Climate change is a new national security threat

The Guardian Observer reports that a secret Pentagon report tells Bush that climate change will destroy us. It’s scary stuff. This report suggests that within 20 years climate change will cause wars over water and energy shortages and mass migrations from places like Europe that will become less inhabitable. The head-in-the-sand, let’s dig up Alaska attitude will undoubtedly have to stop sometime. I didn’t expect that the harm would reach that point within the next twenty years.

Update: Boing Boing has some good coverage of this topic, including a link to the actual report at Greenpeace’s site. The short of it is that this was one scenario (described as not the most probably scenario) the Pentagon folks were exploring. Additionally, this is not new, as Fortune had an article about this a month ago. So, while climate change is an important topic to consider, discuss and probably take action on, it is not necessarily the imminent threat that the European press portrayed it to be.

I do still stand by my statement that we cannot ignore the effects of our greenhouse gas emissions forever.