Terror in the Weather Forecast
Does climate change threaten international peace and security? The British government thinks it does. As this month’s head of the United Nations Security Council, Britain convened a debate on the matter last Tuesday. One in four United Nations member countries joined the discussion - a record for this kind of thematic debate. Countries rich and poor, large and small, and from all continents - Bangladesh, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, much of Europe and, most poignantly, a large number of small island states endangered by rising seas - recognized the security implications of climate change. Some other developing countries - Brazil, Cuba and India and most of the biggest producers of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, including China, Qatar and Russia - either questioned the very idea of such a link or argued that the Security Council is not the right place to talk about it.
But these skeptics are wrong. Evidence is fast accumulating that, within our children’s lifetimes, severe droughts, storms and heat waves caused by climate change could rip apart societies from one side of the planet to the other. Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous - and more intractable - than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.
Congress and senior military leaders are taking heed: Legislation under consideration in both the Senate and the House calls for the director of national intelligence to report on the geopolitical implications of climate change. And last week a panel of 11 retired generals and admirals warned that climate change is already a “threat multiplier” in the world’s fragile regions, “exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states - the breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism.”
Addressing the question of scientific uncertainty about climate change, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff who is now retired, said: “Speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”
In the future, that battlefield is likely to be complex and hazardous. Climate change will help produce the kind of military challenges that are difficult for today’s conventional forces to handle: insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare and global terrorism.
In the 1990s, a research team I led at the University of Toronto examined links between various forms of environmental stress in poor countries - cropland degradation, deforestation and scarcity of fresh water, for example - and violent conflict. In places as diverse as Haiti, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa, we found that severe environmental stress multiplied the pain caused by such problems as ethnic strife and poverty.
Rural residents who depend on local natural resources for their livelihood become poorer, while powerful elites take control of - and extract exorbitant profits from - increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources in the countryside dwindle, people sometimes join local rebellions against landowners and government officials. In mountainous areas of the Philippines, for instance, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have increased poverty and helped drive peasants into the arms of the Communist New People’s Army insurgency.
Other times, people migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with the people already there. Or they migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.
Climate change will have similar effects, if nations fail to aggressively limit carbon dioxide emissions and develop technologies and institutions that allow people to cope with a warmer planet.
The recent report of Working Group II of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies several ways warming will hurt poor people in the third world and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes - zones inhabited by billions of people - will experience more drought, more damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease.
The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: in semiarid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. (There is evidence that warming’s effect on crops and pastureland is a cause of the Darfur crisis.) Many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and temperatures even a couple of degrees higher could lead to much lower yields.
By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments - and make challenges from violent groups more likely - by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.
We’ve learned in recent years that such failure can have consequences around the world and that great powers can’t always isolate themselves from these consequences. It’s time to put climate change on the world’s security agenda.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times
It’s too late. America is almost done leading the rape of the earth. There’s going to be blowback that not even the military can control. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Hoa Binh
no, sorry, hb, you have to roll the dice one way or the other, now’s not the time to chicken out.
We are currently involved in a conflict in Iraq that is using enormous quantities of fuel. 70% of all tonnage moved on a battle field is fuel. The vehicles that are burning this fuel do not come with catalytic converters.
If the ‘first world countries’ were serious about cutting back on fossil fuel consumption the first thing thing that they should do is stop wars. All nations should be forced to join the World Court and the leader of any country that begins aggression should be hanged for war crimes, without exceptions.
All of the trillions of dollars that are currently going into military budgets could be spent on new technoligies to combat green house emmissions. The 500 billion that we have blown in Iraq could have been better spent on infrastructure improvements in the US to lower emmissions.
The River–
Your clear waters flow true and penetrate to the heart of this problem. Nicely said and well done.
Maybe a new slogan is needed:
First, we blame Global Warming on al Queda.
“We must fight Global Warming over here or we’ll be fighting them over, er… or we’ll all die.”
Next, “The Department of Homeland Warming.” New Attorney General, Al Gore, creates a new criminal designation: eco-enemy combatant. Those suspected of directly or indirectly attempting to kill Earth will be subject to indefinite detention working to retro fit a coal plant, cleaning up oil spills, or installing solar systems for low income home owners.
You get the idea…
Climate change does threaten international peace and stecurity because that is what BIG MEDIA wants you to think. And who benefits from threatened peace. The military, arms manufacturers, private security organisations, gangs, and anyone else who makes money off of war.
C’mon Thomas Homer-Dixon you must be aware of this. Maybe you are making money off of this story. Why else would you send it in with ‘terror’ in the title.? Making us feel bad doesn’t help global warming. I know something that does: MEDIA REFORM. Wake up, you sound fairly smart just off target a little.
adamwestfakey@yahoo.ca
Well, Bush keeps saying that it’s a “war on terra;” we all just assumed that he couldn’t pronounce terror.
While the White House pretends that Global Warming can be dealt with by converting Iowa corn to high-test moonshine the Pentagon is steadily taking steps to deal with a low-fuel environment.
Already there is a hummer like vehicle that consists of a plug-in hybrid in testing. The Air Force has done engine tests on biofuels in B-52’s and Nellis AFB is getting 140 acres of solar panels. Any day now you’re going to see the Navy testing out sails on it’s frigates in order to save fuel costs.
So if the Pentagon planners don’t think that they get to eternally corner america’s fuel supply where do you think your future lies?
Here’s a clue. Global Warming is going to destroy crops around the world. Australia is only a start; you can Google: “china grain shortage” for some real scary reading.
Hungry people don’t care what the laws are and they will kill you if it will feed their children. If you stay fat while their children starve to death they might kill you anyway.
The River is right. The human race is still in adolescence. Just try to convince an eighteen year old that she should slow down a bit. A world court with teeth and safeguards against corruption could be our salvation
There is no shortage of decent, qualified leaders. How about a Mandella or a M.L. King for a leader instead of a Bush?
”if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.”
-Vice-President Dick Cheney
You kind of wonder why the same logic doesn’t apply to the threat of mass destruction from global warming, dontcha?
The article skirts around the issue that a globalized economy has been a major part of the problem, increasing deforestation, monoculture agriculture for export crops rather than for domestic consumption, the entrenched power and lack of accountability of multinational energy corporations, the huge energy output required for expansionist wars and the military generally, increasing multinational corporate control of peoples and regions most at risk. And of course, the conspiracy of disinformation and outright lies about global warming and climate change that have allowed the US to thumb its nose at the world.
I think it is really ironic that climate change is now seen as a “security” threat. The implication is that “they” out there are the threat, that we can deny the damage we do because this enables the destruction to continue rather than make the necessary changes that would also threaten profits of entrenched corporate interests. As usual, the damage can be “handled” militarily. It is this mentality of endless growth and exploitation supported by the US military industrial complex that has gotten us into this black hole in the first place.
These problems will call for a transformation in thought, a readiness to allow the creative potential of humanity to address this collective disaster, not more of the destructive capacity of the industrialized countries who may have to finally pay for the suffering they have wreaked upon the rest of the world.
We are doomed. Irrational short-termist commercial interests rule the world. Even if this were not so, people are unlikely to all do the “right thing”. Holidays in distant lands are sooo tempting, and if your neighbour’s got an SUV, why shouldn’t you have one.
The latter issue could be resolved by stronger governance, but no so-called democracy would have the courage or the power to prevent Joe Bloggs from eating burgers with 40,000 food miles. People would rebel against such authoritarian rule.
Still, this is moot, as corporations dictate the governance to suit themselves, and this will never change.