Global Warming, Military Style

Those Looney Lefties also known as Pentagon analysts are again warning of global wars driven by climate change. From the Environmental News Network:

“…governments in the US and UK are already being briefed by their own military strategists about how to prepare for a world of mass famine, floods of refugees and even nuclear conflicts over resources.

Gwynne Dyer is a military analyst and author who served in three navies and has held academic posts at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and at Oxford.

“[There will be] huge falls in the amount of crops that you can grow because there isn’t the rain and it’s too hot,” he said. “That will apply particularly to the Mediterranean… and so not just the north African countries, but also the ones on the northern side of the Mediterranean. “The ones in the European Union like Spain and Italy and Greece and the Balkans and Turkey are going to be suffering huge losses in their ability to support their populations.

Climate refugees.

He says a fall in crops and food production means there will be refugees, people who are desperate. “It may mean the collapse in the global trade of food because while some countries still have enough, there is still a global food shortage,” he said. “If you can’t buy food internationally and you can’t raise enough at home, what do you do? You move.
So refugee pressures – huge ones – are one of the things that drives these security considerations.”

In Climate Wars, even the most hopeful scenarios about the impact of climate change have hundreds of millions of people dying of starvation, mass displacement of people and conflict between countries competing for basic resources like water. “India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed countries. All of the agriculture in Pakistan and all of the agriculture in northern India depend on glacier-fed rivers that come off the Himalayas from the Tibetan plateau. Those glaciers are melting,” Dr Dyer said.

“They’re melting according to Chinese scientists to 7 per cent a year, which means they’re half gone in 10 years. “India has a problem with this. Pakistan faces an absolutely lethal emergency because Pakistan is basically a desert with a braid of rivers running through it.

“Those rivers all start with one exception in Indian-controlled territory and there’s a complex series of deals between the two countries about who gets to take so much water out of the river. Those deals break down when there’s not that much water in the rivers.” And then you have got the prospect of a nuclear confrontation, Dr Dyer says.

“It’s unthinkable but yet it’s entirely possible. So these are the prices you start to pay if you get this wrong,” he said. “Some of them, actually, I’m afraid we’ve already got them wrong in the sense that there is going to be some major climate change.” Dr Dyer explains the least alarmist scenario for the next couple of decades still involves enormous pressures on the US border. “That border’s going to be militarised. I think there’s almost no question about it because the alternative is an inundation of the United States by what will be, effectively, climate refugees,” he said. “

http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/38054

If you’re interested in global warming as a source for global conflict you might also check out the speech given by Gareth Evans (president of International Crisis Group) on this subject:

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5648&l=1

 

Water, It’s the New Oil

Looking for a good investment? Have a look at the leading companies in the rapidly expanding, global water supply industry. There are a lot of places in the world where people lack access to clean, fresh water and that’s a growing market at least for the century to come. What’s more, people who need fresh water will pay what it takes to get it. Life itself doesn’t really work too well without it.

Water as a commodity. It’s something a lot of Canadians have fretted over for years, the idea of somebody selling our stock of freshwater to foreign bidders. Keep your eye on that.

An interesting development in the US southwest where water is becoming increasingly scarce. It arises out of the apportionment of water between agriculture and domestic use. About three-quarters of their fresh water supply is earmarked for agriculture. People gotta eat – or do they? Some clever farmers in the region are reportedly now getting into the business of selling water they might otherwise be putting on their fields. They’re not selling their quota, just the water. That means they’re taking a common resource, privatizing it and putting it onto the commercial market. The best thing is they never pay dime one for the water itself. They get it so they can grow crops. The new way, however, cuts out all the bother of planting and irrigating and harvesting. You simply sell what you never produced in the first place. Neat trick, eh?

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

For some people – a lot of people actually – the danger is too much water, sea water to be specific. Rising sea levels forecast to result from global warming pose an enormous problem to the Middle East. Egypt’s Nile River is especially vulnerable to rising water levels and the associated infusion of salt and brackish water. The UN Environment Programme estimates it could result in the displacement of between two and four million Egyptians by 2050.

