The warming warning

The Pentagon report about the expected impact of the climatic changes that will occur in the near future - as reported by the London-based Observer newspaper - is not based on any special discoveries or on new information. Its authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, are not scientists; they based their conclusions on forecast models that have been known for years. Nevertheless, two elements in the document could have the effect of changing the discourse about global warming. One is the identity of its sponsor; the second is the linkage it talks about between changes in climate and geopolitical stability.

The sponsor of the report is Andrew Marshall, a Pentagon adviser and one of the individuals who has exerted the greatest influence on Pentagon thinking for the past 30 years. The highest credibility can be attributed to Marshall's joining, at the age of 82, the chorus of those who have been warning against the effects of global warming. Marshall, with his distinct security orientation, is highly regarded in the field in which he has been engaged throughout his professional life: assessment of risks and translating the conclusions into national working plans. He is a professional who can in no way be considered left-leaning or to have any special fondness for environmental causes.

The mission Marshall gave the authors of the report was simple: Identify the geopolitical scenarios that are liable to unfold if the forecasts of global warming prove correct. Schwartz and Randall met the challenge and came up with an astonishing interconnection. A topic that had hitherto been considered by many as academic, theoretical, abstract and detached from real life was suddenly translated into concrete questions formulated in terms familiar to everyone: struggles of survival for food and water, war and peace, and a general threat to global stability.

If global warming continues at the present rate, it will generate four types of catastrophes: the flooding of land regions because of a rise in the level of the oceans as polar icebergs melt; salinization of fresh water in low-lying areas; crop failures due to a shortage of water stemming from decreased precipitation; and unanticipated impacts on the local level - a striking example is the increasing cold in Britain, attributed to the weakening of the Gulf Stream because of the warming of the northern Atlantic.

These geographic phenomena, the report says, will bring in their wake events of geopolitical significance. The flooding, the drought, the thirst and the hunger will turn tens of millions of people into desperate refugees who will search for water, food and subsistence in neighboring countries that are cooler and wetter or richer. The target countries will try to protect themselves against these invasions. They will revise their national security policy in order to achieve maximum defense of vital resources, develop new military capabilities, including nuclear weapons, and in a crunch will not hesitate to press the nuclear button. The world system as we know it today, which is coping mainly with crises caused by national and ideological movements, will vanish in an era of catastrophic wars of survival.

Global warming is caused by the emission of gases from vehicles and electric power stations. The gases accumulate in the atmosphere as a heat-impervious sheet that delays - exactly like a hothouse - the discharge of the heat from the earth into space. A cessation of this process requires a dramatic change in transportation and in the production and use of energy - a change that will adversely affect the vehicle-manufacturing, fuel and energy corporations that run our lives. They and the politicians who represent them are firmly blocking any attempt to bring about change - as seen dramatically in U.S. President George Bush's successful effort to quash the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

What the Pentagon report makes clear is that global warming is not some caprice of scientists and environmentalists. Without the proper treatment, it is liable to generate instability in comparison with which current terror threats will pale. Bush, who has succeeded in identifying himself with concern for security and international stability, but has vigorously denied the existence of global warming, is liable to be perceived - in the wake of the report - as having fallen asleep on his watch of world peace. Or worse: of deliberately sacrificing it for the sake of the interests of energy companies and carmakers.