Chapter 2
Clim at e
Imper ativ es
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2.1 Global Climate Change
Rear Admiral David Titley
Today, I will drill down a little bit on some of the specifics
regarding why the Navy cares about climate change. As you will
see, it is more than humanitarian assistance and disaster relief
(HA/DR). While that certainly can be a component of it, I think
there are effects that can fundamentally impact both force structure and the ways in which we deploy and use our military forces.
To begin, I want to spend a few minutes on climate change.
As I go around the country, I find that there are still a fair number
of people who believe this is all some vast left-wing conspiracy,
that climate change is a hoax. I am not going to ask for a show of
hands or anything like that, but I hope to convince you that climate
is in fact changing and that, at the global level, it is actually pretty
simple to understand. When you start down-scaling to specific
regions and ask what it is going to be like, say, in Fairfax County in
2038, then I am far less confident.
Rear Admiral David Titley is the Oceanographer and Navigator of the
U.S. Navy. He received his B.S. in meteorology from Penn State and
then went on to earn an M.S. in meteorology and physical oceanography as well as a Ph.D. in meteorology at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, California. He was commissioned through the Naval
Reserve Officers Training Corps and has held a number of shipboard,
surface warfare, and meteorological and oceanography assignments,
including service as the commander of the Fleet Meteorological and
Oceanographic Center in Monterey. He also served as commander
of the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command and was the
first commanding officer of the Navy’s recently established Naval
Oceanography Operations Command. In addition to his duties as
oceanographer and navigator, Rear Admiral Titley serves as director of
the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change.
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But I can tell you that if the world continues to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which we are doing, the climate
will change, and it will probably change in some pretty significant
ways. Figure 1a shows the Earth’s global average temperature for
the years from 1980 to 2010. [1] Those of you who are interested
in more detail should refer to the references identified here. As you
can see, climate, like the weather, has variations—some years are
warmer than others. But if you look at the 25-year trend line, you
see that the trend is clearly up.
Some people will take a 3-year or a 5-year portion of the curve
and say, hey, guess what, it has not warmed in 5 or 10 years. For
those of you took a time-series class back in graduate school, you
will recall that you can get yourself in a lot of trouble with aliasing.
It is really easy to do for temperature data like this, either intentionally or otherwise. But be careful of aliasing, especially when you
talk about climate.
When thinking about climate, sometimes it is helpful to have
an analogy. One that I frequently use, since I am in the Navy, is
to ask people to recall a trip to the beach where you are playing
with your kids and building sand castles and watching the waves
come in and out. The individual waves are like the weather. On
top of that is the tide, which can be going up or down, but over a
much longer period of time. That is sort of the climate. The weather
changes on a rapid time scale, the climate on a slower one.
I have had a lot of folks tell me that it is really just about
the Sun. Some years you get a lot of sunspots, and some years
you get fewer. So, let’s look at sunspot data for the last 25 years
(Figure 1b). [2] If you compare that curve with the one for temperature, you do not see the same trends, they just do not line up. So,
it is probably something else. I want to emphasize again that these
are actual observations. They are not predictions from a computer
model.
Now let’s look at the Arctic, where we have had some pretty
dramatic changes. It was actually predicted by a lot of the models
and by the theory that the effects of climate change would be
amplified in the Arctic, and, indeed, we are seeing that. Figure 1c
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 1. Historical Data Relating to Climate Change
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shows the satellite data of the ice coming off of the Greenland ice
sheet. [3] Ice on the Greenland ice sheet is ice on land. When the
ice on the ocean melts, it does not impact sea-level rise because the
sea level has already changed to accommodate the ice. However,
when ice on land melts, it flows into the ocean, and sea level
increases as a result. The graph in Figure 1c starts in about 2000
and goes to about 2010. It shows not only what is coming out, but
also I think you can see that the rate at which it is coming down is,
in fact, increasing.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in
their last report, stated, with a fair number of caveats, that sealevel rise in the 21st century was probably going to be around 7/10th
of a meter, about 70 cm. I think a lot of the scientific community
now projects that the most likely sea-level rise for the 21st century
will be somewhere between 1 and 2 meters, or between 3 and
6.5–7 feet. To give you a basis for comparison, in the 20th century,
global sea-level rise was about 20 cm. The expected rise for the
21st century is something between 100 and 200 cm, or 5 to 10
times as much. Based on the latest observations, sea level is currently rising at somewhere between 3 and 3.5 mm per year. That
does not sound like much, and over 1 year, it is not.
But let’s return to the data. For the 20th century, the rate was
20 cm divided by a 100 years, or 2 mm per year. Current measurements of sea-level rise are already 50% higher than those experienced in the 20th century.
As a bottom line, I can tell you that the Chief of Naval
Operations (CNO) understands that the climate is changing and
that I understand that the climate is changing. At the macro level,
it is pretty simple to understand. There are certain gases that reradiate at infrared wavelengths, the so-called long-wave radiation.
They re-radiate heat back into the atmosphere. If we had no greenhouse gases, the average temperature at the Earth’s surface would
be –1°F. Fortunately for us, it is actually about 59° or 60°F, on average, thanks to greenhouse gases. So small amounts of greenhouse
gases—a little methane, a little CO2, some water vapor—make
a lot of difference. However, when you start adding billions and
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billions of tons of those gases to the atmosphere, which is what we
are doing, you might expect things to change.
I expect that my friends in Task Force Energy will cringe when
I talk about energy here, but we are in the process of digging up
the dinosaurs and putting all that carbon back into the atmosphere.
That has a big impact. One of the things I have learned from my
time with Task Force Climate Change is just how sensitive climate is
to really small changes. Again, for the engineers and scientists here,
you can almost think of climate as kind of like a normal mode, but
for any given mode, it does not take much to move it to another
mode. That is kind of where we are.
So what are we going to do about it? For one thing, the White
House has issued an Executive Order that addresses greenhouse
gas emissions. [4] Secretary Mabus talked about how the Navy
plans to move toward those goals. And, as we have heard, the
recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) addressed both climate change and energy security at some length. [5] Those of you
who have read the entire Maritime Strategy that Admiral Roughead
signed out in October 2007, more than 2 years before the latest
QDR, will recall that that strategy talked about climate change. [6]
I would argue that it has really stood the test of time quite well.
These have been our guiding documents, if you will.
To address the concerns identified in Figure 2, the CNO established Task Force Climate Change in mid-2009. Its establishment
was really driven by the CNO’s desire to understand what is going
on with the Arctic in the near term. If I had to frame CNO’s overarching question, it was: When are the conditions in the Arctic
going to change to the point where the United States Navy and the
surface Navy need to be involved? At a somewhat more detailed
level, he wanted to know (1) when will we need to have very
robust communications, (2) when will we need to start thinking
about infrastructure, and (3) when might the Navy be called on to
support the Coast Guard on defense security operations for civil
affairs, HA/DR, search and rescue, or potential assistance in oil
spill? I think everybody knows the Navy has worked in the Arctic
for many years. Our submarines have been in the Arctic when and
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where needed for over half a century and have done exceptionally
well there.
Figure 2. Navy Climate Change Concerns
If we look at our surface ships and ask how many U.S. Navy
combatant surface ships are ice-strengthened, we find that the
answer is zero! Now that is a pretty easy number to remember.
Obviously, we need to ask whether that is the right number. In
November 2009, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral
J. W. Greenert, signed out our new Arctic Roadmap, which calls
for the Navy to conduct a capability-based assessment to understand whether it is better to devote a dollar to ice strengthening
or to some other important need because, as I like to tell people,
although the Arctic is opening up, nobody is flying over the Navy
with C-17s and shoveling money out the back end for us to go
do this. [7] So everything that we might consider doing in the
Arctic will, rightfully, have to compete within all the other existing
roles and missions that the Navy has. We do not see any of those
going away.
Our Task Force on Climate Change started off from the word
“go” arm in arm with the Coast Guard and with the National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where
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Dr. Jane Lubchenco has taken the lead in trying to establish, certainly within NOAA, a climate services agency. As I said, we are
looking at climate change in general but really starting with the
Arctic and working with a lot of folks. Within the Navy, we are
working with Second Fleet, Third Fleet, and Pacific Fleet. We are
also working with the combatant commanders and with the Office
of the Secretary of Defense Policy, where Ms. Amanda Dory,
the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Strategy, provides
important leadership. We are also involved with the nations of the
Arctic Council. Tremendous work is being done in this country
today by many of our leading universities, including the University
of Alaska at Fairbanks and the University of Washington Applied
Physics Laboratory. Dr. Ralph Cicerone at the National Academy
of Sciences has been a tremendous supporter.
Now, I am going to drill down on some of the specifics of
climate change. While I do not profess to have all of the answers,
I would like to offer some thoughts to help you think through the
specifics of climate change and how they might affect force structure; or tactics, techniques, and procedures; or what DoD calls the
full range of DOTMLPF issues (Doctrine, Organization, Training,
Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, and Facilities). Since the Arctic
was our first focus, I will just spend just a short time on that, and
then I will move on to some of the others.
What are we trying to do in the Arctic? Our principal goal is to
make sure that the U.S. Navy in the 21st century is ready to answer
all bells. I can tell you three things about the Arctic, two that the
Arctic is, and one that the Arctic is not. The first thing I would say
is that, from a U.S. Navy perspective, the Arctic is a challenge and
not a crisis. In recent years, especially in 2007 and 2008, not quite
as much in 2009, a lot of media reports about the Arctic framed
the issues in a way that made the Arctic sound like the Wild West.
