216. U.S. MILITARY PLANS FOR GLOBAL WARMING APOCALYPSE

The Pentagon doesn't think Lovelock's global warming die-off scenario (see #215 below) is far-fetched. In fact, they've been planning for it for a while, as reported two years ago by Arianna Huffington:

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.Source

Here is the pdf of the report: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. More background on the report is available here.

Here's an eerie prediction from the report:

In 2007, a particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands making a few key coastal cities such as The Hague unlivable.

They just got the date and the place mixed up slightly. It actually happened in 2005, in New Orleans. Check the report out. It's a real mind-bender, especially if you've been thinking peak oil is the big threat.

Even before Katrina and Rita, the Bush administration was privately worried about accelerating global warming:

David Keith never expected to get a summons from the White House. But in September 2001, officials with the President’s Climate Change Technology Program invited him and more than two dozen other scientists to participate in a roundtable discussion called “Response Options to Rapid or Severe Climate Change.” While administration officials were insisting in public that there was no firm proof that the planet was warming, they were quietly exploring potential ways to turn down the heat.Source

Scary stuff, indeed, folks. But let's keep one thing solidly in mind: This stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with peak oil. Peak oil is just a distraction compared to drought and other deadly weather phenomena.

In upcoming posts, I will describe some techno-fixes for rapid global warming, should it occur. Lovelock says the earth is a living creature named Gaia. She's sick and breaking out in a fever. We may have to give her an aspirin.

-- by JD