Pentagon predicts climate change wars by 2020

February 23, 2004 Off By leigh

The Observer is running a story on a leaked report that has come from the Pentagon predicting that climate change will threaten security of the U.S. and other nations as natural disasters and loss of arable land threaten the economic stability of nations. It predicts that climate change will be a greater threat than terrorism in the coming years.


The Observer is running a story on a leaked report that has come from the Pentagon predicting that climate change will threaten security of the U.S. and other nations as natural disasters and loss of arable land threaten the economic stability of nations. It predicts that climate change will be a greater threat than terrorism in the coming years.

To knowledgeable observers, this would always be the case; compared to countries like Britain (Israeli insurgents, the IRA), France (Algerian insurgents), Spain (the Basque separatists), India (Kashmiri separatists), El Salvador (right wing paramilitary death squads), Nicaragua (the U.S. back Contras) and East Timor (Indonesia backed militia), terrorism has barely touched the U.S.A. The spectacle of 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing and other recent Al Qaida operations stand out more for their ability to capture media attention and world sympathy (validly) than the real number of lives lost or the generation of founded fear of real attack.

However the Pentagon report is notable in that it completely contradicts the Bush Whitehouse policy of repudiating warnings of climate change effects as an hoax. That the Bush administration buried this report for some four months indicates it’s priorities. Whether such dire warnings are indeed plausible is cause for further debate, but, as the Observer notes, the Pentagon is quite a conservative institution, although their prestige comes from the preservation of fear of threat to the U.S.