenge the administration’s inclusion of climate change as a defense priority.”