http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9882Climate Change Alert
Patrick Doherty spent a decade in the field of international conflict resolution, working in the Middle East, Africa, Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus.
First Paul O’Neill, now Andrew Marshall. Marshall has just blown the lid off another Bush administration can of worms—namely, its unwillingness to acknowledge and address the massive threat posed by global climate change.
Marshall is the founding director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, a quiet but powerful think tank within the Pentagon. In 2001, Marshall was tapped by George W. Bush to lead the Pentagon’s military review that largely defined the scope of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “transformation” agenda. Marshall, whose ONA has served every president since Nixon, introduced the term "revolution in military affairs."
In an article published Jan. 26 in Fortune magazine, Marshall released the findings of an unclassified report—written by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network—entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security."
Global Warming Happens
Until now, the debate over climate change in the United States has focused on whether global warming exists and if so, whether it can be attributed to human activity. In their report, Schwartz and Randall close that debate and raise the stakes. They write that "the IPCC
documents the threat of gradual climate change," deftly allowing Marshall to implicitly acknowledge that the IPCC findings have sufficiently established what the report calls "the scientifically proven link between CO2 and climate change" as well as the international consensus around climate change itself. But, while fully recognizing the reality of global warming, the report argues that the gradualist view "may be a dangerous act of self-deception." The real threat to national security is from global warming triggering an "abrupt climate change event."
Abrupt climate change is an increasingly probable and, the authors show, a historically precedented event in which global atmospheric warming triggers a rapid modification in global oceanic patterns. The report focuses on the threat receiving the most concern from researchers, which occurs when atmospheric warming releases enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to shut down the "thermohaline conveyor"—currents including the Gulf Stream—that move warm water north from the tropics. That, in turn would send much of the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze, disrupting energy, agriculture and fresh water supplies around the world.
This is no abstract hypothetical scenario. The Fortune article cites a presentation made by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute director Robert Gagosian who, at last year's World Economic Forum at Davos, "urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades."
Thankfully, Marshall did just that. The ONA-commissioned report, using the well-established scenario-planning techniques developed at Shell's planning unit, generated a plausible future scenario in which the thermohaline conveyor collapses in 2010. What follows that oceanic shut-down sounds apocalyptic and yet the authors contend, is quite plausible.
...more..
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