If the Joint Chiefs think 'climate change' is greatest threat they should all be fired

 Chris J. Krisinger:

Speaking to American troops at RAF Mildenhall, England, on his trip to Europe, President Biden recounted an exchange with the Joint Chiefs as vice president: "This is not a joke.  You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was?  Global warming."  Those comments were the latest in a Pentagon policy redux to return climate change to Obama-era status that it is an "urgent and growing threat to our national security."

This began only days after his inauguration when President Biden signed several executive orders again elevating climate change to a national priority.  The Pentagon soon followed suit, stating that it would begin incorporating climate risk analysis into modeling, simulation, wargaming, analysis, and the next National Defense Strategy.  "There is little about what the [Defense] Department does to defend the American people that is not affected by climate change," defense secretary Lloyd Austin declared.  "It is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such."

This shift reverses Trump administration policy that removed climate change from the list of global threats to the U.S.  Implications are that Biden administration security policy will give climate change status on par with more traditional and conventional threats like great power competition, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation while declaring that the danger it poses overshadows more pressing threats.

But do world events — present or past — support claims of climate change influencing the global security environment?   Does the still uncertain and questionable science of climate change meet the threshold to influence, even justify, Pentagon decision-making involving investments, acquisitions, policy, and infrastructure potentially costing billions of dollars?

Existing national security threats — e.g., great power competition, cyber-attacks, piracy, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial crises, dictatorships, nationalism, drug trafficking, revolutions, Iran, North Korea, etc. — will all continue to fester.  Yet none can be persuasively linked to climate change, even as a worsening effect.  Further, climate change does not appear to animate the agendas of U.S. antagonists like Putin, Xi, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Kim, Rouhani (now Raisi), Assad, al-Qaeda, cartels, Hezb'allah, Hamas, or Boko Haram.

ISIL, which once controlled large swaths of some of the planet's most inhospitable desert areas in Syria and Iraq, professed no regard for "climate change" in its worldview.  The current century's wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — have no compelling environmental or climatological links, nor have any U.S. military interventions in our post-1945 era.  Arguably, no war in human history, modern or otherwise, has a causal relationship with climate change, despite human history recording periods of the planet both warming and cooling.

The science behind climate change is also not settled, and any evidence of cause and effect on national security is even less certain.  Only a few years ago, well-known columnist George Will reminded us with his aptly titled commentary, "Apocalypse Fatigue," that it was only the mid-1970s when "a major cooling of the climate was widely considered inevitable."  Climatologists told us to "prepare for the next ice age."  Scientists were "almost unanimous" that cooling would "reduce agricultural productivity," and "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" would "stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery."  Were that era's White House and Pentagon remiss to ignore such forecasts in their decision-making by not "following the science" of their day?

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Predictions of climate doom and gloom have been serially wrong for over 50 years.  The poles are not ice-free and New York City is not underwater.  The climate may vary as it has done since the memory of man knoweth not.  Humans have had little impact on it outside of their homes.