Left tries to frighten people into 'climate change' bill

NY Times:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise at the National Defense University, an educational institute overseen by the military, last December explored the potential impact of a flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure.

“It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest. If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

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Since the temperatures have dropped over the last decade this is becoming a harder sale. There is also the fact that the prescription for dealing with "climate change" will lower everyone's standard of living and lead to a global recession which is just as likely to cause a conflict.

Most of the current famines in Africa are man made with the deliberate intent of starving enemies and their families. That has happened in both Somalia and Sudan. Further, evidence has shown that the Sahara is already getting greener because there is more moisture in the air.

I am not buying Sen. Kerry's scare mongering or his economics. If the world is getting warmer we will have to adapt and that will be much less expensive than his global thermostat which has too many countries with screed doors. The fear mongering will probably continue, but the so called consensus is falling apart.

Meanwhile, this groups from Congress makes a global warming tour of tourist "hot spots." Not much strife to see here.