U.S. exposed in Arctic as a result of climate change: Military experts

U.S. exposed in Arctic as a result of climate change: Military experts

Published 2 July 2015

 

Senior former military commanders and security advisors warn that global warming is jeopardizing U.S. national security. They said that political gridlock in Washington over climate change has left the U.S. military exposed to Russia’s superior fleets in the Arctic, flooding in U.S. naval bases, and a more unstable world. “We’re still having debates about whether [climate change] is happening, as opposed to what we should do about it,” said a former undersecretary of defense. “We need to guard against the failure of imagination when it comes to climate change. Something is going to happen in the future years, and we’re not going to be prepared.”

Last month, the Weather Channel published a series of twenty-five interviews with security experts on the implications of climate change for U.S. national security and defense posture.
Sherri Goodman, who served as Bill Clinton’s deputy undersecretary of defense and founded the security analysis firm CNA Corporation, said the U.S. climate debate was “stuck in the past” and that climate change was “acting as a threat multiplier in the Arctic.”
The Guardian notes The Arctic is the most rapidly warming region on Earth and its sea ice has significantly declined in recent years. Goodman said the politicization of the discussion in the United States over climate change has created a technology deficit in the far north — a place where Russia and the United States, the relationship of which has become increasingly tense, are separated by just eighty-two km.
“Right now we have a fleet, a very small fleet of ageing icebreakers. The Russians and other countries have vastly more ice-breaking capability and other capabilities to be present in the Arctic. We will need to have a greater presence in the Arctic of various types,” she said.
“We’re still having debates about whether this is happening, as opposed to what we should do about it,” she said. “We need to guard against the failure of imagination when it comes to climate change. Something is going to happen in the future years, and we’re not going to be prepared.”
“Literally, the nation’s defense is at stake,” said rear admiral David Titley, former naval oceanography operations command and a professor of meteorology.
“Unfortunately all we have to look at are the events of the day in Crimea and Ukraine and we see that the Russians are making some noises about, ‘well, you know, maybe the Arctic is another place we should compete rather than cooperate’,” he said.
Brigadier general Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project and a foreign affairs adviser to the State Department, said the security concerns extended beyond the Arctic to the foundation of U.S. military power - its naval bases.
“I can start here in the continental United States where we’ve got thirty naval bases both here and overseas. Naval bases by the nature of course are on the coast. Coasts are threatened as the sea level rises, and I can give you two very prominent examples, the Naval Air Station in Norfolk, Virginia, for instance. Eglin Air Force base in Florida, another one, has already flooded in this past year when they had to shut it down for the first time in its history,” he said.
He said that the concerns were not limited to the U.S. ability to defend itself. Climate change was already causing wars around the world. He gave the example of Tuareg farmers in Mali, displaced by drought and radicalized by conflict, who have destabilized the West African country.
“We know climate change caused this,” he said.
Cheney said it was important that the military recognized its own contribution as the largest polluter in the world’s second highest polluting country. Weaning the defense force off fossil fuels is an active policy that would solve a security and supply problem as well as bring down carbon emissions.
“Many conflicts throughout our history have been based on resource competition,” said General Charles Jacoby, who was the commander of the U.S. North Command — the primary line of defense against invasion of the U.S. mainland — until last year. He said that this competition would only intensify in the future, with energy and water supply at the top of the list.
Jacoby said climate change was a “legitimate mission that we readily embrace.” He said the military had to be pragmatic and the politicking around climate change was ultimately irrelevant.
“It can be considered a politicized issue. And it can be considered something that one party is more interested in, another party less interested in. I’m a soldier. I’m a requirements guy. I’m a mission accomplishment guy. And so for me, it’s be in favor of what’s happening. And so, I deal with the facts. Whatever the cause is less relevant to me than the effect,” he said.
The Guardian notes that the Weather Channel also interviewed leading Republicans, who criticized what they described as their party’s obstructionism on climate issues.
Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who served as director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush, said the Republican stance on climate change was “frustrating and puzzling,” citing the GOP’s history of environmental stewardship.
“It was Richard Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agencies. I mean, it’s ours. It’s our issue. It’s conservation. It’s conservative. This is an issue we should be talking about in a rational way. Let’s not politicise it, let’s not demand that everybody be absolutely for or absolutely against climate change,” she said.
Henry Paulson, George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, appeared to disagree with Whitman’s assessment of the Republican attitude to climate change. “I think that there are plenty of Republicans that understand that this is a huge problem and we need to deal with it. And there are plenty of Democrats that don’t want to deal with it,” he said.
The EPA’s director under the first president Bush, William Reilly, said he was also bemused by his party’s undermining of climate action. But he said he was hopeful of change “Young people of all stripes including young Republicans are very supportive of both acknowledging that we have a climate problem and humans are contributing to it,” he said.
— Read more in The Weather Channel Presents: The Climate 25 — Conversations with 25 of the Smartest Voices on Climate, Security, Energy, and Peace (The Weather Channel, 10 June 2015)