posted February 24, 2004 12:08 AM            

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

posted February 24, 2004 02:22 AM              

I started reading about this upon my happening across a site about "Peak Oil."

Scary stuff.

My sarcastic side says they will start worrying about it when it happens, given the penchant for American politics to ignore a situation until all angles of manipulation are neatly outlined. In other words, leave it for future generations...what matters now is the STOCK MARKET, geez, you silly hippies and your "the sky is falling chicken little" scenarios......

(you know I am just playacting on that, right?)

My hopeful, striving-at-optimism side says that maybe if enough people become educated on the very real potential of our destructive habits, like minded folks will enable a "cosmic shift of consciousness"
(imagine with me)
and we will develop new, innovative methods of cooperation to solve the issues we are faced with as a global community..

Most likely scenario? Necessities like energy from fossil fuels, water, etc and the need for such products to create food will be so precious and so limited that we possibly will find ourselves in a technological feudal system where only money talks, and the relative few have all the goods, and the rest of mankind suffers in abject poverty-only on a worldwide scale. And as history proves, if a people are oppressed long enough, and brutually enough, revolution will occur.

I prefer option number 2, please, Universal Deity. Super-size it too.

~awesome post~

posted February 25, 2004 10:00 PM              

THE PENTAGON SOUNDS THE ALARM ON GLOBAL WARMING; WHY ISN’T PRESIDENT BUSH
LISTENING?

By Arianna Huffington

If he’s smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been
handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush — and
cripple Karl Rove’s attempts to position his man as America’s go-to guy on
national security.

The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat
posed by global climate change — and the potentially cataclysmic
consequences of the Bush administration’s obstinately ignorant approach to
global warming.

And the thing that makes the report so frightening — and the prospective
bludgeon so crushing — is that it wasn’t authored by some crunchy granola
think tank or a band of tree-hugging EarthFirsters, but by the U.S.
Department of Defense.

That’s right, the Pentagon — Rummy’s playpen. In fact, the report, which
was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps
by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a
legendary DOD figure, nicknamed “Yoda” for his sagacity. As head of the
Pentagon’s secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered
national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon.

And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger
than even the scourge of international terrorism.

Dryly entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for
United States National Security,” the report reads like the plot summary
of the upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, “The Day After Tomorrow,” in
which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and
annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study,
the question is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It
could be, according to the report’s authors, as soon as the next three
years, with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between
2010 and 2020.

At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in
which mega-droughts devastate the world’s food supply, drinkable water
becomes a luxury worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced
to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival
become commonplace.

I believe that would qualify as a Red Alert in Tom Ridge’s color-coded
book.

But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address — or even
acknowledge — this looming peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the
administration continue to fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn,
routinely ignoring scientific evidence and international consensus, and
casting a questioning eye on the very idea, let alone the fact, of global
warming. It’s a stance that has warmed the hearts — globally, no doubt —
of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and energy industry, making
them feel very generous indeed.

As last week’s release of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent
scientists — including 20 Nobel laureates and former science advisers to
both Republican and Democratic administrations — makes clear, the Bush
administration has made an art out of ignoring science. Particularly when
it comes to the issue of global warming.

Who can forget the president’s famous CO2 flip-flop, or the way the White
House tried to force so many changes to a section of an EPA report dealing
with climate change that Christie Todd Whitman finally threw up her hands
and decided to eliminate the section on global warming altogether?

But blinding the voters with pseudo-science may no longer be an option now
that the Pentagon report threatens to put the issue front and center — and
reframe it as a key component of our national security debate.

This is particularly good news for John Kerry, should he prevail, given
his long history of leading the charge in the Senate to cut down on
greenhouse gases by raising fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks.
The president, of course, has done just the opposite, giving Kyoto the
kiss-off, and pushing through unconscionable loopholes that reward
gas-guzzling monster SUVs and allow carmakers to effectively reduce fuel
economy for millions of the vehicles they sell.

One of the defining traits of leadership is the ability to see not just
the crisis right in front of you, but the one lurking around the next
corner. Bush’s steadfast refusal to act upon the potential desolation that
awaits us if we do nothing to confront global warming makes him a major
national security liability.

Everyone in the Bush administration acted shocked and surprised when 9/11
happened — even though there had been red flags aplenty warning of
al-Qaida’s evil intentions. Well, let there be no surprise this time. We
have all been warned.

While the Pentagon is sounding the alarm on an environmental Armageddon,
the president is covering his eyes, crossing his fingers, and whistling
about the “national importance” of a constitutional amendment banning gay
marriage.

The Democratic nominee needs to remind the White House — and the American
people: It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

© 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

posted February 26, 2004 07:01 PM            

Alas I fear something more along the lines of option #3. Have you read Starhawk's novel, _The Fifth Sacred Thing_? It is a melding of visionary utopia novel with a terrible technological feudal system of sorts just like you described wherein the penalty for stealing water is death.
It is terrifying but ultimately a very hopeful inspiring read.

Carlo,
Hey thanks for the great article. I hope that this report is made known of far and wide and that if it does prove to be just the cudgel the Dems need to win, then they take that win and step out of their usual corporate pandering stance so very much like the Repubs and effect some REAL change in our relationship to the enviroment.

