Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

 

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Sounds freaky... I live on the coast.

 

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This sounds like it should be Politics as well... the United States has to embrace Kyoto as soon as possible.

 

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This is horseshit. Not to mention it is completely inaccurate and devoid of scientific credibility.

If this is the case, then it will occur at an unprecidented rate, not seen in the course of earth history. What will be the impetus for such climate change? It certainly can't be this percieved global warming because it doesn't work that fast. I'm skeptical if a colossal volcanic eruption would even make that sizable an impact.

This entire article could've been written by Chicken Little - "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

 

A good, objective article describing this potential climate change is:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,582584,00.html

I believe a lot of the science behind it is the evaluation of ice cores, which indicate we are on the verge of slipping into a cyclic, minor ice age. And the Pentagon report indicates it is a very real possibility.

 

If it would really happen by 2020, we should be seeing it already. Nature takes a long time to change. It can't change that fast unless it is influenced by something like an asteroid impact or something like that. If all that would happen by 2020, we would already be seeing some major changes.

Or at least, that's what I think...

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Here is a non subsription link to the same story: http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/01/26/climatec.html

 

Yeah, i will believe the story only if we ever become extinct, but only then.

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oh man, were so hopeless. and i quote : "If it would really happen by 2020, we should be seeing it already. Nature takes a long time to change. It can't change that fast unless it is influenced by something like an asteroid impact or something like that. If all that would happen by 2020, we would already be seeing some major changes."
ummm helloo?? we ARE already seeing changes. Colder winters, hotter summers, the icecap is melting so fast it will be gone by 2050, and serious food, water, shelter and oil deprevation is already taking place. The hole in the ozone is twice the size of Europe. Earth hasnt seen this great of a temperature change in its existance, and its all because of human carelessness, ignorance and greed. It will only take 10 degrees global temperature change for there to be another ice age, and by the end of the 21st century scientists speculate it will be 12 degrees or more at the rate we burn fossil fuels. Expectations on oil consumtion are constantly being revised because demand is growing, and this is doing nothing to help the environment. Change needs to happen, it is already too late. We dont have 20 years to convert the economy because by then we will all be dead. We need changes in the economy and society NOW, if my generation ever hopes to retire. Bush knows all this but he is just in the presidential game to please his friends he borrowed so much money off of in the oil industry, in which he himself was once a player. Things arent going to get better by themselves!! I just wish there were something i could do. Im SOOOO glad this report got leaked, its about damn time the general public knew.

 

You need to take a look at an Earth history textbook. The Earth has experienced plenty of climatic changes and life has continued to exist through all of this. The escalating CO2 levels should be a concern to all but let's put this in a historical perspective, they have been higher and the Earth survived. If you looked at a map of the planet through time you would notice that polar ice caps are a relative rarity in history as well. Before you go believing that the sky is falling, learn a little geology, Earth history and maybe even a little about astronomy.

By the way, that "news story" is complete crap. One or two facts, sprinkled with a generous helping of name dropping and polishing it off with a topping of gloom and doom does not equal reputable journalism or credible science.

 

That's not what I said. I said that such climate changes are a slow process. It doesn't just happen, unless it is caused by something big (like a supernova, meteorite, etc...)...

 

Here is another article: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/96_99/19224.html

This one seems like credible science.

 

the sinking of the Kyoto Protocol last December in Milan, has caused an explosion of hysterical propaganda in order to put pressure on governments for ratifying the infamous treaty. We have seen that with the unbelievable clumsy story of the “Pentagon Report” published by the British <b>The Observer</b> and <b>The Guardian</b> – clear examples of yellow press. What came out of the story now is that:

(1) There is no such “Pentagon Report”,

(2) The story was not kept hidden for 4 months – it was published by Fortune magazine almost a month before The Observer “got it”. (the link to the story was provided in a previous post in this forum.

(3) The story was written by two “science fiction” writers (one of them, Peter Schwartz wrote the script for the film “War games”, where a kid got inside the ballistic missile control computer.

