The US military views climate change as an existential threat to human society and has already started implementing mitigation plans.
Climate scientists, environmentalists, and health experts have been loudly proclaiming the need for urgent action to prevent climate breakdown for years.
Now another organisation is ringing the alarm bells: the US military.
Although the Pentagon has been discrete about its analyses and plans for climate change, it has been implementing strategies for some years.
“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water,” the US Department of Defense told Congress in a 2015 memorandum.
“These impacts are already occurring and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”
In a recent book, “All Hell Breaking Loose”, professor emeritus Michael Klare outlines the Pentagon’s perspective on climate change.
“The generals’ view is the likelihood that climate change will cause grave harm to the homeland,” he writes.
Klare says the US military contemplates what may be called an “all hell breaking loose” scenario – “a situation in which key US allies are begging for American troop support to avert collapse while the homeland is reeling from several major climate disasters and vital military installations are incapacitated by storms or wildfires”.