The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has released their latest annual Strategic Survey report for 2007 likening the impact of global warming to nuclear war according to a story in Reuters today. The report states:
The most recent international moves towards combating global warming represent a recognition … that if the emission of greenhouse gases … is allowed to continue unchecked, the effects will be catastrophic — on the level of nuclear war.
The IISS is a forty-nine year old British think tank that describes itself as “the world’s leading authority on political military conflict”.
Despite what some naysayers would have us believe, global warming is not just the concern of ‘treehuggers’ and environmentalists. The Security Survey 2007 makes it clear that global warming is a national security issue for every country on the planet. The report’s executive summary states:
International moves towards combating global warming indicates recognition of the need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. Even if effective measures are adopted there will still be unavoidable impacts on the environment, economies and human security… The security dimension will come increasingly to the forefront as countries begin to see falls in available resources and economic vitality, increased stress on their armed forces, greater instability in regions of strategic import, increases in ethnic rivalries, and a widening gap between rich and poor.
 |
The world has already been witness to resource driven conflicts in the Darfur region of Sudan and in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Reuters notes the IISS found global warming’s “impact was already being felt — particularly in conflicts in Kenya and Sudan — and more was expected in places from Asia to Latin America as dwindling resources led to competition between haves and have nots.” IISS specialists acknowledged that mitigating the threat of global warming is more difficult than identifying it.
The IISS report predicts that climate change will cause states to collapse and reduce the international community’s ability to “tackle the causes and to reduce the effects of global warming.” In addition, “state failures would increase the gap between rich and poor and heighten racial and ethnic tensions which in turn would produce fertile breeding grounds for more conflict.”
Overall, it said 65 countries were likely to lose over 15 percent of their agricultural output by 2100 at a time when the world’s population was expected to head from six billion now to nine billion people.
Urban areas would not be exempt from the fallout as falling crop yields due to reduced water and rising temperatures would push food prices higher, IISS said.
“Fundamental environmental issues of food, water and energy security ultimately lie behind many present security concerns, and climate change will magnify all three,” it added.
Addressing global warming and mitigating the impact of climate change is a national security issue for every nation in the world, including the United States of America. The tired arguments about how dealing with global warming will hurt the economy do not consider how the world economy will crater as the earth continues to heat up. I suspect that the ever-widening gap between rich and poor is part of the wealthy’s strategy to insulate themselves from the impending planetary disaster. Securing more oil from Iraq, the Arctic, or Canadian oil tar sands is not going to make the United States be better situated to muddle through the climate meltdown. Unless we start rolling back our rampant consumer society, the war in Iraq is just a prelude to the future resource wars to come.
10 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
But the IISS likening the impact of global warming to nuclear war has to be an eye-opener for some skeptics, I hope. I think it will help to frame global warming as a security issue, but I fear the reaction will be just more military spending and not addressing the causes of greenhouse gas emissions.
for lack of a better descriptor, i am glad to see this topic being covered here. and well, too. i caught wind of this article earlier today over at earth portal.
accurately stated, without a whiff of hyperbole. it is a shared security imperative whose importance belies the insanity of its continued denial by too many of our governmental and industrial leaders.
ugh. so very tired as well about that hoary old chestnut. the environment is only a threat to an economic system that allows unchecked externalization of costs and that abides extraction of public resources while thumbing a nose at any notion of limits. but i appreciate why and how some may find such a sentiment to be threatening.
World Agriculture Faces Serious Decline from Global Warming
Much worse in India, Pakistan, Africa and South America.
And of course the new Red List, every bit as horrible as expected. WWF’s Susan Lieberman sums it up:
The predictions from the IISS and IPCC essentially predict massive death due to famine/drought, violent storms, resource wars, and rampant diseases. The four horsemen of the apocolypse. Let’s call it Armegeddon as that it truly what it will be. It will be the collapse of human society and devolution into smaller tribal bands. It will be Future Shock on acid.
We will be remembered as a society that spent over 500 billion dollars a year on defense and 200 billion a year on pointless wars. I am guessing the combined true cost of both is closer to a trillion dollars a year. We refuse to conserve energy. We are degrading the environment to mine for coal and drill for oil. We have sold nearly a million acres of forest to developers during the tenure of the war criminal king. America will be remembered as a country that got it wrong, stuck its collective head up its ass, and wrung its hands about the impact of doing something on the profit margins of multinational corporations.