This was going to be the last great race for resources. When everybody converged at 90° North, we would all need to watch out. As
you may recall, the Russians got there first and, by planting their
flag on the North Pole, probably did us a big favor. They achieved
what countless think tanks and Federally Funded Research and
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Development Centers (FFRDCs) have been unable to do, and that
was to get our leaders to focus on the Arctic.
There is a great article in National Geographic about that
Russian expedition. It was kind of a tourist expedition. If you had
had enough rubles, you too could have been on one of their submersibles. They sent two submersibles down, and then had a
difficult time getting one of them back up through the ice. The
expedition had huge political and strategic implications, but that is
okay because it got people focused.
So what are we trying to do? In Navy parlance, we are getting
ready to answer all bells. We want a ready and capable Navy to
operate anywhere. What do we have to do? We have to understand what it is we are going to do before we start spending money
or before we even study how we are going to spend money.
Our new Arctic strategy is now in final staffing and should soon
be signed out. I will not go through the specifics, but I can tell you
in broad terms what the U.S. Navy is looking for is a safe, stable,
and secure Arctic. We need to make sure that we can train and
operate there. In May 2009, I told the CNO that, by 2035–2040,
the Arctic would probably have about 4 weeks of basically icefree conditions in the late summer/early fall. I said on a confidence
scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is perfect and 1 is nothing, I would consider that statement to be about a 2. Since then, I would keep that
forecast, except I would probably change the confidence interval
now to maybe a 3 or 4. There has been some recent research that
says that a few weeks of ice-free conditions could exist by the
2030s. That is why we look at this as a challenge and not a crisis.
While cruise ships, fishing vessels, and exploration ships are
moving around the edges of the Arctic, the big shipping industry
probably will not be there for another 30 to 40 years. Those guys
are looking for absolute, no-kidding, reliable, sea lines of communication. While it may save on distance traveled, it will not
save you a whole lot of time if you have to travel at 3 knots for a
considerable period behind an ice breaker. In addition to slowing
you down, it will cost you $30,000 to $50,000 a day. That is not
a great business model. There are also lots of secondary issues:
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insurance, charting, navigation search and rescue, environmental
concerns—what kind of fuel are you going to be allowed to burn.
So for all those reasons, we do not really see the big shippers en
mass coming up for quite a while.
When thinking about the Arctic, we need to consider that not
only is it an ocean, but in some ways it is also the world’s biggest
estuary. The opening of the estuary is the Bering Strait between
Russia and Alaska. At its closest point, it is only 4000 yards across.
Think about the traffic that potentially is going to pass through that
in 30 or 40 years. If the world is still hooked on hydrocarbons, you
could get the Bering Strait to have attributes of the Strait of Hormuz
and the Strait of Malacca simultaneously. So, this is a part of the
world that we will need to really understand.
What stops the Arctic from being the Wild West? As it turns
out, there is an internationally agreed governance regime for how
we work on the oceans. It is called the United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea. A hundred and sixty countries have ratified
the treaty. A handful of countries have not; among those are North
Korea, Iran, Syria, and the United States.
When the CNO provided his posture statement to the Congress
just a couple of weeks ago, he again went on record in favor of
the treaty. The last four of five CNOs have done so, as have the
Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce. In fact, much of
the entire executive branch has voiced support for the treaty. Even
the White House is aware of this. It is now up to the political process to figure out how we are going to get this done. When people
ask me why this is so important, I begin by telling them that, for
one thing, our maritime lawyers essentially wrote the treaty. While
we are currently abiding by it, we have not formally signed it. If
somebody wants to change it and they have ratified it, they are at
the table while we are not. That is one part. There is also something that the treaty, under Article 76, calls “extended continental
shelves.” For the United States, this amounts to an undersea area
about the size of California where we would have sovereign access
to minerals and resources. However, since we are not part of the
treaty, there is significant doubt as to whether our claims would be
taken seriously.
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The Navy’s currently partnering with NOAA to do hydrographic surveys in the Bering Strait. We are also pursuing partnership opportunities with the Air Force, the Department of
Commerce, NOAA, and the Department of Energy to look at the
next-generation forecasting system that goes from zero hours to
30 years—or what I call “0 to 30.” Our goal would be to develop
a new forecasting tool that would cover events of interest tactically
all the way to the strategic time where you are thinking about the
kind of 30-year ship-building plan that you need.
We also need to think about the kind of training program that
we will need. If you believe the Arctic is going to be opening up
in 25 or 30 years, the ladies and gentlemen who will lead the
Navy at that time have already been accessed. They are today’s
junior lieutenants and lieutenant junior grades. How do we prepare
those officers to lead in a seasonally ice-free and certainly ice-
diminished Arctic? The answer is that we are doing a lot of things.
As I mentioned there are three things about the Arctic. One,
it is a challenge, not a crisis, but we have the opportunity to get it
right, and if we wait, it will become a crisis. Two, it is an ocean.
We know how to govern an ocean. It is called the Law of the
Sea. Three, the Arctic should not be viewed as if it existed in a
vacuum. What happens in the Arctic will have repercussions in the
mid-latitudes and the tropics, and vice versa. That is true on the
science side as well as on the political side. Can we be certain that
a conflict involving the major powers in the Arctic would remain
there? I do not know. If there are heightened tensions in the Arctic,
would that be confined to something north of 66° North latitude?
We have done some wargames and I would say the answer is not
entirely clear that such conflicts would stay isolated.
Now let’s look at the link between climate and energy. One
of the benefits of reducing our energy vulnerability and getting off
carbon-based fuel is reduction in greenhouse gases. As you have
heard, the Navy is participating in that effort. It is true, of course,
that the Navy does not account for a very large share of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, even if the U.S. Navy goes to zero on
greenhouse gases, that only makes 5/100th of a degree difference
in the global temperature. My counter to that is, while there are
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
37
a lot of nonlinear effects in climate science, especially as you get
down to regional level, leadership is also nonlinear. A little bit of
leadership—such as that being shown by the Secretary—can make
a whole lot of difference.
Let’s return to sea-level rise and consider why the Navy should
care about that. An obvious answer is that our bases are invariably
at sea level. So that will be a big impact. Think, too, about places
like Diego Garcia, where the average elevation is a mere 4 feet.
What does 1–2 meters sea-level rise do to that? How will sea-level
rise affect, from a policy perspective, the disputed claims in the
South China Sea where several of the Paracel and Spratly Islands
currently stand just above sea level? Maritime lawyers will have a
field day sorting out the competing claims. Can you build a caisson around that little outcropping and keep building it up? Is that
still an island? Do you still have your exclusive economic zone?
I do not know the answers, but my guess is there are going to be
multiple views of how this goes, and it is probably something that
we should start thinking about.
Water and resource challenges could also be important. Let’s
take a look at the Southwest Monsoon, the seasonal weather effect
that delivers rain to places like Vietnam, China, and India. A significant shift in the prevailing pattern could have a huge impact on
agriculture in that area. The tremendous population that lives in
the area already imposes significant environmental stress. So how
does that play out? What happens if northeast Russia—Siberia—
becomes a better place to live? The demographics in Russia are not
very good. They are depopulating for a variety of reasons. They
also have a lot of people living to their south. How does that play
out? Those are just some of the potential effects of climate change
that the DoD, along with other agencies in our government, need
to understand.
Another potential wildcard is ocean acidification. It is a silent
cousin to global warming because almost half of the CO2 that goes
into the atmosphere does not stay there. It gets absorbed by the
ocean, and in the process turns the ocean slightly more acidic.
While it will not be like taking a bath in hydrochloric acid, it can
have adverse effects. The ecosystem in the ocean has basically
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been tuned for many hundreds of thousands of years to work at the
pre-existing pH level (a measure of acidity). In the last 100 years,
the amount of change has been greater than in the last several hundred thousand years. That change seems to be imposing significant
stresses on the ecosystem. Frankly, it is a wildcard. It is unknown as
to how the living ecosystem, all the way from the little tiny critters
up to the big, big fish, is going to adapt to that. If they adapt, that is
good. If they do not, we have to start asking ourselves, how do the
1 billion people who get their protein from the ocean today feed
themselves in the future?
While we can predict some of the effects of climate change,
we cannot predict all of them. Our climate forecasting models are
not good enough at the regional scales. You may have heard about
so-called down-scaling models. Basically, these involve running a
really big climate model, which has pretty course resolution, and
then putting in a finer-scale model at regional level. Be cautious
when you see such results. Why do I say that? This is exactly how, in
the 1970s and 1980s, the weather service and the Navy attempted
to do hurricane and typhoon forecasting. It was not that good,
honestly. We really got a whole lot better when the entire global
model was able to resolve those specific features. That happened
roughly 10 years ago. So just be careful when you see results that
come from models with down-scaling. I do not necessarily mean
that they are wrong, but I would treat them with less confidence.
One proposed mitigation that I have not put up here is something called geoengineering. It involves use of engineering processes as a technological “silver bullet” to either cool down the
planet or take the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Doing either could
entail a lot of risk. In fact, the real risk is that it may be doable, but
there is no international governance whatsoever. So my question
is what would we do if we woke up one day and we turned on
CNN and found out that another country had said that because the
Earth’s getting too warm, we have launched a dozen rockets with
sulfates? We put them a hundred thousand feet up in the atmosphere, and we would like the United States to participate with
us in 90 days when it is time to re-seed this. What would we do?
Unfortunately, I do not know the answer. It is more than a DoD
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
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question, it is a whole-of-government question. But it is something
that we need to (1) understand the impacts of geoengineering to
the point we can, and (2) start thinking about what would we do if
somebody else unilaterally did that.
