The Pentagon casts this grim scenario in a study of global warming, a looming catastrophe that many governments, led by the US, are ignoring. Kept secret for four months, the report leaked to The Observer and Fortune in February. It castigates world leaders, including ironically George W. Bush, for dismissing global warming as a hoax.
The paper is significant for its conclusion that rising temperatures can wreak havoc on many lands earlier than expected. Worse, that floods, harsher winters, drought and famine will kill millions and force more to migrate. This, in turn, will provoke nuclear powers to invade less-stricken lands, or at least use the weapons to defend remaining waterways, food belts and oil fields. It could be a Third World War, with every country to itself – and against itself.
Climate change arising from excessive industrial pollution generally is believed to be gradual and span generations. But the study made for US security officials says the risks could hit sooner and harder than imagined. Financed by defense adviser Andrew Marshall, dubbed Yoda by Pentagon insiders who revere his vast experience, the paper suggests that the ocean-atmosphere system may be fast pushing the climate to a tipping point. The rise in global temperature could lurch from slow burn to meltdown in less than a decade. "It’s like a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over," Fortune reported. Sadly governments and peoples "spend little time worrying about it as we did about al-Qaeda before 9/11."
Though triggered by warming, climate change could lead to cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the US and Europe. Yet it simultaneously can trigger massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests into ashes. "Picture last fall’s California wildfires as a regular thing," said Fortune. "Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan and Russia. It’s easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change."
Climate researchers began sounding the alarm on global warming a decade ago. They noted that carbon dioxide, methane and fluorocarbons from industries, land, sea and air transport, and home and office machines like airconditioners punch huge holes in the ozone layer high above the earth. Short-wave solar radiation rushes in through the holes, heating up oceans and disrupting weather in all parts of the world. Problem is, scientists do not know how bad the greenhouse effect already has boiled the seas. Global Business Network’s Doug Randall, one of the Pentagon paper’s two authors, told The Observer it can possibly be too late to avert disaster. "We don’t know exactly where we are in the process," he said. "It could start tomorrow, yet we would not know for another five years."
With co-author Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Shell Group, Randall wrote that the earth already is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy will become increasingly harder to surmount, plunging the planet into climate wars. Climatic conditions 8,200 years ago brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of peoples. "This could soon be repeated," Randall and Schwartz warned.
The leak of the Pentagon study enlivened environmentalists. They believe that Bush would now take global warming seriously, since he listens intently to defense officials. Marshall, who commissioned it, was responsible for recent sweeping changes in US defense policy. The only other group Bush heeds is the small but powerful oil lobby from which he and his senior Cabinet come. Oil companies are largely blamed for global warming, but belittle its potential risks.
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