Sea water levels don’t have to rise very much at all before they begin salinating the groundwater supplies of particularly vulnerable spots like Gaza. A little salinity in groundwater can be incredibly destructive. It’s widely believed that the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was destroyed when they rendered the once richly fertile lands of the Tigris and Euphrates delta utterly sterile by centuries of irrigating with brackish water. The salts don’t wash away. Instead they accumulate over time until the soil becomes incapable of supporting plant life. Remember how the Romans took revenge on Carthage?

Sea water levels are also expected to wreak proper hell on security in the Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian areas (and, please, don’t send me e-mails screaming that there is no Palestine).

The report entitled Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security, by the non-governmental organisation Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), was presented at the annual UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.

It believes climate change could act as a “threat multiplier”, exacerbating water scarcity and tensions over water between nations linked by hydrological resources, geography and shared borders, particularly in Jordan, Gaza and Egypt.

“Poor and vulnerable populations, which exist in significant numbers throughout the region, will likely face the greatest risk”, says the study.

Okay, this isn’t the delusional ranting of some whacko, leftie NGO. It’s a reality already recognized in studies by very hard-nosed Israeli hydrologists who argue fiercely that Israel needs to keep a permanent hold on the Golan Heights and the West Bank for its own hydrological survival. They worry that a Palestinian West Bank and a Syrian-controlled Golan will leave Israel at the mercy of its enemies for essential access to freshwater.

Of course there’s always desalination plants. Sure, but not really. Desalination plants use a lot of fossil fuel and generate a lot of contamination of coastal waters but the product they produce, while economically feasible for urban consumption, is way too expensive to quench the enormous thirst of the agricultural sector.

“Economic unrest across the region, due to a decline in agricultural production from climate impacts on water resources, could also lead to greater political unrest, posing a threat to current regimes and, thereby, affecting internal and cross-border relations,” the FOEME report claims.

 

Mission Accomplished, Jerk. Russia Suspends CFE Treaty

Dammit, where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we need him?

You may never have heard of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty but it was a critical element in easing of military tensions between West and East at the end of the Cold War. That was the deal where we all said we were going to play nice for a change so that we could get a good night’s sleep at long last.

It worked real well for a while until a moronic frat boy and his diseased, demonic sidekick arrived on the scene and decided to stir things up by putting missiles and radars on the other side’s doorstep.

The upshot of this Oval Office lunacy? Big Vlad Putin has signed a law suspending the CFE. From the New York Times:

“The treaty, signed in the last days of the Cold War, limited the number of tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery and other heavy weapons that both NATO and Russia could deploy in Western Europe and the western part of Russia.

The U.S., the European Union and NATO had all urged Russia not to suspend the treaty, which was regarded in Europe as a cornerstone agreement in maintaining security on the continent.”

America’s Number One Nitwit has done a truly monstrous job at shredding the fabric of peace woven with enormous effort by his predecessors. Like an unruly little punk he got away with it because there was no one around able to slap him down when he needed it.

Now we have arms races foraging ahead in every corner of the northern hemisphere. Why? So these despicable Chickenhawks who ducked the fight at every turn when it was their turn can now act tough, maybe even manly. What a joke.

 

Has It Really Come to This?

Is the best way to deal with climate change to arm ourselves to kill off those we’ve harmed most?

That’s Naomi Klein’s take on an apparent recent surge in investment bucks, not toward green technologies, but into the weapons and security industries.

Klein gets this hot tip from “Douglas Lloyd, a director of Venture Business Research, which tracks trends in venture capitalism. ‘I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant,’ he said recently. Lloyd’s bouncy mood was inspired by the money that is gushing into private security and defence companies. He added: ‘I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy.'”

“According to Lloyd, the really big money – despite all the government incentives – is turning away from clean-energy technologies, and is banking instead on gadgets that promise to seal wealthy countries and individuals into hi-tech fortresses.

