Global Warming is the scare you silly movement of our generation, one that people like Al Gore are lining their pockets with as they spread global panic over this junk science demagoguery.

Now, the WAPO jumps in the tank with the Goracle and delivers a scarefest of new dimension:  Global Warming will lead to Global War.  Coming soon, Climate Wars!:

Global Warming Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The Cold War shaped world politics for half a century. But global warming may shape the patterns of global conflict for much longer than that — and help spark clashes that will be, in every sense of the word, hot wars.

We’re used to thinking of climate change as an environmental problem, not a military one, but it’s long past time to alter that mindset. Climate change may mean changes in Western lifestyles, but in some parts of the world, it will mean far more. Living in Washington, I may respond to global warming by buying a Prius, planting a tree or lowering my thermostat. But elsewhere, people will respond to climate change by building bomb shelters and buying guns.

“There is every reason to believe that as the 21st century unfolds, the security story will be bound together with climate change,” warns John Ashton, a veteran diplomat who is now the United Kingdom’s first special envoy on climate change. “The last time the world faced a challenge this complex was during the Cold War. Yet the stakes this time are even higher because the enemy now is ourselves, the choices we make.”

In the Cold War, the issues was deliberate nuclear proliferation and jockeying to be the dominant super power between (primarily) two unions, the USA and the USSR.  The conflicts had to do with strategic use of land and weaponry to forward that contest.  It was not a responsive conflict to a global shift in weather.

Defense experts have also started to see the link between climate change and conflict. A 2007 CNA Corp. report, supervised by a dozen retired admirals and generals, warned that climate change could lead to political unrest in numerous badly hit countries, then perhaps to outright bloodshed and battle. One key factor that could stoke these tensions is massive migration as people flee increasingly uninhabitable areas, which would lead to border tensions, greater demands for rescue and evacuation services and disputes over essential resources. With these threats looming, the U.N. Security Council held a precedent-setting debate on climate change in April 2007 — explicitly casting global warming as a national security issue.

What they might want to consider is whether the policies they are proposing will contribute to that unrest.  For example, forcing emergent countries to limit cheap fuel sources will lead to their feeling oppressed and disadvantaged in a global race for development. 

Also, the increased demand to utilize the world’s corn crops for alternative fuels will lead to unrest as poor nations face starvation as one of the primary food sources is depleted to power cars.

In other words, even if the dire climate shifts occur on schedule, they will not drive the unrest or wars, the responsive policies will.

So the issue is not warming, it is our adaptation to it.

The WAPO, sees it thus:

Global warming could lead to warfare in three different ways.

The first is conflict arising from scarcity. As the world gets hotter and drier, glaciers will melt, and the amount of arable land will shrink. In turn, fresh water, plants, crops and cattle and other domestic animals will be harder to come by, thereby spurring competition and conflict over what’s left. In extreme examples, a truly desiccated ecosystem could mean a complete evacuation of a hard-hit region. And the more people move, the more they will jostle with their new neighbors.

That is a far fetched and long term issue.  Particularly when the melting glaciers are not in fact melting as reported.

But sometimes the displacement happens with shocking speed: Just think of the deadly hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which together drove millions of people to suddenly leave Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. As global warming and population growth increase, we could see far deadlier storms than Katrina. In 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh displaced 2 million people and killed 138,000.

I think they forgot that the last three years have all had lower than normal storms despite dire predictions of heavier than normal storms due to Global Warming.

But even so, the history of the world is replete with natural disasters.  Yes, Katrina was bad, as was Andrew years before.  So was the tsunami a few years ago that killed hundreds of thousands.

Humans are the most pragmatic of creatures.  We respond to disasters pretty much the same way everywhere:  We survive.  We lick our wounds and we bury our dead.  We then rebuild where we can, and move on where we can’t.  Katrina has been a very slow rebuild, yet the rebuild continues.  The rebuild there is hampered more by man than nature, for whatever that is worth.

But the point remains, that humans are creatures of survival and adaptation, always have been, despite the cause of the disasters:   Even when man made.  We nuked Japan, twice, yet Japan has recovered from being a humiliated defeated enemy to become an economic global leader.

And no, please, I am not proud of our bombing Japan, nor am I treating the decades of resultant suffering that the bombings delivered to Japan trivially.