If you think about how the Navy is responding to climate
change at large, CNO has chartered two task forces. I run Task
Force Climate Change and Rear Admiral Philip Cullom runs Task
Force Energy. We need to understand what is going on in time
scales important to the Navy. One of those is the 5- or 6-year
budget process by which the Department of Defense and the
Department of the Navy make decisions. Another is the annual
planning process used by those planning naval exercises. Another
is the 30-year lifetime of our ships and the 30-year career length of
our officers and sailors.
So those are the kinds of time frames for which we need to
understand what is going on. We need to figure out how to adapt.
We need to figure out how we are going to work in a changing
world of rising sea level and potentially significant ocean chemistry changes, including ocean acidification, while watching for
potential wildcards. Simultaneously, Task Force Energy is very concerned about energy efficiency and reducing our energy vulnerability, which, by the way, will reduce our carbon footprint.
That is one way in which the Department of Defense and the
Navy can help provide leadership to our country to start working down the global greenhouse gases and the carbon footprint,
because ultimately that is how we are going to do the best that we
can to stabilize the climate over the long term.
References
1. I. Allison, N. L. Bindoff, R. A. Bindschadler, P. M. Cox,
N. de Noblet, M. H. England, J. E. Francis, N., Gruber,
A. M. Haywood, D. J. Karoly, G. Kaser, C. Le Quéré,
T. M. Lenton, M. E. Mann, B. I. McNeil, A. J. Pitman, S. Rahmstorf,
E. Rignot, H. J. Schellnhuber, S. H. Schneider, S. C. Sherwood,
R. C. J. Somerville, K. Steffen, E. J. Steig, M. Visbeck, A. J. Weaver,
The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the World on the
Latest Climate Science, Sydney: The University of New South
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Wales Climate Change Research Centre, 2009, http://www.
copenhagendiagnosis.org/.
2. C. Fröhlich, J. Lean, “Solar radiative output and its variability:
evidence and mechanisms,” Astron. Astrophys. Rev. 12:273–320,
2004, doi: 10.1007/s00159-004-0024-1.
3. I. Velicogna, “Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE,” Geophys. Res.
Lett., 36:L19503, 2009, doi:10.1029/2009GL040222.
4. The President of the United States, “Federal Leadership in
Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance,” Executive
Order 13514, Federal Register 74(194), 8 Oct 2009.
5. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report,
Feb 2010, http://www.defense.gov/qdr/.
6. James T. Conway, Gary Roughead, Thad W. Allen, A Cooperative
Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, Oct 2007, http://www.navy.
mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf.
7. Task Force Climate Change/Oceanographer of the Navy,
U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap, Washington, DC: Department of the
Navy, Oct 2009, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/documents/
USN_artic_roadmap.pdf.
Q&
A
Session with
Rear Admir al Titley
the next-generation numerical prediction capabilQ: Regarding
ity that you are planning, could you tell us a little bit more
about the new capabilities that you have in mind?
Rear Admiral Titley: I sometimes tell people that what I am
trying to do is undo 60 years of collective bad behavior throughout the executive branch. It turns out that in the United States,
each agency has, for various reasons, been allowed to develop
its own set of weather models. And, like many things, these
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
41
numerical models get more and more complicated, and the
budgets for associated with providing this capability continues
to grow.
So, we have proposed that we put together the intellectual
capital of the Navy labs, the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, the NOAA labs, the Department of Energy labs, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the
National Science Foundation in order to build a first-rate forecasting system. If we pull these departments and agencies together
using a single vision, I think there are ways that the infrastructure
can develop a numerical forecasting system that is second to none.
Moreover, our goal should be to create a unified approach that
couples air, ocean, and ice forecasting in order to answer some of
these basic questions.
What we need to do is to gather our efforts, and so far, we
have a lot of support. Dr. Lubchenco at NOAA is on board with
this as is Dr. Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy
of Sciences. We also have the support of Dr. John Holdren, the
President’s Science Advisor.
This is not an efficiency initiative per se. This is really harnessing the intellectual capital of the United States, and I believe we
have more than any other country if we put our mind to it. That
model can support both military and civilian. On the military side,
I would have the DoD run the model inside the their information-assured network so as to allow us to use observations from
unmanned vehicles that may or may not be in the civilian network.
But as far as what that model is, the ones and zeroes of the
computer code, I think you can have the same model there. So
it is really trying to put all this together. I think it is pretty exciting. And this is one of the places—at least to me—where climate change has frankly provided the opportunity. Without
that, we would not have the senior leadership attention that we
have today.
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of the climate effects you have talked about, such as seaQ: Some
level rise, will impact modeling. Would it be advisable to set
up an international effort to look? We could spread our effort and cover
more of the world. Are there any steps to set up that sort of collaboration?
Rear Admiral Titley: I think there are. I have discussed such
issues with the U.K. Meteorological office. We have access to some
of the European data. In fact, the intent of the IPCC is exactly that.
It is the ability to take science that is being done around the world
and review it on a level playing field and put the appropriate pieces
together. So I believe that can be done. But I also think, at the end
of the day, that if we are going to be making decisions for national
security, I want the ability, at least within the U.S., to have the ability to come up with answers we need for our national defense.
seaports in the developing world, such as parts of Africa,
Q: Are
much more vulnerable in terms of their infrastructure and
the way in which they can adapt to climate change?
Rear Admiral Titley: I think that is going to be looked at. Where
you have large numbers of people living right on the coast, they are
probably quite vulnerable. The potential for climate migrants has
been mentioned as well; we heard a lot about that at Copenhagen,
and it is noted in the QDR. At last week’s Arctic conference in
Miami, the Canadian Inuits gave a presentation in which they basically said, and I paraphrase here, “hell no, we’re not going anywhere.” They are not interested in moving in response to climate
change. That is exactly the same reaction I heard from the citizens
of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Now if you are on an island and the island is covered with
water, you will have to leave. But I think we are probably going to
see more pressure for people to stay and adapt than to just pick up
and move. But we will see how that plays out.
the plot of ice mass loss that you showed [Figure 1c]
Q: AswasI recall,
based on data provided by NASA’s GRACE mission,
which will soon end and not be replaced in the near term. There is a lot
of the climate monitoring data that is coming from science missions that
are essentially one-of-a-kind-type missions. Do you see the United States
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
43
going to an operational climate monitoring system, and what role will
the Navy have in that?
Rear Admiral Titley: I think the Navy’s role is to strongly support NOAA for that. I have spoken to the administrator at some
length about the need for a national strategy for this. Many people here probably know NASA flies some incredible technologies,
some tremendous space vehicles, but by and large NASA is an
R&D organization. They will fly it once, then they are looking for a
mission-funded agency to pick it up. The Navy is picking up almost
a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of end posts that I now have to
find the money to fund, just for altimetry, which has some climate
uses for that, although the orbit I am looking at is more for day-today ocean forecasting.
Frankly, I think the country is going to have to come up with a
strategy. I think this can be done in cooperation with the European
space agency, the Japanese, perhaps some others. But there needs
to be, at the very least, a national, if not international, strategy so
we do not simply lurch from satellite to satellite and so that we can
have climate records.
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2.2 Roundtable 1: Climate Change
Moderator’s Summary
Dr. Marcus King
To begin, I want to briefly describe CNA’s involvement in climate change and how we got there. CNA’s climate change work
began in 2006 with the establishment of our Military Advisory
Board (MAB). At that time, the MAB consisted of 11 three- and
four-star generals and admirals who began to look at, and provide advice related to, issues at the intersection of climate change,
national security, and energy.
This group was one of the first to examine the risks of climate
change impacts using a national security framework. Their report,
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, began to
elevate the dialogue on climate security in the United States and
abroad. [1] It identified climate change as a threat multiplier. The
report found that, although climate change itself was rarely the only
cause of instability, it had potential to accelerate existing tensions.
Furthermore, the report found that climate change could
cause “multiple chronic destabilizing conditions to occur globally
at the same time and threaten many Asian, African, and Middle
East nations.” Last year, CNA’s work on climate change began to
expand. Our research staff began to look at climate impacts in
The moderator is Dr. Marcus King from the Center for Naval Analyses,
which is part of CNA. Marcus is a Research Analyst in the Environment
and Energy Team, where he focuses on the national security impacts
of climate change. Dr. King earned a B.S. in foreign service from
Georgetown University and an M.A. in law and diplomacy and Ph.D.
in international security studies and environmental policy from Tufts
University. Before joining CNA, Dr. King held positions at Georgetown
University, the Department of Energy, and DoD, where he was a
member of the U.S. delegation for negotiation of the Kyoto Climate
Protocol. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University
where he teaches courses on environmental security.
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Climate and Energy Proceedings 2010
other countries and the security implications for the United States. Recently, CNA has begun to examine energy security issues in support of the Quadrennial Defense Review as well as for the Navy
and Marine Corps.
The examination of potential security and economic impacts of
climate change and the multinational implications of these impacts
led the way to further examination of how to adapt and how to
build resilience to these changes. CNA’s latest work is focused on
just this. How will federal agencies, including the Navy, be able to
fulfill their roles and missions when the very nature of those missions may be changing due to the impacts of climate change?
In the sections that follow, the roundtable’s panelists will discuss
potential effects of global climate change, to include temperature
increases, sea-level rise, reduction in sea ice, and melting glaciers,
among others. These are physical effects of climate change. While
I expect that Dr. Gulledge will address the natural science and
associated uncertainty most directly, we are also concerned with
the second- and third-level effects of climate change.
Second-level effects may include climate changes impact on
social, health, or economic systems. We can characterize the
resulting impacts or disruptions of these systems on global or U.S.
security as third-level effects. I would ask that the panelists and
the audience keep this framework in mind as the panelists deliver
their remarks.
The first of today’s panelists is Dr. Jay Gulledge, a Senior
Scientist and Director for Science and Impacts at the Pew Center
on Global Climate Change. Our next speaker is Major General
Richard Engel, U.S. Air Force (Retired), who serves as Director of
the National Intelligence Council’s Climate Change and Stability
Program. The final panelist is Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko, the Director of
the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars.
ReferenceS
1. Military Advisory Board, National Security and the Threat of
Climate Change, Alexandria, Virginia: CNA, 2007, http://
securityandclimate.cna.org/report/.
47
2.3 Scientific Uncertainty
and Security Risks of
Climate Change
Dr. Jay Gulledge
Let me begin by saying that it is a pleasure to be here. I think
this is a really important audience and I am particularly gratified
to see so much attention on this topic coming from the Navy and
the extended community that is working with the Navy on climate
energy issues as well as the rest of the Department of Defense
(DoD) and its civilian leadership.
I want to talk about scientific uncertainty. I think that when
most people hear scientists talk about climate change or get a scientific overview, which this is not going to be, they do not get much
focus on uncertainty, but I think it is absolutely critical because
uncertainty is very tightly linked with risk. That is really what this
topic is all about. The security implications of climate change are
about risk and how we are going to manage that risk.
Dr. Jay Gulledge is a Senior Scientist and Director for Science and
Impacts at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. He is also a
non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security
(CNAS), an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming,
and a certified ecologist. His work informs environmental and national security policymakers, business leaders, the public, and the press
about science and the impacts of climate change. Dr. Gulledge earned
B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology from the University of Texas and a
Ph.D. in biological sciences from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Before joining Pew Center and CNAS, he served on the faculties of
Tulane University and the University of Louisville, where he developed
courses on global environmental change and ecology. His academic
research investigates how environmental change affects the cycling of
greenhouse gases between terrestrial ecosystems in the atmosphere.
He serves on the editorial board of the Ecological Society of America
and currently serves on the Executive Council of Global Environmental
Change Focus Group in the American Geophysical Union.
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Climate and Energy Proceedings 2010
Risk perception is the key to figuring out how we are going
to manage this type of risk. Climate change is very complex, nonlinear, long-term, intergenerational. It is about as difficult and
uncertain a problem as you can find, and it is loaded with risk.
So a risk-management framework is really the appropriate way of
approaching the problem of climate change.
Unfortunately, uncertainty seems to tempt people to ignore risk.
However, if you take a rational look at the uncertainties underlying
climate change, it actually should turn you toward paying more
attention to risk. I think this is also true of the scientific community, which, by and large, is not accustomed to thinking about risk.
Many of the methods of science cut against thinking about risk
because they tend to average over long periods of time and over
large areas of space. A lot of things that entail risk get averaged out
when scientists are working on climate.
For a topic like this, what we really need science to be focusing on, in addition to the basic process of improving understanding, is bringing out and exposing and analyzing the risks in climate
change. One reason that risk perception is difficult, and this goes
back to the averaging problem, is that it is hard to grasp the risk
when there is a heavy focus on averages and changes in averages
as opposed to changes in climate extremes, because much of the
risk is loaded into the extremes. We know this from our past experience. You do not have to have climate change to know that it is
the extremes that cause damage.
If we have an idealized distribution of a climate event—intensity of rainfall or distribution of temperatures, for example—we
know that it is the extreme events, the one in 40 years, one in
50 years events—that cause the most damage: the Dust Bowl type of events; once in a century, perhaps. But with climate change, this
distribution is going to move. By focusing on the middle, the center
line, we miss the fact that a one in 40 years event actually now
becomes a one in 6 years event. It is the same intensity of event.
But now instead of happening once in every one or two generations, it happens several times in a generation. But not only that,
our new one in 6 years event is more damaging than the old one
in 40 years event. This is the type of focus that we need to bring
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
49
to the scientific assessment of climate change in order to better
understand the risks, but this is just one aspect of it.
I want to provide a quick case study of how risk perception
has played a role in the way scientists think of the risks of climate
change. Ten years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) developed this little device here to help policymakers think about what might constitute dangerous interference with
the climate system (Figure 1).
Figure 1. IPCC Five “Reasons for Concern”
Developed to Characterize Risk1
They came up with five categories of climate impacts or risks
that they thought might be of interest to the policymakers. These
included risk to unique and threatened systems like the Great
Dark is more dangerous; light is less so. Included in the IPCC Third Assessment
Report (TAR) in 2001 but not in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in
2007. [1, 2] Updated after AR4 by Smith et al. in 2009. [3]
1
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Barrier Reef or the city of New Orleans as well as risks of extreme
weather events. They also identified distribution of impacts as
a factor. Is it going to hurt poor countries more than rich countries, poor people within a country? Yet another was distribution
through space and time. You could even think of it across generations. Another was aggregate impact; what is the total number of
people exposed to water stress or exposed to damages? And then
risk of large-scale discontinuities like a massive sea-level rise or
shutdown of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation.
The dark color shown on the vertical axis reflects warming
beyond the year 1990 temperature. Lighter shading indicates some
risk, while darker implies significant risk. This is just a qualitative
assessment by a panel of experts as to how much warming constitutes risk for these categories. This was done about 10 years ago
based on the information available for the IPCC TAR.
Figure 2 shows a recent update after about 10 more years of
information, where we had much more climate data analyzed. We
had events like Hurricane Katrina. We had a very deadly heat wave
in Europe in 2004 that killed tens of thousands of people in rich
countries. Based on a decade of additional information, the same
group of experts redrew the chart like so. And, of course, what you
see immediately is that the colors come down farther on the chart
saying that risks kick in at lower temperatures than these experts
thought before. Now, this is just based on their change of perception, based on the information that became available. How we
look at the type of information that is available is really key to this
perception.
Now, I am going to go quickly through the kinds of things that
we really have a good handle on in climate science as a foundation for saying we know we have risk and we have got to manage
this problem. In 2007 (in the AR4), the IPCC concluded that the
warming of the climate system is unequivocal. The evidence is
very strong. We have thermometer measurements over 150 years.
We have a synchronous retreat of mountain glaciers around the
world. We have decline of ice and snow pack all over the world.
We have acceleration of global sea-level rise. None of those things
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
51
Figure 2. Proposed AR4 “Reasons for Concern” [3]
can happen without a net increase in the temperature of the Earth’s
surface.
The IPCC also concluded that it is very likely, which they define
as greater than a 90% chance, that since the mid-20th century, that
warming of the climate system is mostly caused by accumulation
of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We also have
good confidence about a number of other things. Changes are
already underway. The impacts are occurring. A report of the U.S.
Global Change Research Program from last summer said that that
is true in the United States. The temperature change of the 21st
century is very likely to be larger than what we have seen in the
20th century.
After a degree or two of warming globally, the net effects are
likely to be negative around the world, even if there are some benefits. So it is possible that adaptive capacity could be overwhelmed
by unmitigated warming. Both developed and developing countries are vulnerable. That is a relatively recent finding. We had
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this ongoing assumption that rich countries were really not very
vulnerable.
But that is a lot of information. It does tell us that we have this
risk and it needs to be managed. But it does not really tell us the
specifics of what that means. What does it entail to manage these
risks? There are a lot of uncertainties that make this ambiguous.
How much the climate will warm for a given amount of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere is still uncertain. I will talk more about
that. We do not know how much greenhouse gases will be emitted in the future. That also applies to other human activities that
change the climate—the timing and magnitude of future change.
Even if we knew the quantity of greenhouse gases we would emit
in the future, the specifics of where, when, and how the climate
will change are very uncertain, including the regional details.
We also do not have a handle on the potential amplifying
effects or positive feedbacks such as thawing of the frozen soils of
the Arctic that might release a lot of methane into the atmosphere
and cause additional warming. And then there are tipping points
and thresholds and irreversibility of certain types of changes that
we cannot model or predict. So we have a lot of uncertainty that
is risk-intensive.
I will give you an example. One of the fundamental key uncertainties about climate change is the climate sensitivity, which climate scientists define as the equilibrium warming of the Earth’s
surface for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Right now, we
are on pace for a doubling at about the middle of this century.
Figure 3 shows several probability distributions for the climate sensitivity. The climate sensitivity is shown on the horizontal axis, and
the probability appears on the vertical axis. You can see that they
are all shaped similarly. They have this long tail off to the right that
means it is difficult to limit the upper bound for warming.
The best estimate is around 3°C. That is sort of the weighted
mean of these distributions. But there is a 5–15% chance that it
could be as high as 5°C. We have what statisticians and economists call a “fat tail.” As a result, there is an uncomfortable chance
that the temperature change will be greater than 10°C. It is very
hard to cut that tail off.
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
53
Figure 3. Risks Associated with Doubled CO2
So just to give you a sense of what that means, whether the
sensitivity is 3°C, 5°C, or 10°C, let’s look at Figure 3, which was
adapted from the IPCC AR4. It shows several different categories
of impact. You can see, for example, that mountain glaciers start to
disappear with 1°C of warming. If this climate sensitivity, the best
estimate, is correct, the first darker vertical line shows where that
would be for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are really
far into this risk chart. We are getting significantly into this bottom
risk of the rising risk of dangerous positive feedbacks and these
singularities, these global singularities, like massive sea-level rise.
But there is a 10% chance that the climate sensitivity is out as
far as the line labeled ~10% and a 2–3% chance that it could be
beyond that, where we have not even assessed what the impacts
might look like out beyond that amount of warming. So another
aspect of this problem is that currently our models and our judgments of climate change are underestimating current observed
change. It is only recently that we have the data necessary to make
this comparison. That is the comparison of projections to observe
change.
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Next, let’s look at sea-level rise (Figure 4). The squiggly line
is based on our satellite observations available since 1993. The
shaded plume is the range of IPCC model projections. The dashed
line is the average of those models. As you can see, the models are
not keeping pace. The actual change is almost three-fold the rate
of the average of the models.
Figure 4. Sea-Level Rise
There are other things that are being underestimated right now.
The polar ice sheets, in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, are now
losing mass. In 2001, the IPCC said that this would not happen
during the 21st century. It is already happening. The reason is we
have observations now that we did not have for the 2001 TAR. The
small glaciers and ice caps are also losing ice faster than projected.
Global precipitation was projected to increase, but it is increasing
more rapidly. While climate models had forecast that the tropics
would widen, they are widening faster than projected.
So what we have is a situation where our view of uncertainty is
being modified by the observations. Ideally, we would try to set up
our analysis so that we have an equal chance of either overestimating or underestimating change. This is a normal distribution. And I
would point out that the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
55
mandated that the military, the DoD, and the Quadrennial Defense
Review (QDR) use the mid-projection of the IPCC AR4 as a basis
for risk assessment. [4, 5]
What we are actually seeing now is a distribution of the probability of severity along the lines of climate change that might look
more like Figure 5. It is similar to that climate sensitivity distribution. But it could also just be related to how much change we will
have in sea level, for example, and other aspects of climate. So the
risks are loaded to the more severe side. It is more likely that we are
underestimating change than overestimating change at this point.
Let’s look at another quick case study. The IPCC projected a
range of sea-level rise for the 21st century between 20 and 80 cm.
The Defense Authorization Act then would require the QDR to
examine the mid-range of this, so perhaps about half a meter would
be a reasonable assessment. But since the IPCC AR4 was released,
several other studies have been released that have projected sealevel rise between half a meter and 2 meters. The full uncertainty
range is actually like this. And, in fact, we are missing by this criterion, we are missing most of the risk when we do our assessment.
So it is important to consider this full range of uncertainty.
Figure 5. Global Sea-Level Rise Projected to 2100 [6–8]
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Just to give you some sense of what it means to have sea-level
rise in this range, take a look at Figure 6. The upper image shows
Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, an important rice-exporting region that
feeds part of Asia. The highlighted land area would be inundated
Figure 6. Sea-Level Rise Scenarios
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
57
by 1 meter of sea-level rise. The lower image shows similar data
for Africa’s Niger Delta. It has oil fields, croplands, and, as I
understand it, a rebel movement. This is the type of region where
we might be worried about instability.
These are the great river deltas of the world. They are heavily
populated. They produce a huge proportion of global crops. And
they are all vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges. Storm
surges are going to become a problem even earlier than inundation
is going to become a problem. And this is just to show that sealevel rise is not the only problem. It is a good case study because
its features are well studied. But yet, it is very uncertain.
Water resources are going to be a huge problem. Figure 7 shows
a mid-21st century projection for changes in surface water availability. The smaller circles indicate increasingly less water. The largest
circle is more water. I think you can see that there are regions here
that would be of concern in the littorals for social stability. I would
point out that Southern Europe and Western United States are also
in pretty bad shape here. And so we have vulnerability exposure in
both rich countries and the developing world.
Figure 7. Projection for Changes in Surface Water Availability
To bring this full circle to CNA’s Military Advisory Board, they
said that “the U.S. and Europe may experience mounting pressure
to accept large numbers of immigrant and refugee populations as
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Climate and Energy Proceedings 2010
drought increases and food production declines in Latin America
and Africa.” [9] Well, I just want to end on that note as a way of
saying this overview was not really an assessment of the risk of the
vulnerabilities and the security implications. But I think this illustrates the problem.
References
1. IPCC, Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001, IPCC,
2001.
2. IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, IPCC,
2007.
3. Joel B. Smith, Stephen H. Schneider, Michael Oppenheimer,
Gary W. Yohee, William Hare, Michael D. Mastrandrea, Anand
Patwardhan, Ian Burton, Jan Corfee-Morlot, Chris H. D. Magadza,
Hans-Martin Füssel, A. Barrie Pittock, Atiq Rahman, Avelino
Suarez, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, “Assessing dangerous climate
change through an update of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) “reasons for concern”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
USA 106(11):4133–4137, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812355106.
4. U.S. Congress, House, H.R. 1585: National Defense Authorization
Act for Fiscal Year 2008, 110th Congress, 2007–2008, http://
www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1585.
5. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report,
Feb 2010, http://www.defense.gov/qdr/.
6. Stefan Rahmstorf, “A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting
Future Sea-Level Rise,” Science 315(5810)368–370, 2007, doi:
10.1126/science.1135456.
7. Martin Vermeer, Stefan Rahmstorf, “Global sea level linked to
global temperature,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106(51):21527–
21532, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0907765106.
8. W. T. Pfeffer, J. T. Harper, S. O’Neel, “Kinematic Constraints on
Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise,” Science
321(5894)1340–1343, 2008, doi: 10.1126/science.1159099.
9. The CNA Corporation, National Security and the Threat of
Climate Change, Alexandria, Virginia: CNA, 2007, http://
securityandclimate.cna.org/report/.
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2.4 The Impact of Climate Change
on National Security
Major General Richard Engel
It is a pleasure to be here and talk to you about our assessment
of climate change and national security. I will also provide some
insights from the research that was done following our assessment.
Our effort began in November 2006 as part of a periodic
review that the intelligence community does to look at all of the
topics that are within the National Intelligence Priority Framework.
At that time, we had a topic that was called environment and natural resources. During one of our periodic reviews, it was decided
that the intelligence community needed to start looking at climate
change as a national security issue.
We made a decision to do what we would call a second-tier
level of report on this. But as we got into it, we discovered that
CNA had done their report at the same time that Congress became
very interested in the topic. As a result, we decided to elevate
our assessment and develop a National Intelligence Assessment or
what we call an NIA. In our hierarchy, an NIA is equivalent to a
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which is the highest level of
document that the intelligence community produces.
Major General Richard Engel, U.S. Air Force (Retired), serves as
Director of the National Intelligence Council’s Climate Change and
Stability Program. He graduated from Texas A&M University with
a B.S. in mechanical engineering and then went on to earn an M.S.
in industrial systems management engineering from Arizona State
University and a master’s of arts and security studies from the Naval
War College. Prior to his current position at the National Intelligence
Council, Major General Engel served as Deputy National Intelligence
Officer for Science and Technology.
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One of the first questions that we had to deal with was to
determine why would climate change be a national security issue.
To do this, we put together a set of criteria, based upon the elements of U.S. national power, which we could use to make those
judgments. Our criteria went something like this. We said that if
climate change could cause a noticeable, even if temporary, degradation in one of the elements of national power—be it military,
economic, geopolitical, or the social cohesion of the United States
itself—it would degrade our national security.
We felt that this could occur if climate change directly impacted
the U.S. homeland or if it impacted a major economic or military
partner in such a way that their ability to contribute or to partner
with the United States was degraded, and therefore our security
was degraded. We also thought it possible that a combination of
significant climate events that occurred globally might consume
U.S. resources to the extent that our security was degraded. So
those were the criteria we used.
In conducting the study, we used a three-step process. The
first step was to really understand the climate science. The intelligence community does not have expertise in climate science. We
count on other experts like Dr. Gulledge to tell us what is really
going to happen in the future. So we asked a group of experts from
the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
in partnership with the University of Maryland through the Joint
Global Change Research Institute to develop a series of scene
setters that explain how the climate was going to change.
Our second step was to look at how climate change could
affect human beings. To do that, we provided the picture of the
future climate to a group of cultural anthropologists, sociologists,
economists, and political scientists with expertise in the Earth’s
major regions and asked them, if your part of the world saw this
kind of a climate, how would the people react? So they took us to
the next level, which was the human impact.
Our third and final step was to look at how those impacts would
affect U.S. national security interests. For this particular assessment,
we only looked out to 2030. One of the most important factors
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
61
behind that decision was the fact that, as Dr. Gulledge mentioned,
as you go farther out in time, some of those distributions get wider.
So, we picked a nearer in period where we would not really have
to look at the broader set of possible outcomes.
What did we draw in the way of conclusions from our effort?
Overall, we judged that climate change would have wide-ranging
implications for the United States over the next 20 years. Climate
change is likely to aggravate existing problems such as poverty tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak
political institutions that threaten state stability.
We did not see how climate change alone could cause or trigger state failure in any state before 2030. But it could potentially
contribute to intrastate conflict and perhaps, in some cases, to
interstate conflict. We judged that such disputes would most likely
occur over water resources.
Our assessment of the United States to 2030 was that the United
States was better equipped to deal with climate change than many
parts of the world. We might even enjoy a slight near-term benefit
owing to increases in agricultural productivity. However, the United
States has a great deal of very valuable infrastructure that is at considerable risk of extreme weather events. Damage or loss of that
infrastructure could have significant economic impact. Protecting
that infrastructure and making it resilient will be expensive.
We also thought that water would become a more important
issue in several regions of the world, which turned out to be a
mixed story. It provides an opportunity for states to assess their
future water needs relative to the supply provided by their water
basins and then take aggressive steps to mitigate any challenges.
This also provides an opportunity for the United States because we
have a lot of technology that could be of value if we engaged early
and helped them manage their water challenges.
Along these lines, we observed that low-emission nuclear
power would probably be attractive as an alternative to fossil fuel
energy in mitigating the impacts of CO2 and other greenhouse
gases. What that would mean is more nuclear power stations, more
nuclear scientists, and more nuclear material. The result of which
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would probably be an increase in the complexity for the security
community in terms of counterproliferation and counterterrorism
issues.
We did observe, and this was probably one of the most significant takeaways for this audience, that the extreme weather events
associated with climate change would cause more of what we designated “911 calls” where the Department of Defense would be
called upon to provide relief assistance around the world. The U.S.
Navy and Marine Corps could expect to be asked to answer to lot
of those calls. Providing such capability could, however, impose
a strain on the readiness posture of those forces and decrease the
strategic depth for combat operations.
Overall, as we looked at the NIA, we saw several paths by
which climate change could manifest itself as a security issue. One
was it would change water availability in some parts of the world,
which would force people to move.
Second, it could affect agricultural productivity by changing
water supplies, rain patterns, and temperature. Such changes could
also cause people to move. Human migrations in and of themselves are not inherently destabilizing. Stability will depend on
where the people attempt to move to and the willingness of the
receiving population to accept them.
Third, extreme weather events could damage valuable infrastructure. If you look at those three paths, the first two more typically would occur in the developing world. The third would be
more likely to occur in the developed world like the United States.
Since we completed the NIA, we have come to the conclusion
that there really is a fourth consideration that should be added to
our list. Changes in disease patterns could occur globally because
the climate changes. The changes of disease patterns could affect
human beings, they could affect the livestock that human beings
count on for food, or they could affect plants. So those are the four
ways that climate change could impact our national security.
When we finished the NIA, we decided to look at six countries in greater detail: Russia, China, India, Southeast Asia, North
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
63
Africa, and Mexico and the Caribbean. We also elected to look at
the Arctic. We made that choice because the Arctic is going to be
one of the first areas that will be significantly affected by climate
change.
We put together what we called a geopolitical Arctic game
and invited participants from 10 different nations to come together
in London. We asked them, if the Arctic does open up, what will
that mean to your individual Arctic states? How might you work
together to mitigate adverse effects? What we observed from that
was that the Arctic states are certainly aware that the Arctic may
open up. They will all have their own national interests that they
will pursue.
They prefer, as a general rule, the Arctic Council or the
International Maritime Organization as the preferred venue to discuss Arctic issues. Implicit in that is that they were not excited
about using other institutions to do that. As a group, they collectively recognized that before the Arctic really becomes open for
commercial activity, there needs to be better Arctic situational
awareness, including understanding of ice sheets and ice-sheet
movements, weather, shipping, and traffic.
Finally, the group also concluded one of the principle challenges to opening the Arctic is the absence of infrastructure among
the Arctic coastal states. That manifests itself as a limitation in terms
of search-and-rescue capability. There will have to be investments
in search-and-rescue capability to make it credible for shipping to
occur. The overall takeaway from the Arctic game probably was
that the Arctic is unlikely to open to commercial shipping as fast
as some have predicted. Commercial and economic interests are
likely to slow it up a little bit.
A concise overview of our study is provided in Dr. Fingar’s testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and
Global Warming. [1] Additional details regarding of our follow-on
research can be found by Googling “National Intelligence Council
Climate Change to 2030,” and further information is available on
the National Intelligence Council website. [2]
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References
1. National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security
Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030, Statement for
the Record of Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy Director of National
Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence
Council before the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, House Select Committee on Energy Independence
and Global Warming, 25 June 2008.
2. National Intelligence Council, “The Impact of Climate Change
to 2030,” http://www.dni.gov/nic/special_climate2030.html
(accessed 26 Aug 2010).
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2.5 The Connection Between
Climate Change and
National Security
Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko
I would like to cover four topics that relate to the connection
between climate change and national security. My thoughts come
from the perspective of someone who is sitting at the Woodrow
Wilson Center­—a non-partisan, non-advocacy organization that is
often trying to bring together communities that do not have a lot
of experience talking with one another. They speak different languages, use different tools, and have different objectives. Hopefully,
there are a few lessons that we can draw from that.
The first topic deals with frames, messengers, and mindsets and
how this community is equipped to address those issues. Second,
I would like to lend my support to the views you have heard this
morning in terms of characterizing threats and the real concerns
that are there. In particular, I would like to reinforce the complexity and uncertainty message that Dr. Jay Gulledge put forward. I
do so in part to remind us that this set of topics is occurring in a
political context and that we would be well advised to avoid some
of the pitfalls that have become apparent during past discussions
Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko is the Director of the Environmental Change
and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from
Duke University and a doctorate in government and politics from the
University of Maryland. For the past 18 years, he has facilitated dialogue
among policymakers, practitioners, journalists, and scholars, grappling
with the complex links among environment, population, development,
and security. He is a member of the United Nations Environmental
Programs Expert Advisory Group on Environment Conflict and Peace
Building. Prior to joining the Woodrow Wilson Center, Dr. Dabelko
held a position with the Council on Foreign Relations and served as a
lecturer at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
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of this topic. We want to be able to focus on the analysis rather
than on some of the arm-waving that we see in the advocacy
community.
My third topic gets at what I think are future concerns about
indirect causes of conflict as we try to address climate change with
a variety of different means. Although we have heard some of that
this morning, I think it is a topic that we have yet to fully explore. It
is just beginning to play out. In some ways, I will present a deductive set of arguments, albeit ones that I think we need to be aware
of as we move into that discussion. Finally, I will end on a positive
note with a few comments about opportunity as well as threat and
the ways that the Navy and its partners can respond to those.
So let’s begin by addressing frames, messengers, and mindsets.
As I mentioned, the Woodrow Wilson Center frequently asks very
different communities to come together to talk. Accomplishing that
for just the climate and environment communities turns out to be a
fairly difficult task. Then, when we extend it to those involved with
conflict, peace, and security, it becomes even more complicated.
To get the process started, we have to abandon our stereotypes of
what we mean by environment or what we mean by security if we
are engaging folks from the climate environment community. It is
more than a kid trying to hug a redwood tree.
In short, we need to focus on the analysis rather than the politics. As we have seen, these issues are now front and center in
terms of their geopolitical context, their economic context, and
their security context. As we go forward and engage our colleagues,
we have to put it in those terms. We need to focus on the message,
not on the messenger. One of the factors that has inhibited discussion on these issues in the past is that the argument is often about
who is making the case rather than the case that is being made. I
offer this as advice as you go forward and engage other colleagues
who may have different views on these topics.
In order to bring the proper attention to these issues from a
national security perspective, it is not a requirement that we engage
in the debates about cap and trade or carbon tax or the things that
are done on Pennsylvania Avenue. As we have seen, there is an
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
67
awful lot that we need to pay attention to that does not go into the
political realm.
In terms of mindsets, I would like to echo Dr. Gulledge’s recommendation that we focus on uncertainty. We need to examine these issues from a risk perspective as we develop and assess
potential responses. In this way, I think the mindset that the security
community brings and the tools that the security community has
available leave it well positioned in terms of planning for the worst.
We cannot afford to ignore events that have low or unknown probabilities when they have high negative outcomes. Unfortunately,
that view is not necessarily shared by all players in this case. But
it is something the security community, along with its gaming scenarios and simulation tools, really brings to the table.
As General Sullivan of CNA’s Military Advisory Board reminded
us, we cannot let the lack of complete information keep us from
making important decisions. [1] If we do, bad things are certain to
happen. The notion that we must have scientific certainty before
we can take action is misguided. Certainty is just not going to
come; its absence, however, should not be considered an excuse
for inaction.
Let’s move on to my second topic, which looks at the notion of
threat complexity. In doing so, I hope to avoid the oversimplification and the backlash that has occurred in the past when this topic
has been addressed. In the early 1990s, we tended to focus our
attention on environmental change and conflict. Climate was not
the focus of the discussion then. The notion was that environmental
change was long-term and incremental. We tended not to worry so
much about climate in the context of precipitating conflict.
Since the mid-1990s, we have begun to view environmental
change as a potential threat multiplier or accelerant of conflict,
especially in regions of high instability, such as West Africa. And so
while there was a lot of substance in the analysis, it ended up being
framed by overclaims and overstatements and political oversell. As
a result, we saw a pullback on those issues in the late 1990s and
the early 2000s in terms of understanding its importance. I think
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the discussion that we are having today might have occurred earlier
had that not been the case.
To avoid such outcomes, we need to avoid oversimplifying and
instead maintain the notion of uncertainty and complexity and seek
to understand the issues from a risk-analysis perspective. There are
plenty of things to be concerned about without having to know all
the answers about exactly what is going to happen.
I think that Admiral Titley’s characterization of the Arctic as a
challenge rather than a crisis provides an excellent example of this
approach. Regarding water issues, I fully agree with Major General
Engel that this is an absolutely critical point of concern. At the
same time, we need to remind people that, historically, we have
not seen countries fight over water.
That is not to say that there has not been a lot of violence
associated with water disputes. It is just been at the subnational
level rather than between countries. It is less organized than we
might think or be typically accustomed to in tracking conflict. That
fact provides some challenges but also some opportunities. Sharing
water resources is something that countries and basins do cooperate on. But it takes a lot of work. And we have generally neglected
those institutions that are critical to doing it.
