Climate Change and Security
I have decided to speak to this issue in the broadest possible sense.Scientists (barring a tiny minority) are pretty certain that Anthropogenic Climate Change is happening. While many the carbon energy mafia intends to resist a shift away from using fossil fuels, we the people of Earth will eventually pay the price of this phenomenal stupidity.
Long before we drown in the rising waters from molten polar ice caps or burn up as global temperatures spike, a myriad variety of security threats will emerge.
A peculiar aspect of anthropogenic climate change is that it is not reversible on the scale we might think. It has taken us a hundred years to get here and even if we were to stop fossil fuel utilization today it would not mean that warming would stop [1]. Cutting fossil fuel use helps but not as much as one would think [2]. And the mere act of curtailing fossil fuel use is fraught with complications - there is no clarity on whether the debt created in the changeover is serviceable at all.
With that in the background, we need to accept that certain realities and restructure our national security frameworks to accommodate these realities.
The realities I refer to above are as follows
0) We may not be able to reduce emissions enough by 2030 to keep the global temperatures below 1.5C and the excursions from the mean temperature will likely grow in the foreseeable future.
1) Abrupt Climate Change may NOT be avoidable (this contrasts with the latest IPCC assessment that it is not presently considered a low likelihood event). This kind of event represents a catastrophic risk, no amount of resources set aside for mitigation will be enough. There is NO response modality that is sufficient. An Abrupt Climate Change situation will most likely be an extinction level event.
2) Climate Change driven dynamics will present itself in unpredictable ways. There is a relatively small fraction weather patterns where we have *some* predictive power. Where possible we may be able to leverage this into a real world prediction of where to deploy mitigation resources - but in all probability - the prediction will be crap. We will be hit by extreme climate events in places we are least prepared to cope with.
In the face of these realities there will be certain social and political consequences.
a) There has always been a class divide in human society - this will unfortunately hold true for climate information as well. A social ordering will develop based on the foreknowledge of imminent climate events. The "Haves" will possess the knowledge and be better positioned to handle the consequences than the "Have Nots" who will essentially pay for their ignorance with their lives.
b) Among the "Haves" there will always be too factions - the first that seeks to preserve the exclusivity of their club and the second that seeks to spread the knowledge and expand the club.
c) The "Have Nots" will also have two factions - one which accepts the massive reduction in their life expectancy and the second which does not and fights to establish a more equitable distribution of knowledge.
(No prizes for guessing which faction I belong to).
Having put all that out there - we have what it takes to flesh out emergent national security threats or perhaps I should call them what they are "Global Security Threats". Post globalization, national security seems like a poor framework to capture events that clearly span the planet. I mean even those anti-Globalization Nationalism movements are acting in concert and building a global alliance ... so ... yeah.
A quick list of the major global security threats in order of priority
1) A millenarist cult that seeks to precipitate a Climate apocalypse and ensure that only its "chosen ones" survive.
2) A cabal of "Haves" that obsesses about loss of primacy in global affairs and triggers obscure conflicts in the hope of keeping the "Have Nots" preoccupied.
3) A disorganized "Have Not" led "Resistance" which seeks to coerce the "Haves" into sharing information.
4) A pervasive apathy by the first faction of the "Have Nots" which makes meaningful resolution of climate mitigation issues impossible.
I hope to discuss each of these four threats in some detail in upcoming posts.
Apologies in advance for the delays and typos, it is a lot of thinking and it is difficult to get it all down in a concise text.
posted by maverick @ 7:39 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home