by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Washington, D.C. – On October 29, 2009, a group of serving and retired military officers from around the globe called on all governments to “work for an ambitious and equitable international agreement” at the Copenhagen climate negotiations in December. Participants at the conference on “Climate Change and Security at Copenhagen” emphasized the critical importance of addressing climate change now in order to avoid exacerbating current security threats and creating new ones.
“To avoid conflicts from climate change-related impacts, we need to employ every tool and strategy available, and the military is a critical ally in this fight,” said Durwood Zaelke , President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development and speaker at the conference.
The officers, representing Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US , are part of an international initiative on Climate Change and the Military led by the Institute for Environmental Security (IES) in The Hague and 10 other think tanks from Asia, Europe and North America.
A key focus of the climate-security effort is the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, which was discussed at length in Brussels earlier this month at the officers’ first meeting. This 500,000 km2 of snow and ice supplies the dry season irrigation for more than a billion people. It is predicted to shrink to 100,000 km2 in 20 years, threatening climate chaos and conflict among dependent countries, including three with nuclear weapons.
Quoting from the military climate statement released at the conference, Air Marshal (ret) AK Singh of India, Chairman of the project’s Military Advisory Council, warned that “failure to recognise the conflict and instability implications of climate change, and to invest in a range of preventative and adaptive actions will be very costly in terms of destabilising nations, causing human suffering, retarding development and providing the required military response.” AK Singh also serves as Project Director, Climate Change & Security, Centre for Air Power Studies, New Delhi.
Food and water shortages due to climate change threaten to increase conflicts between nations. Inhospitable living conditions from sea level rise and other impacts will contribute to a growing problem of environmental refugees. With the world nearing the tipping points for abrupt climate changes, little time remains before military organizations will be faced with increased challenges.
“We need meaningful action in Copenhagen to address CO2, but CO2 is only half the climate problem,” added Zaelke. “We also need to take fast and aggressive action to reduce the other, non-CO2 half of warming. Reducing black carbon soot, tropospheric ozone, methane, and HFCs, as well as expanding biosequestration through biochar production, are strategies that can help delay abrupt climate change while we wait for reductions in CO2 to kick in.” Because these non-CO2 climate change agents are short-lived in the atmosphere compared with CO2, which can persist for up to 1,000 years, reducing them will produce significant benefits quickly.
While biosequestration of carbon is important and only the real safe way to go it is still questionable as to whether biochar is a answer. Trees and forests and scrub lands, on the other hand, are, and the fact that we have been destroying our forests wholesale ever since the onset of the Industrial Revolution (yes, i know it already started before that). It is this destruction of the tree canopy that has led us to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere much more than any emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, though it is obvious that the latter has not helped either.
A new paper published by Nobel Laureate Mario Molina in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences promotes these fast-action strategies as essential complements to CO2 reductions. HFCs are one of the major targets. These powerful greenhouse gases, widely using as coolants in air conditioning systems, can be up to 12,000 times more potent than CO2 and their emissions are growing rapidly. Molina and his co-authors recommend using the Montreal Protocol ozone treaty to phase down the HFCs, and report that this could produce mitigation of up to 100 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent or more by 2050 and up to a decade of delay in climate forcing. Every country of the world is Party to the Montreal Protocol and has the opportunity to express its support for an HFC phase-down next week at the treaty’s annual meeting in Egypt.
Climate change is more a threat to worldwide security and stability than any conflicts that may be ongoing in the world at present and more so, maybe, even than was the global threat of Nazi Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, against which the world arose, basically, as one.
The same attitude must now be taken as far as climate change is concerned and the world population, but especially those of us in the developed nations, must take up a war footing in this and an attitude of wartime austerity to curb our excess consumption.
© 2009
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