“So why is “homeland security”, not green energy, the hot new sector? Perhaps because there are two distinct business models that can respond to our climate and energy crisis. We can develop policies and technologies to get us off this disastrous course. Or we can develop policies and technologies to protect us from those we have enraged through resource wars and displaced through climate change, while simultaneously shielding ourselves from the worst of both war and weather. (The ultimate expression of this second option is in Hummer’s new television adverts: the gas-guzzler is seen carrying its cargo to safety in various disaster zones, followed by the slogan “HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies”. It’s a bit like the Marlboro man doing grief counselling in a cancer ward.) In short, we can choose to fix, or we can choose to fortress. Environmental activists and scientists have been yelling for the fix. The homeland security sector, on the other hand, believes the future lies in fortresses.

“As Lloyd explains: ‘The failure rate of security businesses is much lower than clean-tech ones; and, as important, the capital investment required to build a successful security business is also much lower.’ In other words, finding solutions for real problems is hard, but turning a profit from those problems is easy.

“Bush wants to leave our climate crisis to the ingenuity of the market. Well, the market has spoken: it will not take us off this disastrous course. In fact, the smart money is betting that we will stay on it.”

Is Klein just some Doomsday fantasist? I wish but I don’t think so. This is a candle we’re burning at both ends – increasing carbon emissions at one end, time to implement practical solutions at the other. As those two ends draw ever nearer, the pressures of climate change(compounded by other environmental challenges such as desertification, water exhaustion, resource depletion, peak oil and all the other problems) will inevitably draw more and more support toward defensive options over the remedial alternatives.

Unfortunately, I agree with Mr. Lloyd. In the West, too many people don’t want to really think about these problems and what is really needed to deal with them. If you want examples of how populations in great nations from the past either didn’t see or chose to simply ignore what was consuming their civilizations, read Jared Diamond’s great book “Collapse.” As a species, we’re quite capable of doing ourselves in, we really are. We’re also capable of overcoming enormous challenges, but only when we make conscious decisions – in time – to solve our problems.

 

Speaking Truth to Power

I wish Harpo was in Chicago. If he was, maybe he’d load up on a lot of wisdom about the international turmoil now underway in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There’s plenty of it to be had in the Windy City from the roughly 3,000 international affairs thinkers gathered there for the annual, International Studies Association convention.
Here, according to James Travers, writing in the Toronto Star, are some of the words of wisdom Harper could find helpful:

“Politicians stiffening national backbones won’t find renewed strength in this sampler drawn from four intensive days. There’s no guarantee imposing democracy controls terrorism, that being over there necessarily makes us safer over here or, most importantly, that the hope of reconstructing Afghanistan as a stable, modern state is guided by a common blueprint.

“None of that is idle musing. Academic and think tank business is booming in the failed states/security sector and the result is a lot of empirical holes in subjective cloth.

“For example, research predicts that violent groups will cling to their methods even after becoming political parties, Western powers become targets by intervening in essentially local conflicts, and practical short-term tactics make nonsense of the theoretical long-term Afghanistan strategy.”

“A steady supply of walk-in suicide bomber recruits is a product of new anger over infidel boots on Islamic soil and not just a manifestation of more deeply rooted grievances.

“And in Afghanistan the goal of winning hearts and minds is being pushed further over the horizon by the day-to-day damage of air strikes in a war fought among the people and by anti-drug policies that make farmers poorer and more vulnerable to corrupt officials.”

This isn’t revolutionary thinking, far from it. It’s actually very conventional wisdom that is simply not heard very often and even more rarely heeded.

 

First the "Bush Doctrine", Now This

I’ve written several comments about the quiet arms races underway – in the United States, China, India and even Russia. In no small part, these have been – if not triggered, certain accelerated – by America’s unilateralism under George Bush and the infrequently mentioned, bellicose “Bush Doctrine” in conjunction with lesser provocations such as Bush’s space doctrine.

