John Kerry: Climate Change Is Our Greatest Long-Term Security Threat

[kpete]

John Kerry: Climate Change Is Our Greatest Long-Term Security Threat »

Our guest blogger is Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

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We all know about the August 2001 memo warning President Bush that terrorists were determined to strike inside the US. Thirty-six days later, they did. Well, today scientists tell us we have a ten-year window — if even that — before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible. We have to use the narrow window we have to forestall a crisis while we still can. We have to connect the dots, and we have to act. I agree with my friend Dick Armitage’s assessment on future national threats to the United States:

***If I had to say what might be the biggest long term threat I’d say it might be climate change.

In 2007, eleven former Admirals and high-ranking generals issued a report from the Center for Naval Analysis warning that climate change is a “threat multiplier” with “the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today.” General Anthony Zinni, former commander of our forces in the Middle East, was characteristically blunt. He warned that without action — and I quote:

***We will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.

Why? Because climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

more:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/21/kerry-climate-threat/

[jgraz]

1. Climate change is no longer a "long-term" threat

Climate change is a threat today. Long-term, it's a fucking catastrophe.