(4) An aging (82 years-old) adviser in the Defense Dept., Andrew Marshall (he is still permitted to play around with phones, Xerox machines, and computers in his little office at the Pentagon), asked Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall for a scary story for himself. He later sent it to <b>The Observer</b> as if it <b>had been suppressed by the Pentagon</b>, giving the tip to Greenpeace and other lunatics of the kind.

The rest you know, and are discussing here. But has anyone read the original "Pentagon-Schwartz-Randall Report"? All people know is what they've read in the media - the yellow one, of course.

And now people believe that the <b>whole Pentagon</b> has warned Bush about the impending disaster of climate change, and he better ratify the treaty or else. People really believe that the <b><font color=red>science fiction story has scientific validity</font></b>. People believe it can happen in 20 years, in spite that the authors clearly state in their disclaimers and caveats, that <b><font color=red>their report is a work of fantasy, and it has not a single possibility of becoming real.</font></b>

If this is not a dishonest manipulation of the press, <b><font color=red>in order to fool and cheat on people with false information</font></b>, then what is?

Go here and see a longer analysis and comments: http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/006051.php

And here is the original "Schwartz-Pentagon" report, in Word format:

http://www.stopesso.com/campaign/Pentagon.doc

 

Ed:

Thank you for elucidating what I could not. That report is wrong on so many levels I had trouble figuring out where my criticism should begin. And then I lost patience.

I loathe this kind of pseudo-science crap masquerading as legitimate science.

 

i think global toxcisity is a bigger threat than global warming
i don't know the figures but im convinsed Easter Asia are making a bigger mess in this department then any one else

 

I read something about a giant forest fire in Borneo that burned an area equal to the size of the Neathelands, back in 1983. Is that like half the huge island?

Did the world end? I don't even remember any news of it back then. Apparently the world went on. Apparently I didn't even notice or it disappeared into the noise of daily news?

Mount Helens blew up. Even bigger volcanos have erupted. Did the world end?

Didn't they claim that Yellowstone recovered from the conflagrations of 1988? Wasn't that supposed to be sort of like the end of the world or something?

The truth is, no matter how much humans like to pretend like they are "god" or something and can supposedly create or "destroy" the earth, our influence on the climate, is puny, and makes little difference.

There were mentions of strange weather a century ago, in old novels. People always think the weather is strange. I can decern no conclusive trend at all. The summers don't seem any "warmer" and at least some winters are as cold as ever I can remember for my area. Kind of hard to worry about "global warming" when one's electricity is out for a day, after an ice storm. (Wouldn't it be nice to have a little "global warming" on such days?)

Yeah, I agree with that post about lots of "Chicken Little" to that report.

And I agree with the last post, that there may be more to worry about, concerning chemical toxicity, than spewing huge amounts of harmless CO2 into the atmosphere, which it surely must be rather "used to" by now? As the forest fires that have probably raged ever since the drying out from the Great Flood of Noah's Ark and the radical climate changes that God caused in relation to that, seem to be no lasting harm to the environment. As I read, many times as many acres were consumed by forest fires, before man intervened in them in the last century. Don't forest fires and volcanos, spew CO2 and toxic gases?

And yet I notice that the world doesn't seem to have ended just yet?

 

The Pentagon, or the univerisities, or environmental groups, or other governments, or all of the above can continue to warn George W. Bush about global warming, be it for the next 20 years or the next 10. As long as the predicted consequences are AFTER the next Presidential election, HE JUST WON'T CARE.

In fact, the only people whose opinion he'll seriously consider are the VOTERS.

For coping with global problems which will affect decades and centuries to come, the ideal leader would be some kind of benign, enlightened dictator, who can afford to plan far ahead at the expense of short-term economics.

 

There is not such a being in the Universe, not even God - as God doesn't seem to be benign at all.

Being benign has nothing to do with Justice - or Science.

But all this mess happens when politics gets in the way of simple science. People are too worried about something that has not given yet sign of ever manifest itself!

 

I would say being "benign" as a politician is about acting in the best interests of the people as a whole - and, where global warming is concerned, the people and the environment are on the same side. It's not impossible to fulfill that definition.

Politics and morality don't always coincide, of course.