When people think about the relationship between energy and national security, they generally focus on America’s dependence on oil from an unstable part of the world, on the susceptibility of our central hub-and-spoke power grid to terrorist attacks, and on the special vulnerability of large power plants, especially nuclear plants. Those are all real security issues, but climate change is also a security issue, even though it isn’t usually thought of that way.
US Climate Change Policy Creates Hostility
The United States’ failure to address global warming has caused major international relations difficulties, thereby making our nation less secure. By pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, we have lost considerable support, especially in Europe, for a range of security and trade issues that are critically important to our national and economic security. That’s quite astounding. Why has the negative response been so intense?
I recently shared a plane ride with a British tanker captain who was in Cape Town, South Africa during the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. He happened to be in a TV electronics shop as events in New York unfolded. The younger people there, both white and black South Africans, were making comments such as, "Well, maybe America will now get it." When he asked them what they meant, they responded, "You know, on climate change, pulling out of Kyoto, it’s outrageous." To these young people, it was really an important issue.
Like these South Africans, many Europeans feel that because America is the biggest contributor to global warming and the most responsible for the buildup of greenhouse gases, how dare America not accept responsibility and take the lead on this serious issue. The long hot summer of 2003 in Europe only increases anger towards the US.
Why have we abandoned the Kyoto Protocol? It hardly matters whether it is fear of competition from developing countries or ideology. The fact is that in failing to meet our obligations to reduce climate altering gas emissions, we are jeopardizing our national security.
Global Warming as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Perhaps more important than the way that global warming affects us in the policy arena is its direct risk to our national security. In fact, global warming leading to massive climate change is actually the greatest weapon of mass destruction known to humankind. What do I mean? The definition of a weapon of mass destruction is one that causes major death and damage. Global warming, as it is projected between 2000 and 2100 on any of the trajectories the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put together, will probably lead to more deaths and more property damage than any other weapon of mass destruction we can imagine being unleashed in this century. The difference is that it will not happen in the twinkling of a microsecond, but rather will be drawn out over the century and perhaps over the rest of the third millennium.
The addition of climate-altering greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is changing its chemical composition. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased almost 32% since the pre-industrial era, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. Methane, which is also associated with the energy industry—natural gas and coal mining—but also with agriculture, solid waste disposal, and other human activities, has increased 133%. These are extraordinary changes.
We have now reached 372 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up from 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times. And the levels are continuing to rise. The IPCC’s lowest estimate is that, during the 21st century, levels will increase to about 550 parts per million, roughly double pre-industrial levels. The high estimate is about 950 parts per million.
What’s really stunning is that even higher concentrations are possible over the next two centuries. If all the coal, oil, and natural gas that is recoverable with current technologies and at current prices were used, we would add five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as has been put there since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The world will get to this point if China, India, and other developing countries start driving cars like we in the US do and get to do what we in the US currently do. And why should they not be permitted to do so if we are doing it? The current world average is one metric ton of carbon emissions per person per year. The US average is over 5 metric tons per year (more than the weight of a very large SUV)—an amazing amount of stuff to be putting up into the air.
Carbon dioxide has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 100 years. That means that a century from now 10 of the 20 pounds that I release into the atmosphere today by using just one gallon of gasoline will still be there. The IPCC has shown that even if we stabilize emissions, temperatures will continue to increase for 2-3 centuries and sea level for 2-3 millennia. We are making long-term, disruptive commitments
The Impacts of Climate Change
The extra carbon dioxide and other climate altering gases we are putting into the atmosphere are changing the composition of plant species, since there are some plants that thrive with more carbon dioxide while others thrive with less. Many of the ones that thrive with higher concentrations are weeds and they are being favored in agriculture and natural ecosystems. We are therefore transforming the biosphere in unprecedented ways that don’t even have to do with changes in temperature or precipitation.
The heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases has already produced an average global temperature increase of about one degree Fahrenheit since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This will rise to 2-3 degrees even if we were to stop adding carbon dioxide today. The number of heat waves will increase. In the US, they are already 2-3 times more likely than 25 years ago. That leads to additional deaths as happened in Chicago, in the Indian subcontinent, and in Europe, where several thousand people died from heat stroke and related effects.