So it is again a complex set of issues. It does not just lend
itself to the waterworks frame, as politicians and journalists love to
frame this issue going forward. But, of course, the bottom line is
that the future may not look like the past. So countries in some of
these basins, particularly in a warmer world where we are losing
glaciers, may start engaging in some of these activities. Fortunately,
we have some basic at-risk analysis to build on.
My point is that we should strive to avoid oversimplifying
such issues. We should seek to be more precise, employ far fewer
bumper stickers, and recognize that there are tremendous challenges. As a final example, let’s look at population migration. We
need to recognize that population migration need not always be
a bad thing. In some cases, the movement of people has actually
diffused conflict.
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
69
It really matters how it is done. People can be driven to move
by a complex mix of motivations; they can be pushed by environmental or political factors, or pulled by economic ones. The challenge is to avoid creating some new category of “climate refugees”
that pushes all the hot buttons on the migration side and ignores
the fact that people move for lots of reasons. At the same time, we
need to put forward migration as a critical issue. At the end of the
day, I am making the case for embracing complexity and embracing uncertainty. There are very real threats and challenges there.
But we do not want to set ourselves back unintentionally by overstating the facts regarding any of these issues.
My third topic examines some additional conflict considerations. We talked about what our fears are in terms of environmental change and what impacts that might have, for example, on
water availability or on population migrations because of changes
in water availability.
But I would suggest that we have a whole other category that
we need to look at in terms of what needs to be done if we are
going to get serious about addressing climate change. And that is
an area that we have spent precious little time trying to understand.
We need to go into it with our eyes open and to try to take some
steps to minimize the political and economic disputes associated
with shifting to alternative energy sources. And here I am thinking
the most obvious way to get off fossil fuels is to increase reliance
on nuclear power.
This morning, we heard the Secretary of the Navy talk about
first-, second-, and third-generation biofuels. Let’s look in more
detail at one of these: palm oil. The European Union has said that,
by 2020, they are going to have 10% of their transportation sector
fueled by renewables. And palm oil is going to be a big part of that.
Based on that declaration, the price of palm oil doubled, accelerating deforestation on the other side of the Earth, in Indonesia where
it was already a problem. The resulting social conflict was entirely
unanticipated by those who had proposed increased use of palm
oil. Now, people are working harder to recognize such unintended
effects and try to manage them. At the same time, it continues to
go on.
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At the end of the day, how does it come back around to us?
Well, a lot of these unanticipated effects are happening in the
neighborhood of the Straits of Malacca, a sea passage that is critical from both geostrategic and trade perspectives. It turns out that
some of the social conflicts that are being accelerated by manifestations of climate change lie very close to critical trade routes. So,
it is through that lens that we need to understand it.
As another example, let is look at the construction of hydroelectric dams. The World Commission on Dams said 40 to 80 million people were displaced in the second half of the 20th century
because of large dam projects. [2] This did not occur as the result
of armed conflict but rather because of economic development.
And it is characteristic of the ways in which efforts to address climate change can have unintended consequences.
As yet another example, consider the strategic minerals that
might be important in a green economy. If we are moving to battery technology, one answer would be lithium. As it turns out,
Bolivia sits on 50% of the known quantities of lithium. They are
now talking about setting up a cartel with some of the other countries that have large deposits. I am not saying it is going to happen.
But our experience with petroleum should impress upon us the
need to ask questions about resource dynamics.
Then there is the subject of geoengineering. I would second the
notion that we have thought very little about this topic. It holds big
potential for challenges in both the political and security realms.
Admiral Titley asked what we would do if a country unilaterally
decided to start putting particulates up into the atmosphere. The
barriers to entry in this field are so low that all it takes is a couple of eccentric billionaires who think this is a good idea.
What would happen if several billionaires decided they were
going to solve the Earth’s climate problem and sailed their yachts
out into the open sea and started launching particulates into the
atmosphere? It is not for me a stretch to suggest that the Navy is
going to be asked to monitor and potentially interdict these kinds of
activities because there is such a low threshold for entry. This kind
of thing that is not a direct climate impact, but it is the product of
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
71
our trying to get serious about climate change. And it shows that
it may only take a few folks, rather than a whole country, to pose
some very real challenges.
To try to end on a positive note, I will emphasize an opportunity. In recent years, we have seen a small area of research aimed
at asking whether we can take advantage of environmental interdependencies as well as the need to cooperate across borders
and between groups to build on those interdependencies to try
to develop patterns of cooperation, trust, peace, and confidence
building. As a result, we are starting to understand, for example,
the strategic communication and reputational benefits that come
from responding to humanitarian crises. While those sometimes
come at a high cost, there are multiple other reasons for doing it
or not doing it.
The military, I would argue, has been very good historically at
being proactive in building on this notion of shared environmental threat and shared environmental interdependency. When first
established, the Arctic Military Environment Cooperation Program
included only the Norwegians and the Soviets. Later, the Americans
joined, followed by the British. This group helped resolve some of
the radioactive contamination issues that arose when the Russians
decommissioned their nuclear submarines. It provided a mechanism that the U.S. government and military could use to address
an important environmental concern in the face of the unsettled
political situation coming out of the Cold War.
When Marine General Anthony Zinni headed the U.S. Central
Command, he used this military-to-military approach to address
a number of important issues, including natural disaster preparedness. He conducted joint exercises with the Central Asian
Republics and in the Middle East. I would argue that we could do
this in terms of climate, both mitigation and adaptation. We could
use it as a means to achieve some larger military-to-military objectives that, in many ways, are on the prevention side rather than on
the response side.
Going forward, some of us have suggested, for example, that we
use the set of climate change issues to facilitate military-to-military
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interactions with China. By focusing on issues where we have
common interests, such as natural disaster preparedness, we can
build relationships that will be beneficial for topics where there
is contention. Both countries are concerned about the climate,
concerned about environmental change. Focusing on issues of
common interest becomes an avenue, a tool, for building militaryto-military relationships.
I would further suggest that we continue our discussions with
groups like NATO that are also going to be concerned about the
humanitarian disaster response. By broadening the discussion to
include them, we can address our environmental and climate
objectives as well as some of our national security objectives. We
might also hope to address the issue of burden-sharing, although
that may be too much to ask.
So, in conclusion, I offer my apologies if my presentation
reminded you of a tennis match or an economist flipping between
“on one hand” and “on the other hand.” I do hope, however, that
I have demonstrated that although we need to be quite concerned
about climate change and its potential effects on national security, we need to accept and embrace the topics’ inherent complexities and avoid some of the mistakes we have made in the past
when dealing with these issues. Because they are so important,
we do not need to succumb to the bumper-sticker approach or
engage those who do. We should stick to the very focused and
cool-headed analysis of how these issues really pose fundamental
challenges for us.
References
1. Military Advisory Board, National Security and the Threat of
Climate Change, Alexandria, Virginia: CNA, 2007, http://
securityandclimate.cna.org/report/.
2. World Commission on Dams, Dams and Development: A
New Framework for Decision-Making, Nov 2000, http://www.
dams.org/.
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
Q&
A
73
Session with Panelists
might the QDR discussion have changed if a more
Q: How
realistic climate change forecast had been used?
Dr. Jay Gulledge : That is a good question. I was not engaged
with the QDR discussion per se, but I do want to say that I think
the QDR process was very good and strong. I also think that the
people who conducted the QDR, some of whom I know, were not
as naïve as I might have suggested. They understand that there is
a range of risk, of uncertainty, and were not fooled by that. But I
do not have the specifics of the QDR in mind that I can specifically comment on. However, I think that the general principle is
that there is a wide range of uncertainty. Scientists by and large
have not been good at communicating that full range of uncertainty. This is largely because, while they are very cognizant of
uncertainty, they are not particularly concerned with it. They are
really concerned in their practice with central questions. Central
questions of science are not the ones that are necessarily the most
informative about risk. So the point that I want to make is that there
needs to be an increased effort in the scientific community to circumscribe the risks in terms of the scientific uncertainty and then
to work together with the assessment community and social sciences to really flesh out what those risks entail.
M ajor General Richard Engel: Like Jay, I think the people who
worked the QDR did a very good job. It is the first time they really
looked at this topic in many years. You will be proud to know that
it was principally a Navy commander and Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who did most of the staff work on this. Interestingly
enough, one of the challenges the QDR always faces is the timeline. The QDR is designed to help shape a Department of Defense
planning process that really is only about 5 years or so in length.
Many of the things that we typically talk about in the climate
environment are 20, 30, 40, 50 years in length. So it is hard, no
matter what curve you use, to really get that longer timeline into
the discussion. I think that is symptomatic of a broader challenge
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regarding how strategic thinking is done inside the U.S. government at large. To some extent, it is understandable since we have
a full plate of near-term issues that our leadership deals with. As a
result, it is often hard to engage people on longer-term issues.
The Department of Defense, interestingly enough, probably
does better than almost any other part of the government because
of the acquisition cycle, since they are buying weapon systems
like aircraft carriers and bombers that will stick around for 40 or
50 years. So the department is sensitized to these longer looks. But
that is very rare inside the federal government.
Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko : I think that the requirement to use
that medium IPCC projection is illustrative of the challenge that
we have where the politics unfortunately gets in there. Because
just like Rich said, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) used
that for their assessment, and it was in the legislation; it is what
IPCC is supposed to be there for, right? It is a kind of consensus
conservative all can agree on. And so, therefore, if you are trying
to get legislation passed or you are trying to have an NIC all-of-
government assessment based on something that everyone can
agree to on the science to try to take that scientific discussion out,
that political scientific discussion out. Then it makes sense. The
problem is it means that we miss some of the less likely, but more
severe, events—those that occur in the so-called “tails” of the
probability distributions. There is also the time delay problem: to
be published in 2007, the research had to done in 2004, published
in 2005, evaluated in 2006, and written up and published by the
IPCC in 2007.
the NIA projected changes out to 2030, the comQ: Although
batant commanders and the warfighter are really interested
in things that might occur today or tomorrow. Does the NIC or someone
else in the intelligence community have the capability to address what is
happening today?
M ajor General Richard Engel: Yes, there are activities within
the intelligence community that look at closer-in activities from
a warning point of view. The one that I think is probably most
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
75
closely tied to weather is the Famine Early Warning System, or
FEWS NET, which is a partnership of several components of the
U.S. government.
The purpose of this program is to look at 6- to 9-month projections of future weather and from these make famine predictions.
Right now, it is focused primarily on East Africa, although there
are plans to expand the program. But that is illustrative of the type
of things that the intelligence community does to provide warning
to the combatant commanders. Other than that, it is having good
weather predictions to let you know where the hurricane is going
to hit and what the damage is going to be.
does the NIC see as future critical issues in the area of
Q: What
climate change that they may pursue?
M ajor General Richard Engel: This year, the NIC is examining
water basins around the globe to identify those that may potentially
be stressed all the way out to 2040 or 2050. In the following year,
we are going to look at food from a very long-term perspective,
out to the 2050 time frame. That assessment will try to account for
a number of important factors, one of which will be climate and
what it does to water. That is obviously a big part of it. Another
contributing factor that we want to look at is the effect of increasing
wealth. As large portions of the world’s population grow in wealth,
their diet changes, and they seek to get more protein. The resulting
changes in land use associated with getting that protein may push
us against some limits.
On the other hand, and this is a huge wildcard in trying to look
out 50 years for food, we have to be cognizant of the potential for
agricultural revolutions. We have been blessed by some phenomenal agricultural revolutions in our lifetimes in terms of the productivity of grains and other crops. It would be foolish to think that we
will not see some additional significant changes in the next 40-plus
years. But that is very hard for us to factor in.
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the very real potential of land being inundated by seaQ: With
level rise and the continuing global population increases, has
there been any discussion of managing population growth as an element
of adapting to and mitigating the effects of, climate change?
M ajor General Richard Engel: The NIC has not written about
population growth. The observation that we have made, and I think
we made it in NIC 2020 [1] and then repeated it in NIC 2025 [2],
is that demographic patterns certainly see the population of the
world growing. Much of that growth is expected to be concentrated in very large cities. Many of the mega-cities are located in
delta areas that are vulnerable, probably not so much to sea-level
rise in the near term, but to extreme weather events. Such events
would include rain-induced flooding or, in the worst case, tropical storms or hurricanes hitting these mega-cities. The problem is
compounded in that these cities are often unaware that they have
lost their ability to respond to such calamities. Since population
builds slowly, the loss of resilience gradually creeps up on you.
They can still cope day-to-day, but when a massive storm comes
in, it really wipes it all out. So we have warned about that phenomenon; that is as far as the national intelligence business has gone
Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko : I think the migration question really
animates a lot of interest, not only in this country but in Europe
as well. There is tremendous interest in the scenarios of North
Africa and Sub-Saharan African and South Asian migration flowing
into the European Union with its relatively porous southern border. Politically, this has led to the emergence of xenophobic anti-
immigrant parties and, in the cases of the Paris suburbs and
Holland, to violence between ethnic groups.
It is not that that violence has a climate change root at present,
but it could in the future if the population flows are as dramatic as
some would suggest. However, there is research to suggest that they
may not be as dramatic as some have predicted. At the high end,
there is concern about social cohesion within the European Union.
Do they continue to have free movement within the Union? They
are struggling to develop institutions to address such concerns.
Chapter 2 Climate Imperatives
77
There is also a big gap between the migration community
and the environmental community, in part because of some really
basic errors that the environmental folks have made. Their use of
the word “refugee” to describe people who are moving away from
adverse climate effects is one example. The word refugee implies
that you cross boundaries and you get specific legal status, which
no economic or environmental migrant will get.
Still, migration, even if it is subnational or south-to-south, is
likely to prove quite important and quite challenging in a security
context, particularly when coupled with some of the other population dynamics that we continue to see. Yet, it is not inevitable. Contrast what is happening now in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Bangladesh is serious about the need to reduce its population growth rate, to flatten the curve. Pakistan has yet to do so.
Countries that we are going to be concerned about have multiple
stresses where the population variable shows up in the near term
as well as in the longer term.
Q: Can you say more about the possibility of an abrupt climate change scenario? What are the new studies since the
third and fourth IPCC assessment report saying about this possibility?
Dr. Jay Gulledge : You can identify perhaps a dozen types of
large-scale abrupt change. One of the two that are most frequently
discussed is collapse of a major ice sheet—Greenland most
likely—concomitant with perhaps a 2-meter rise in sea level in a
century. The other one is the shutdown of the North Atlantic ocean
conveyor that transports heat from the subtropics to Northern and
Western Europe. Either one of these events would have major
global consequences. The sea-level rise is obvious.
The Atlantic conveyor, if it shuts down, would actually cool
parts of Europe. But it warms the rest of the Earth because of the
way it changes heat distribution in the ocean and atmosphere. So
it would add to global warming while at the same time probably reducing crop productivity in Europe. Since the IPCC report,
there have been no major developments in understanding either
effect. The reason is because they are based on non-linear processes. For example, there is a recess in the ocean overturning.
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As it approaches the point where the overturning might collapse,
it is a very non-linear change. A small error in a model will get
that completely wrong. There is a big difference among different
models.
Collapse of an ice sheet is also a non-linear process. An ice
sheet builds very gradually as snow is laid down year by year.
But disintegration involves the appearance of cracks and fissures
and water gushing down through them and lubricating the base
of the ice sheet and making it slide faster, a very non-linear effect.
Unfortunately, we do not know how to model that either. So that
was the state of the science in the IPCC report and was in fact
the basis for a kerfuffle around how the IPCC managed its projections of sea-level rise. In that instance, the IPCC decided that they
could not include the potentially important effects of dynamic icesheet processes because the scientific community did not have an
established method for estimating their extent. So, they simply left
them out.
So I would say basically that the way the thinking has changed
is that there is now much more focus on the uncertainty of largescale discontinuities. I think the community is less sanguine about
the stability of the Atlantic conveyor. The IPCC said that there is
a less than 10% chance that it might collapse this century. Well,
a 10% chance is still uncomfortable. Just a couple of months ago,
a new paper came out saying that it is much more uncertain than
that. When you account for the uncertainty in the non-linear
dynamics, it is actually hard to conclude that there is a less than 10%
chance that it might not collapse this century. So the uncertainty
is amplified. The implications of that for risk and being prepared
for surprises I think is rising in importance within the community.
water shortages have proven equally likely to
Q: Historically,
lead to cooperation as to competition. Has any work been
done to identify the most likely organizations or venues to increase
cooperation and prevent conflict?
Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko : I think there is quite a bit of work being
done on multiple levels. In most cases, water is managed very
locally, which does not allow it to be easily manipulated at the
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79
national level or the regional basin level. At the same time, however, we have seen that regional basin commissions can make a big
difference in effecting cooperation between countries.
It has been demonstrated that basin-level cooperation can
overcome an awful lot of the saber-rattling. Dr. Aaron Wolf, a
geographer at Oregon State University, has examined every multilateral and bilateral interaction over water between states for the
past 50 years. Although he found an awful lot of saber-rattling, he
found very little evidence of organized violence.
Achieving such cooperation does not just happen. It takes
political will. It often takes outside facilitators. Nations have to transition from simply asserting rights to water and saying this much
is mine and fighting over dwindling resources to evaluating needs
and ultimately sharing benefits. A lot of that has been facilitated
by the World Bank and United Nations Development Program.
Unfortunately, such efforts are typically not funded with a whole
lot of money.
So, in that sense, I think there is prospect for ameliorating some
of the challenges that are likely to arise from a warmer world and
the attendant decline in glaciers that support water basins.
Interestingly, on the military-to-military side, multilateral agreements seem to be more effective than bilateral agreements. In the
Nile Basin, for example, when the U.S. comes in, whether it is the
military or the civilian side of the government, the presumption
is we are coming in on the Egyptian side, and that screws up the
basin-wide dynamics. So, in this case, we have to become more
comfortable with supporting these processes through multilateral
institutions in order to overcome the perception that there is a big
donor coming in one side.
The new issue of National Geographic that will be coming in
your mailboxes shortly focuses exclusively on water. [3] One of
the stories is about Friends of the Earth Middle East—a nongovernmental organization co-directed by an Israeli, a Palestinian, and
a Jordanian. Their good-neighbor water projects are designed to
address the lack of sanitation in schools and communities where both
Israeli kids and Palestinian kids get sick. This very local approach
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provides benefits beyond water and health. It is also helping to
improve the affected communities in a broader security context.
So we do not want to leave the very local off the table.
References
1. National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future: Report
of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project Based on
Consultations with Nongovernmental Experts Around the World,
Dec 2004, http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html.
2. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
Nov 2008, http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html.
3. “Water: A Special Issue,” National Geographic, Apr 2010, http://
ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/04/table-of-contents.