Public Enemy #1

Holy shit:

A secret report prepared by the Pentagon warns that climate
change may lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives and is
a far greater threat than terrorism.
The report was ordered by an influential US Pentagon advisor but was
covered up by "US defense chiefs" for four months, until it was
"obtained" by the British weekly The Observer. The leak promises to
draw angry attention to US environmental and military policies,
following Washington's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change and President George W. Bush's skepticism about global warning
-- a stance that has stunned scientists worldwide.
The Pentagon report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, 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 Observer reported. The report, quoted
in the paper, concluded: "Disruption and conflict will be endemic
features of life.... Once again, warfare would define human life."
Some examples given of probable scenarios in the dramatic report
include: -- Britain will have winters similar to those in current-day
Siberia as European temperatures drop off radically by 2020. -- by 2007
violent storms will make large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable
and lead to a breach in the acqueduct system in California that
supplies all water to densely populated southern California -- Europe
and the United States become "virtual fortresses" trying to keep out
millions of migrants whose homelands have been wiped out by rising sea
levels or made unfarmable by drought. -- "catastrophic" shortages of
potable water and energy will lead to widespread war by 2020. Randall,
one of the authors, called his findings "depressing stuff" and warned
that it might even be too late to prevent future disasters. "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 told the paper. Experts familiar with the report told the newspaper that the threat to global stability "vastly eclipses that of terrorism".

This is not some left-wing, liberal, granola-eating,
white-people-with-dreadlocks, hippy group talking. This is not the
Sierra Club. This is not Greenpeace
This is the Pentagon.It's well-known by pretty much
everyone that there are two groups which affect the direction of this
country. One is the oil companies. The other is the Pentagon.
If the Pentagon is saying that climate change is a bigger threat to the
American Way of Life, one can only hope that George Bush will hear it.
If he doesn't, we're basically fucked.
UPDATE: As always, Billmon has the definitive post on this subject.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 22, 2004 at 10:06 PM | Permalink