Pidaua,
I don't think evolution in the classic sense of the word will help out in this instance. It's just too rapid of a change. It's akin to the apocalyptic, dramatic changes that wiped out he dinosaurs.

Perhaps this is like the earth working up a really strong fever to destroy the virus that is infecting the whole system.
I'm not one of those enviromentalists that think the earth would be better off w/o humanity though.

I've seen first hand the most incredible acts of healing and potential for sustainability in human settlement that I believe that it's humanity's divinely appointed destiny to find it's point of harmony in the brilliant, perfectly designed system of life which extends to the whole planet being a life form in and of itself.

posted February 26, 2004 07:10 PM              

Have you read the prequel, "Walking to Mercury"?
She is very inspiring.
Now I have to go re-read them. Whenever I get disgusted with the world of current events, I need something to bolster my inner warrior to fight the good fight again.

posted February 26, 2004 08:30 PM            

Yes I've read every single one of Star's books. She is a really amazing author. If you haven't read it yet, I'd recommend _Truth or Dare_. It's not fiction.. it's more like a historical perspective on the nature of power and I really see it as something of a handbook for Fifth Sacred Thing. I don't know if you are into those kinds of books.. alot of people aren't but it's really an eye opener and it causes one to see just how embedded the authorive, patriarchal figure/mindset is in our society and within ourselves.

posted February 26, 2004 11:08 PM              

"Mother Earth" will take care of us the only way it knows how. God has planned it that way.

It will be man bowing to its benefactor.

And a political statement- Bush is a bought and paid for president. Lobbyists and big business are destroying this planet.

We will all pay, it has already begun-the decline of another great civilization.

posted February 27, 2004 10:12 AM              

I love Arianna and also Arundhati Roy. I tell girls that I am with that if Arundhati ever came for me, I'd be gone. I heard her speak at the church in NY where MLK spoke a year before he died. She is so inspiring, I want to get her new book. Any info on what she is up, please let me know :)

Heard the debate last night at UCLA. I will vote for Dennis in the primary, and Kerry/Edwards in the general election. Dennis said his first thing he would do in office is repealed NAFTA and the WTO, or US participation rather. Kerry said he would reverse the global gag order that Bush did on his first day in office. What a great way to give the finger to the religious right while doing something great and important. Have a nice weekend, ladies :)

posted February 28, 2004 06:28 PM              

ooh, the handmaiden's tale...like the stepford wives of old...and our country is becoming more and more like that...must we really reverse all of the enlightened advances we have made in the past decades? a plunge backward continues to haunt our political scenario, with voting machines etc. can we really expect anything but more usurpation by bush? what even happened to "never again?"

and carlo, on a more personal level, your drumming had a certain appeal to me...i have had a yearning for the "far away and long ago" and ancient drumbeats beckon to me, but i find my entire being in this life caught up in an inhibition of body, mind and soul that needs somehow to be freed up.
as my marchly nemesis approaches, i find myself more withdrawn and "uptight" than ever! i know my twelfth house is partly to blame, as i need a past-life regression and cannot afford it. edgar cayce said it would be helpful with my placements...you could check this out further under my post around the 2004 elections...my theory of the interconnectedness of everything is proven in how these posts seem to end up "wherever!"

posted March 01, 2004 11:35 AM            

For someone as intelligent as you, I'm surprised you buy into that piece of corporate propaganda.

So the Pentagon has gone leftist? Cause they think global warming is happening.

And what about these guys?

"Among prominent scientists who on Wednesday endorsed a letter and report critical of the Bush administration's use of science are:
-David Baltimore, winner of Nobel Prize for medicine, president of the California Institute of Technology.

-Lewis Branscomb, former director of the National Bureau of Standards under President Nixon, current professor of science and public policy at Harvard University.

-Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University population biologist.

-Gerald Fischbach, former director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, dean of Columbia University's faculty of medicine.

-Neal Lane, former science adviser to President Clinton, former director of the National Science Foundation, now an astronomy professor at Rice University in Houston.

-Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and former director of the Fermi National Lab.

-Jane Lubchenco, Oregon State University zoologist and former president of the AAAS.

-F. Sherwood Rowland, atmospheric scientist at the University of California-Irvine, past president of AAAS.

-Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, Nobel Prize winner for medicine, current CEO of the Memorial-Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

-E.O. Wilson, Harvard University ecologist."

(I suppose these guys are a bunch of liberals? )
The report they signed on to said it was the conservative administration's pandering to their campaign contributers (industry) that caused them to distort science.

"The report charges that administration officials have:

*Ordered massive changes to a section on global warming in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2003 Report on the Environment. Eventually, the entire section was dropped.

*Replaced a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet on proper condom use with a warning emphasizing condom failure rates.

*Ignored advice from top Department of Energy nuclear materials experts who cautioned that aluminum tubes being imported by Iraq weren't suitable for use to make nuclear weapons.

*Established political litmus tests for scientific advisory boards. In one case, public health experts were removed from a CDC lead paint advisory panel and replaced with researchers who had financial ties to the lead industry.

