Global Warming is now a threat to national security
Yea, a new intelligence report is stating that global warming could possibly be a threat to our national security by destabilizing countries and making them more susceptible to extremism. Take a look:
Global warming is likely to have a series of destabilizing effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment debated Wednesday.
“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by climate change] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, who testified Wednesday before a joint hearing of two House committees.
Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems such as poverty, disease, migration and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Mr. Fingar said.
But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself.
“The operative word there is ‘may.’ We don’t know,” he said.
I’m glad that they admit that they do not know the future because otherwise I would definitely want to know who will win the coming election so I can plan accordingly.
Anyways, the problem with this report (or it might just be the article since the actual intelligence report is still classified) is that it assumes that fixing global warming would help stabilize these regions. The fact is that we could help these countries more and at a cheaper cost by giving them direct humanitarian aid to help with the affects climate change (not man-made of course). This is what Bjorn Lomborg basically proposes in his newest book “Cool It.”
One of these days I will get around to writing a nice long article describing how outrageously expensive and economically inefficient trying to combat climate change is but today is not the day.
