According to a senior United States Army officer who specialises in environmental security the consequences of uncontrolled global warming could resemble a 100-year war.
Brigadier General Chris King, chief academic officer for the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, has warned that failed states, extreme weather events and mass migration could be “debilitating” and represented real dangers to global stability in coming years.
“This is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years, that’s the scariest thing for us,” he told environmental news website RTCC.
“There is no exit strategy that is available for many of the problems.
“You can see in military history, when they don’t have fixed durations, that’s when you’re most likely to not win.”
He cited Afghanistan, Haiti, Chad, Somalia and Sudan as areas with ‘extreme’ levels of environmental risk, meaning they struggled to offer a sustainable environmental setting that provided for basic human needs.
These countries, already suffering from localised conflicts, famine and drought, could be placed under intense stress by the impacts of climate change.
Afghanistan’s average temperature could soar 4.0° Celsius by 2090 and precipitation rates fall by five to 20 per cent this century, while water levels could be affected by glacier melt in the Hindu Kush.
“Until you can secure an environment that can look after the population they’ve got, which is fast-growing still, how do you get back to a stable and sustainable condition that you can then build a social and political structure on?” Brigadier General King said.
A US military assessment on the threat level posed by climate change delivered to President Barack Obama two weeks ago said poverty, pollution and political instability were likely consequences of a warming world.
The analysis built on the findings of the United Nations IPCC, the UN’s climate science panel, which has said most scenarios “project increasing environmental degradation.”
Brigadier General King, who retired from active duty with 33 years’ experience in the Army, describes the IPCC’s research as “the best defence intelligence we’ve ever gotten.”
“We go out and spend a mass of money on intelligence, trying to figure out what’s out there that’s going to be a threat,” he said.
“In this case somebody did it for us, and did it quite well I believe. It’s as complete a data set and analysis of a strategic security threat that we will see.”
IPCC scientists will meet in Yokohama, Japan next week to release the second of three instalments reviewing climate change, focused on impacts.
Leaked drafts indicate it will say the signs of climate change are everywhere, from melting glaciers and sea ice to more frequent wild fires, extreme heat waves and damaged crops.
The report warns of ever more dangerous impacts without rapid action to curb carbon emissions, including extreme weather, sea level rise and species extinctions.
Yesterday one of the premier scientific establishments in the US, the American Association for the Advancement of Scientists (AAAS) also warned of the security implications of climate change in a study called What We Know.
The AAAS said unmitigated releases of greenhouse gas emissions could lead to “potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts”