Subcommittee Investigates National Security Implications of Climate Change
(Washington, DC) The Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology today convened a hearing to examine current thinking on the nature and magnitude of the threats that global warming may present to national security, and to explore the ways in which climate-related security threats can be predicted, forestalled, mitigated, or remedied.
“The possibility of a world transformed by climate change is not a science fiction image of a post-apocalyptic society, it is not a road warrior movie, it is happening now,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC).
The Committee has long been a leader in bringing the importance of climate change to the attention of the nation and in advocating measures to deal with this critical problem. The Committee was the driving force in the creation of the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 1990 and moved a significant amendment to that act just in June of this year (H.R. 906).
While climate change research is familiar to the Committee, thinking about the implications of global warming for national security has not received due attention from Congress or policy circles generally.
During the hearing, Former Army Chief of Staff and contributor to the recent groundbreaking study National Security and the Threat of Climate Change General Gordon R. Sullivan (Ret.), testified that, “After listening to leaders of the scientific, business, and governmental communities, my colleagues and I came to agree that global climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and in a larger sense to life on earth as we know it to be.”
Consequences of warming temperatures may number: flooding, drought, soil and coastal erosion, melting of glaciers and sea ice, and change in the range of disease vectors. Such phenomena can lead to water shortages, diminution of food supplies from both agriculture and the oceans, the spread of disease to new areas and the emergence of new diseases, increased risk of fire, and decreased production of electrical power. Famine, epidemic, and competition of resources, can contribute to the breakdown of civil order – and, where governments are already stressed, disintegration of the state – as well as rampant human misery, mass migration, the rise of extremist ideologies, and armed conflict.
The hearing looked at the current state of research into these possibilities, as well as the strategic thinking that is being developed in hopes of anticipating and coping with such threats.
“Can we better prepare to protect our national security interests by conducting research that will predict what consequences can come from global warming, and where? Can we be better prepared by conducting research into how to mitigate the consequences of global warming?” asked Chairman Miller at the hearing. “I think we can, and I know this Committee can help insure that research gets underway and is properly utilized for the better protection of the American people.”
The hearing is likely the first in a series of hearings by the Subcommittee that will seek to identify new areas of research, or new emphases in existing areas, that have begun emerging with the recently burgeoning attention to the links between climate change and national security.
In addition to General Sullivan, today’s witnesses included: Mr. James Woolsey, a former Director of Central Intelligence and currently Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton. He is the author of a chapter of the forthcoming Center for Strategic and International Studies report “The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change;” Dr. Kent Hughes Butts, the Director of National Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership; Dr. Alexander Lennon, a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-director of the forthcoming CSIS report “The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change; ” and Dr. Andrew Price-Smith, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado College, Director of the Project on Health and Global Affairs, and author of the book The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development.
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