Major threats to America's security are heating up all over the world, but not due to global warming. Nevertheless, we wouldn't know that according to statements and actions of top Obama administration leaders.
Speaking to Coast Guard Academy graduates on May 20, the president said: “The threat of changing climate cuts to the very core of your service,” adding that “climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security and immediate risk to our national security.”
This echoes the view of Secretary of State John Kerry who has described climate change as "the biggest challenge we face right now." To support this claim, both he and Obama have cited unprecedented storms, unprecedented hurricanes, unprecedented droughts, unprecedented fires . . . everything it seems but an unprecedented lack of simple fact checking.
A reality check would also reveal another inconvenient truth. Despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, that rocketing off-the-chart warming predicted by theoretical climate models has flared out. Although everyone I know recognizes that climate really does change, it just hasn’t done so lately. Satellite recordings show that global temperatures have actually been flat over the past 18 years and counting.
So what information earned climate change the distinction of constituting an epic security threat warranting military preparedness?
That feverishly overheated policy priority originated with a warning by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global warming would melt the massive Himalayan ice mass. This would flood rivers vital to agriculture which would later dry up as glaciers retreated.
The climatological calamity would cause mass migrations of millions of people from lowland Bangladesh across national borders, with militaries (including ours) becoming involved.
As IPCC finally admitted, that scenario was entirely fabricated without a shred of supporting science by a fellow who worked for its director. Nevertheless, in 2007 Senate Armed Services Committee members Hillary Clinton and Republican John Warner snuck some of that message into an amendment of the National Defense Authorization Act, which got our military into the climate protection business, whether they wanted to be or not.
Despite no credible evidence that a climate crisis, much less, any human-caused one, actually exists, a 2010 Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) has ordained that climate change will play a “significant role in shaping the future security environment.” Accordingly, considerations of threats posed by climate change are now mandated to be incorporated into DOD’s long-range strategic plans.
Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Thomas Hayward strongly laments that development. He told me in a 2012 Forbes.com interview: “Despite the large number of scientific organizations within DOD and the military services, none has challenged IPCC’s flawed science of climate change, when in fact, available climate science literature is replete with peer reviewed research contradicting their assertion that man is primarily responsible.”
Hayward further pointed out that this woe begotten folly is adding unwarranted costs to defense budgets and operations at a time when important programs that really do benefit America’s security interests are being sacrificed as austerity measures.
For example, as we reduce second-strike sea and air deterrence capabilities in an Obama dream world without nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran continue to expand first-strike arsenals with determination and impunity.
By 2018, the Navy will reduce the number of deployed and non-deployed submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles from 336 to 280. In fact, some of the missile tubes aboard the Navy’s 14 Ohio-class ballistic submarines will be purposefully altered to prevent ballistic missile launches.
The Air Force is trimming its bomber fleet from 93 to 60, including the 19B-2 stealth bomber. In addition, fifty of our 450 Minuteman III missiles will be removed from silos and stored. The remaining 400 will constitute the lowest number since 1962 when America had 203. That total was rapidly expanded following the Cuban missile crisis.
In 2009, the White House reneged on promises to the Czech Republic to establish a missile defense site in Poland to appease Russia’s vehement opposition. Incidentally, that cancelled Polish missile defense installation would also have afforded some protection for America against Iranian and North Korean nuclear EMP strikes launched over the South Pole . . . true threats discussed in my two previous columns.
And just how do those world and national security threats posed by long-term global warming compare with still another somewhat more immediate risk . . . the accelerating spread of an ISIS caliphate beyond Syria and Iraq, with affiliates in Algeria, Egypt, and Libya?
Whereas the president has branded “climate change deniers” as dangerous threats to our future, we will be safer with more of his attention directed to some other deniers — those who cut off heads and burn people alive for not believing as they do.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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