A changed average temperature impacts all the other parameters of climate—wind velocity, wind directions, precipitation patterns. Some places are getting wetter over the last 100 years, while others are becoming much drier. The Sahel region in Africa is getting 50 percent less rainfall than before 1970, and now alternates between longer periods of drought and sudden downpours, which cause erosion rather than promote the growth of grass and trees needed by pastoral people.
One of the things that could have the most destabilizing effects is drought in China. Chinese officials are always worried about food security, because whenever there’s been a famine in China, there’s been a revolution and decades or centuries of chaos. Communist Party leaders are going to do everything they can to make sure that there is no famine in China. They see it as a race between the stork and the plough so they imposed a one-child policy. They have to keep increasing productivity to supply the increasing number of people. If China experiences food disruption because of drought from climate change, it could create the ingredients for chaos and international conflict. On the other hand, floods have been the scourge of China’s river basins, and the recent record floods on the Yangtze River caused by deforestation and possibly tied to altered precipitation patterns displaced 200 million people and killed thousands.
China has had to import oil since 1993 and is looking to surrounding areas to potentially secure that oil. These areas in the South China Sea are also claimed by half a dozen other nations.
Because of projected shifts in climate zones, the bread-basket of China could become unproductive and won’t be able to grow the rice that is sustaining China. In the case of the US, the IPCC estimates that the climate of Boston will become the climate of Washington, DC by about 2050 and then the climate of Atlanta by 2100.
Over two-thirds of the sandy coastal shoreline of the US is eroding as sea levels rise. Lighthouses over 150 years old have already toppled into the oceans from storm surges or have had to be moved back, because sea levels have risen over the past century.
Sea level rise is destabilizing and will lead to mass migrations in places like Bangladesh. Thomas Homer-Dixon, who looks at the environmental causes of acute conflict, suggests that, as people become displaced when coastal regions are flooded, there will be instability and severe conflict because there will be few places for them to migrate to. People live where they do because those are the only places available to them.
The loss of forests—already happening, particularly in northern areas—will also disrupt people’s lives. Glaciers are not only retreating, but along the border between Russia and Georgia, one collapsed dramatically crushing a village that had been at the foot of it for hundreds of years. The death of coral reefs from heated oceans is undermining the food source and security of the people who live in those areas.
What happens if global warming causes the Gulf Stream to stop bringing warm water from America to Northern Europe? London is at the same latitude as Hudson Bay and, under those conditions, northern Europe may not remain a pleasant, politically stable region.
As climate zones shift, diseases shift. Already malaria is moving north; it’s moving up in altitude. Regions of east Africa that used to be free of malaria are now infested with it. West Nile virus does not sound like a disease that originated in New York and New England, yet that is where it first appeared in 1999.
Pests that damage crops and forests can also move into new locations. We’re about to lose all our hemlocks in the northeast from one imported pest. The oak blight along the west coast could take out trees from oaks to redwoods. These things are getting footholds partly because of our commerce, but also because we are creating climates that are more hospitable for them. That sounds like biological weapons of mass destruction to me, and the effects are pretty indiscriminate. It’s on a worldwide scale that we are changing the dynamics of disease.
Climate change isn’t a nuclear explosion, but the force of damage from storms is going up. In the 1950s, the average annual storm damage in the world was about $3 billion. In the 1990s, it was about $40 billion.
So, in conclusion, global warming can create massive destabilization and conflict, it can spread diseases, it is changing the basic chemical composition of the atmosphere, it damages agriculture and forests, it is destroying coastal regions and coral reefs and the species and people who depend on them, and it can destroy cities and urban areas. That certainly sounds like a definition of mass destruction to me.
But this is a weapon of mass destruction that will, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, come with a whimper and not a bang. It might not even get credit for the destruction that takes place. Yet it could cost more lives and do more damage to infrastructure and the natural world than the military weapons of mass destruction that we rightly fear.
William Moomaw is Professor of International Environmental Policy at Tufts University and has served as a convening lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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