George Cheney-Bush has done a great deal of damage to multilateralism and global order. His foreign policy is built on coercive acquiesence (“you’re either with us or against us”), not concensus. It is premised on “strength beyond challenge” and not just pre-emptive war but preventative war – war on the pretext of preventing war even if the perceived threat is only “emerging.” These are the policies of mad men, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed in Beijing and Moscow.

Everybody that matters is going for their guns, strapping on the six-shooters, and, while no one is willing to admit it, they’re beginning to mosey on down to the corral.

Now it’s Russia’s turn. According to The Guardian, Russia is about to unveil a new military doctrine of its own, one that holds NATO and the West as Russia’s greatest danger.

In a statement posted on its website, Russia’s powerful security council said it no longer considered global terrorism as its biggest danger. Instead, Russia was developing a new national security strategy which reflected changing “geo-political” realities, and the fact that rival military alliances were becoming “stronger” – “especially Nato”.

There have been changes in the character of the threat to the military security of Russia. More and more leading world states are seeking to upgrade their national armed forces. The configuration has changed,” the council said.

“In particular Russia has been incensed by the US administration’s plans to site two new missile interceptor and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“Senior figures in the Russian military yesterday told the Guardian they were infuriated by what they regard as Nato’s “relentless expansion” into “post-Soviet space” – the countries of former communist eastern Europe and the Baltic. Russia felt increasingly “encircled” by hostile neighbours, they said.

“Yesterday Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Washington had failed to explain why it wanted to site missile bases on Russia’s doorstep. President Putin has ridiculed the US claim that the bases are designed to shoot down rogue missiles from Iran or North Korea, claiming their real target is Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“‘We have been discussing this issue with our American colleagues. But most of our questions have remained without coherent answers,’ Mr Lavrov said.

“The chairman of Russia’s academy of military science, Mahmoud Garayev, said Russia could no longer afford to ignore the threat from Nato. Drugs and terrorism were an irrelevance, he said.”

It’s not as though no once could’ve seen this coming. George H.W. Bush presided over the end of the Cold War. His Frat Boy kid may have just brought Cold War back from the grave.

 

Putin Blasts America – Huh?

Vlad Putin has rebuked the US for its ”almost uncontained” use of force in the world, and for encouraging other countries to acquire nuclear weapons. Coming from a guy whose country has been steamrollering the Chechens for more than a decade, it’s hard to tell whether that’s a criticism or a compliment.

According to The New York Times:

“Putin told a security forum attracting top officials that ”we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations” and that ”one state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.

”’This is very dangerous, nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law,’ Putin told the gathering.

“Putin did not elaborate on specifics and did not mention the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But he voiced concern about U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in eastern Europe — likely in Poland and the Czech Republic — and the expansion of NATO as possible challenges to Russia.

“On the missile defense system, Putin said: ‘I don’t want to accuse anyone of being aggressive’ but suggested it would seriously change the balance of power and could provoke an unspecified response.

“The annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, now in its 43rd year, is often used as an opportunity for officials to conduct diplomacy in an informal setting.

“The conference this year focuses on ”Global Crises — Global Responsibilities,” looking at NATO’s changing role, the Middle East peace process, the West’s relations with Russia and the fight against terrorism.”

Much as it is easy to criticize Putin, his main point is right. Washington’s aggressive international posture and its unilateralism is destabilizing global security and triggering reactions in other states, some big, some not so big. Iran isn’t the only smaller state pursuing nuclear technology (i.e. weaponry). In fact, Iran is an exception in that the West is intervening before Tehran can build a nuclear weapon. We missed that boat with Pakistan, India and, for all practical purposes, North Korea.

Big and emerging powers such as Russia, China and India are also pursuing major rearmament programmes inevitably focusing on acquiring arsenals of modern, high-tech weaponry. These moves are coupled with a responsive departure from the international control mechanisms. Bush dropped the gloves and now others are taking theirs off. This is very much part of the Bush legacy, one more thing to thank him for, global insecurity.