Wow, this is thick. What next? Climate research becoming classified?
Panetta: Climate change a national security threat
by Joel Gehrke Commentary Staff Writer for the Washington Examiner – Beltway Confidential
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared global warming a national security threat yesterday during a speech before an environmentalist group in Washington, D.C.
“The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. “Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”
The Defense Secretary must have missed Examiner Columnist Mona Charen’s recent piece on how symbols of global warming aren’t working out the way environmentalists predicted.
For instance, The United Nations climate change panel “admitted that the melting Himalayas prediction was not based on science but on a 1999 media interview given by one scientist,” Charen observed. “They said they regretted the error. Now, a study in nature, based on satellite imagery, has shown that some melting of lower altitude glaciers is taking place but that higher glaciers have been adding ice.”
With reference to the story of an apparently-marooned polar bear floating on an ice floe — puzzling, as polar bears can swim for hundreds of miles — Charen cited a new Canadian study showing that the polar bear population is on the rise.
“Oh, and the scientist for the Department of the Interior whose 2004 work on drowning polar bears inspired Al Gore and others [had been] placed on administrative leave for unspecified wrongdoing,” she added.*
*But is now reinstated
Yeah, national security threat. That’s the ticket.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
The Climate Sedition Act criminalizes climate dissent, including not only blogs but also any actual data, measurements, or scientific arguments against the fragile consensus of climate danger to national security. Any thermometer reading lower than airports will be dismantled. Any sea-level gauges not showing flooding will be removed and model data substituted.
Also covered by Donna Laframbois
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/05/03/the-environmental-defense-fund-the-cia/
Do you suppose they would have honored him if they weren’t sure of what he was going to say?
Sure there is a National Security Threat – to American’s wallets…
The military has been pushing this idiocy for a while.
Still, I love to watch every step up the Stairway To Insanity. The higher they climb, the farther they’ll fall when the money finally runs out and careerism no longer keeps the “experts” in line. Splat!
If Global Warming is truly a National Security Threat, maybe should fire nuclear missiles at until it’s dead and we have Nuclear Winter!
There. Problem solved.
– MJM
Leon, the horse is dead. It’s time to stop flogging it.
Don’t you feel safer tonight? Me neither.
National security. Because as central America and Mexico turn into deserts, their entire populations will migrate north and cause an intolerable burden on America … oh … hmmm … they already did …
This is scary stuff when a Defense Secretary can be brainwashed this easily…it just proves the liberal propaganda machine has been very effective in pushing this virulent strain of pseudo-science.
Leon Panetta is right. All those Canadians crossing the border.
He has occupied so many different government positions he has forgotten he is Secretary of Defense.
Hand in glove with that “10 year plan” to finance anti-skeptic propaganda with taxpayer money. If the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, what more excuse would they need to criminalize climate skepticism? It’s a national security threat.
The government’s really looking to move here. Too much popular opinion against them to succeed at this point, but it will have been a near escape.
President Obama made May 1st “Loyalty Day.”
I’m sure Panetta got the memo, understood what reaffirming allegiance meant, saluted, and spewed what the boss wanted.
I argue that a modern Space Race is taking place between NASA scientists (read: James Hansen and Co.) and Russian space scientists (read: Abdussamatov and Co.) in Don’t Sell Your Coat with Abdussamatov saying “worry about cold” and Hansen saying “worry about warm.” Each team of space scientists is backed by its respective commander in chief (fossil-fuel bashing Obama, on the one hand and fossil-fuel-accumulating Putin, on the other). If I were allowed to brief Panetta, I would let him know that he is on the wrong side of the science and the wrong side of the energy debate and is compromising my nation’s security with his beliefs. So, yes, climate change is a threat to national security, in that sense.
If I thought sending him my book would help, I would. DSYC has been the No. 1 Climatology book on Amazon for most of the last 5 weeks, and if you think that’s a sales pitch, you’re right.
Of course he is so worried about climate change that he burns up fuel flying excessively
“Defense Secretary Racks Up $860,000 In Commuting Costs
WASHINGTON — It’s turning out to be a costly commute home for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
The Pentagon chief has traveled on military aircraft to his home in northern California more than two dozen times since he took the defense post in July – trips that have cost the government about $32,000 each.
Panetta, in turn, has reimbursed the government about $630 per roundtrip for the personal flights, based on longstanding formulas dictated by federal policies.
The totals detailed by defense officials lay out his reimbursements for the first time, showing that as of March 19, Panetta had written checks to the Treasury totaling about $17,000 for 27 roundtrip flights. The total cost to the Pentagon is as much as $860,000 based on average fuel and operating costs for his Air Force planes”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/defense-secretary-commuting-leon-panetta_n_1407923.html
For precisely what reason was the Defense Secretary addressing the Environmental Defense fund in the first place? Would he also like to talk about National Health in relationship to our defense needs? I’m certain there’s a group of doctors who might want some consideration given to them too. But I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Who knows, solutions to AGW just might bolster national security. If some hostile fighter jets from Hugo Chavez manage to penetrate our airspace we could maybe chop them up with those wind turbines.
Don’t read too much into this.
We are now officially in election year mode. Consider the audience Panetta was addressing. His boss knows that he needs the greenies to both come out and vote and to provide campaign support. He also recognizes that his record to date hasn’t exactly satisfied these folks. They still consider his support of nuclear power as a betrayal and even on Keystone they think he was slow to act and know that it is only a temporary measure – i.e. Keystone is not dead.
Panetta is telling people what they want to hear. Doesn’t mean he believes it.
tolo4zero says:
May 3, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Those charges are just rounded-off. That $860,000 probably includes $34.34 per flight for the carbon offsets he bought.
Maybe Secretary Panetta can send some of that global warming to Oregon. We need it!
Rising sea levels are a threat to national security???
w.
My, oh my! No Cabinet Level department is allowed to vote “Present” on the run up to Rio+20. Less than seven weeks away…
More like jumping the Killer Whale
Panetta Presumes to Protect US from Proper Physics….
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scrondrel”….Sammuel Johnson, Apr 7, 1775….
[including Faux Patriots efforts at forced re-education to dumbed-down AGW compliance]….
IF you swallow the extreme end, the CAGW, then the security threat is real. Just as the shut-down of coal plants is reasonable. Of course, if over-population is going to destroy the biosphere, and you truly, truly believe that, then the 12 Monkeys Solution, spreading a human-only pathogen like a mutated H5N1 (read about today) makes not perfect sense but an absolute priority.
This is the true danger of Gore, Hansen, Strong and Suzuki. If you believe them to be reasonable people facing a real, inevitable problem with CO2, then global, authoritarian management with dire social, political and economic consequences are what must, not should, occur.
When a man points a gun at your head, you are allowed, nay encouraged, to do what is necessary to survive. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are portrayed by these four rascals as the same as the man and his gun. In our countries we have turned over responsibilities for dealing with the gun and man to self-authorizing agencies. This is a frightening situation.
The four have indirect power and should have the accountability that comes with holding power – great power, great responsibility, right? So far we see only one side of that coin.
The skeptics have great social reason to fight back against CAGW. Scary, very scary.
Climate change could indeed be a major national security issue if it gets colder. A Russia and a China and a US with failed crops would not present a rosy world picture. Now couple that with a situation where interest on the national debt is larger than the entire defense budget and you start to see the situation we could be in somewhere around 2017. An agitated, hungry world and we can’t afford a military. Not a comforting thought.