What I am saying is that despite that, Japan and other countries devastated by wars have returned to their former prominence because at the end of the day, humans survive. 

The second cause of the coming climate wars is the flip side of scarcity: the problems of an increase in abundance. Suppose that global warming makes a precious resource easier to get at — say, rising temperatures in northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia make it easier to get at oil and gas resources in regions that had previously been too bone-chilling to tap. (A few degrees of change in temperature can transform a previously inhospitable climate.) But what happens if some tempting new field pops up in international waters contested by two great powers? Or if smaller countries with murky borders start arguing over newly arable land?

Of course, let’s put oil in the middle of it.

Finally, we should also worry about new conflicts over issues of sovereignty that we didn’t need to deal with in our older, colder world. Consider the Northwest Passage, which is turning into an ice-free corridor from Europe to Asia during the summer months. Canada claims some portions of the route as its own sovereign waters, while the United States argues that these sections lie within international waters. Admittedly, it’d take a lot of tension for this to turn into a military conflict, but anyone convinced that the United States and Canada could never come to blows has forgotten the War of

Please.  That is really a stretch.  It is not like there are already better ways to get places.

Other kinds of territorial quarrels will arise, too. Some remote islands — particularly such Pacific islands as Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tonga, the Maldives and many others — may be partially or entirely submerged beneath rising ocean waters. Do they lose their sovereignty if their territory disappears?

Did all the Islands wiped out in the tsunami?

The net result of these changes will be the creation of two geopolitical belts of tension due to global warming, which will dramatically shape the patterns of conflict in the 21st century.

First, politics will heat up along what we might call the equatorial tension belt, a broad swath of instability around the planet’s center. This belt will creep southward, deeper into Africa, and extend far into central Asia.

Second, a new tension belt will develop around the polar circles. In the short term, the main problems will arise in the Northern Hemisphere, but later in the 21st century, the area around the South Pole may also see increasing security strains as countries rush to claim and develop heretofore frozen areas.

Wait, so you are saying that new lands will be available, when you just got through saying that there would not be enough land?  Cannot have it both ways.

 If the equatorial tension belt includes mostly poor, developing countries fighting over survival, the new polar tension belt will draw in wealthy, developed countries fighting over opportunity.

So the polar regions do not have any poor countries that may try to expand?  I would say some countries would be very advantaged, and not all of them rich.

So the glum solution?

This is, admittedly, a glum view of the future. But we can still avoid the new hot wars — or at least cool them down a bit. For starters, we should redouble our efforts to slow down global warming and undo the damage humanity has already done to the environment. Every little bit helps, so by all means, hassle your senator and recycle those bottles.

As a proponent of responsible ecological stewardship, I have no issue with it, but I wish they would advocate this on its merits, not as a defensive measure to their strawman climate wars.

Beyond that, we need to get our heads around the idea that global warming is one of the most serious long-term threats to our national and personal security. For the next two decades or so, the climate will continue to change: Historic levels of built-up greenhouse gases will continue to warm the world –

…Despite the fact the world was warming and cooling long before the Industrial revolutions and Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs…

and spin it toward new patterns of conflict. So we need to do more than simply reverse climate change. We need to understand and react to it — ordinary people and governments alike — in ways that avoid conflict. Over the next few years, we may find that climate-change accords and peace treaties start to overlap more and more. And we may find that global warming is heating new conflicts up to the boiling point.

Can we please start with the understanding part?  Seriously?

This author is sitting here, with a straight face, predicting dire global consequences over something that science is still out on, the issue of man’s contributions to global warming.

And the ready made answer, that man is causing it, forces them to look at it from a corrective stand point, and to focus their efforts on trying to reverse it.  They spend almost no time contemplating the possibility that it is naturally occurring as part of a global climate cycle, and that our efforts may be better spent planning for it and learning to adapt to it.

No, instead of figuring out how to survive it, we keep proposing solutions that offer small short term gains, and no long term answers, along with unintended consequences.  Our solutions so far have not answered any of the real questions and are essentially feel good do nothing solutions.

Instead of marshaling the best minds on our planet to answer the questions of survival, they are poking around with planetary solutions to fix the problem that may have even more unintended consequences.

As I said, the real danger is not the warming.  It is our reaction - or over reaction -  to it.

We are our own worst enemy.

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