*Suppressed a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist's finding that potentially harmful bacteria float in the air surrounding large hog farms.

*Excluded scientists who've received federal grants from regulatory advisory panels while permitting the appointment of scientists from regulated industries. "

Yeah, the earth is cooling.. That's why an iceburg the size of New Jersey broke off of Antarctica not long ago, I suppose.

Randall, I know you don't want to debate this but I just can't let a comment like that go unresponded lest some impressionable soul come along and get the wrong idea.

Even if all the science in the world fails to make any sort of impact then perhaps you should visit Alaska. It's my home state and all anyone is talking about there the past few years is how much warmer it is getting year by year. People are starting to get freaked out. My father is a trucker who drives up to Point Barrow all the time and he was shocked to see polar bears walking down the highway almost a hundred miles south of the coast. In all his 20+ years trucking up there he has never witnessed this before.. It's because the pack ice hasn't frozen all the way up to shore this year and last, so the polar bears are unable to get to their traditional feeding grounds out on the frozen ocean. They are wandering inland searching for food. I fear for the survival of this magnificent species. The arctic eco system will be the first to bear the brunt of the destruction of global warming which has already begun.

My father is a staunch conservative as well but he can no longer deny what his own two eyes show him.

posted March 02, 2004 10:17 AM              

You might like to read this:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-12.htm

and stay plugged into this site:

http://www.commondreams.org/

it's the easiest way to basically counter any babble that drools out of the mouths of the dittoheads around here, since you can't actually use a staple gun to attach the articles to their foreheads

Love,

Carlo

posted March 02, 2004 10:26 AM            

quote:

---

it's the easiest way to basically counter any babble that drools out of the mouths of the dittoheads around here, since you can't actually use a staple gun to attach the articles to their foreheads

---

posted March 02, 2004 08:07 PM              

First off, I have noticed that anytime you contradict a Conservative, they respond as if simply by VOICING an opinion makes you the ******* idiot child of Fox Mulder and Hillary Clinton.

It works BOTH ways, my friends.

First, on John Stossel and his "Newspeak"... http://www.fair.org/extra/0303/stossel-treatment.html

This guy cherrypicks info. Scientists don't do that. They present facts, NOT opinions, and I hardly think the media, with its need to satisfy corporate advertising with ratings, even gives a damn about what is "truth" anymore. No one wants the truth anymore. We want to be told we can eat all the butter, bacon, and cheeseburgers we want, and LOSE weight-regardless if 70% of Americans are obese.
We want to be told our children are the best, the brightest, the most beautiful the world has ever known- regardless of the fact they need Ritalin to perform in school and still their attention span is too short to use full sentences in an email.

And yes, we want to be told that we can all live in an eternal orgy of energy consumption, we can all drive SUVs and pour motor oil down the stormgutters and we can produce 700 lbs of garbage per person, per month- and the party will never, ever, end, Amen and God Bless America.

What does it take to open people's eyes to the fact the public is manipulated by the institutions that follow the paradigm of POWER OVER (the Church, the State, the Media)as opposed to POWER FROM WITHIN?

I am reminded of when I lived in CO, and we were in the midst of a wretched 5 year drought. Watering bans were enforced, with fines imposed for violations.
One quote from a Denver resident.."I don't see why I should be fined. If I have the money to pay for the water I use, why can't I use as much as I want?"

This, coming from people who INSIST on growing Kentucky bluegrass lawns in a high desert environment. I hate to insult a person's intelligence- but........

"Although it is true that not all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." ---John Stuart Mill

~sigh~

posted March 03, 2004 02:41 AM              

I realize that no ones opinions are going to change, I just like to debate politics. I did try to keep the personal insults to a minimum (sorry, but thats one of my favorite quotes) Its not personal.

Whereas I firmly believe in the presenting of "both sides of the story" and that you feel obligated to present from your team since there are few conservatives at this site......riddle me this.......

In observing the pure theory of political structures, it is obvious that a system engaged full throttle liberal will potentially suffer anarchy, and thus destruction.

The same eventual conclusion for a system that only values conservative viewpoints is implosion- a collapse of rigid structure, due to a lack of ability to think beyond the status quo, to solve problems. A collapse due to the dead weight of outmoded thinking.

Either way-not cool, taken to extremes.
So neither side, can claim "mastery of truth." Its a balance, or should be.

Here comes the "BUT".........

As far as this topic is concerned, cons like to debunk it, based on the status quo- Nothings changing, its not going to matter, its TOO RADICAL OF A POSSIBILITY.
Or, "we will worry about it if it happens."

Liberal group-think is inherently the ability to reason beyond the status quo- beyond the driving need to MAINTAIN, but rather its power is in CHANGE. If presented with evidence of a potential crisis, the liberal standpoint wants to see change to prevent such a scenario. The conservatives will wait until it affects them directly.

(its so similar to the estential drives of a Cardinal sign versus a Fixed sign, IMO)

So, is it worth it to just wait it out, and suffer the consequences of maintaining the "norm", just for the sake of maintaining it, or are we obligated as a human race to face the challenge, and maintain a balance, instead?

These things keep me up at night.......