From U. S. NEWS:
… Is climate change a national security issue? What would be some examples?
AL GORE: Absolutely. Indeed, more than a few top U.S. military leaders have already designated the climate crisis as a national security issue. The stability of governance arrangements in many strategically important regions of the world is threatened by the multiple assaults of climate change, as budgets are drained, competition for resources is enhanced, and populations suffer. To pick one recent example, in Pakistan a year ago, 20 million people were affected by the unprecedented flooding that affected one fifth of the country. The situation there is still not resolved, and analysts have discussed how this massive flood has further destabilized a nuclear-armed country in a region that is already rife with conflict.
Also within the past year, Russia experienced its worst heat wave in over a century, a deep and prolonged crop-killing drought, terrible wildfires, and suffocating smoke that killed tens of thousands and also threatened nuclear plants and nuclear materials. As a result, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan removed all of their grain from world markets, which contributed (along with other events, many of them also climate related) to the highest rise in world food prices in history.
Kevin Trenberth, a well-known scientist here in the U.S., has said, “Global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather because the environment in which all storms form has changed from human activities.” And that’s an important shift in the way scientists frame the connection between the climate crisis and extreme weather events. They used to say that we are “loading the dice,” that is, we are changing the odds of extreme weather events. Now they say that we are also painting more dots on the dice, so that we are not only rolling more 12s, we are now rolling 13s and 14s. So we can expect continued increases in the frequency and severity of extreme floods, droughts, wildfires, storms and other weather events…
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