Global Warming And National Security

This is one way to make global warming a prime program for funding–looks like an extension of the well used fear card.

Global warming is likely to increase illegal immigration, create humanitarian disasters and destabilize precarious governments and could add to terrorism, all of which could threaten U.S. national security, according to an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“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 for analysis, who testified before a joint House committee hearing Wednesday.

Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems like poverty, disease, migration, and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Fingar told the committee.

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,” he stated.

“The operative word there is ‘may,’ we don’t know,” Fingar said.

“Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror,” stated Adm. T. Joseph Lopez, who commanded U.S. and allied peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1996.

“Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies,” the previous report said. “The U.S. will be drawn more frequently into these situations,” stated the report, which drew on 11 retired generals and admirals.

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa said Congress’ call for the intelligence agencies’ report was “a dangerous diversion of intelligence assets.” He said the issue should be studied by climate scientists, not intelligence agencies.

Republicans on the committee used the hearing to argue for domestic oil drilling and nuclear power to reduce reliance on foreign energy.

Amazing how they trot out this after the calls for more offshore drilling.  I ask, if the proposal had not been made, would this report have been released?