Jumping the shark: Climate change a national security threat

P. Solar says:
May 3, 2012 at 10:49 pm
M.O. is part of UK ministry of defense, hence immune from FIOA.
No it isn’t. From their own website (here):-
We are a Trading Fund within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, operating on a commercial basis under set targets. Our targets are verified and publicised in this section.
AFAIK they are not exempt from FOI.

garymount says:
May 4, 2012 at 12:49 am
Over 8 years ago, the Vancouver Sun published an article stating that the Pentagon considered Climate Change a national threat (or as the Vancouver Sun headline puts it: End Of The World As We Know It – Pentagon Style | Facing A World Of Fire And Ice):
“Frozen countries, massive famine, shattered economies — even nuclear war — as a result of climate change. More doom and gloom from eco-radicals? Nope, this is the Pentagon speaking.”
http://www.rense.com/general49/end.htm

Firstly, the article is now hosted on ‘rense’ (literally: Jeff Rense); not a very reputable source (somewhere behind Alex Jones in terms of ‘reliability’) so I wonder if any parts were added or modified. One should really only accept screenshots or photos of articles from these guys.
Secondly, this was part of ‘contingency planning’ study for a worst-case scenario but magnified through the lens of a conspiratorialists ™ (e.g. The Sun article writer and the rense website):

On the orders of Andrew Marshall, one of the U.S. government’s most influential defence advisers (he was … responsible for a sweeping strategic review of the military under … Secretary … Rumsfeld), two respected senior consultants prepared a study of the threat to national security posed by climate change.

Note: Not actual DOD (i.e. not the Pentagon) but rather consultants to (hired by) the DOD.

.Its authors … Peter Schwartz is a Central Intelligence Agency consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group. Doug Randall is from the California-based Global Business Network.

The ‘study’ amounts to an extrapolation of the worst-case scenario envisioned in the minds of ‘fiction writers’ … that could be loosely translated into ‘Hollywood screenplay writers” … the ‘study’ goes into ‘detail’ since some of the Pentagon types might not be too imaginative as to what the collapse of a society might look like …
.

Mods & Anthony, a little follow-up to my previous post if I may.
Re: The Vancouver Sun / rense republication EOTW-CAGW article:
Peter Schwartz
– cofounder of the Global Business Network (GBN), an elite corporate strategy firm, specializing in future-think and scenario planning.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Business_Network"Global Business Network
– Now employing Peter Schwartz (he is actually a co-founder, something not mentioned in the the Sun/rense article, rather, they only mention his Royal Dutch Shell employ in the ‘strategic planning scenarios’ area of just 4 years)

Global Business Network, or GBN, is a strategy consulting firm and member of Monitor Group, that helps businesses, NGOs, and governments use scenario planning to plan for multiple possible futures.
GBN was founded in Berkeley, California in 1987 by a group of friends including Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Stewart Brand, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson. The company grew to include a core group of “practice members”, and over a hundred “network members,” provocative thinkers from a diverse number of fields, such as social media expert Clay Shirky, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, economist Aidan Eyakuze, musician Brian Eno, biotechnologist Rob Carlson, and China scholar Orville Schell. For its first 15 years, corporate clients would pay up to $40,000 annually in order to gain access to this network of advisers through a private website, attend meetings on emerging trends and training seminars, and receive a selection of literature about future issues each month. GBN no longer offers this membership service, concentrating instead on scenario-based consulting and training.
Unlike forecasting which extrapolates past and present trends to predict the future, scenario planning is an interactive process for exploring alternative, plausible futures and what those might mean for strategies, policies, and decisions. Scenario planning was first used by the military in World War II and then by Herman Kahn at RAND (“Thinking the Unthinkable”) during the Cold War, before being adapted to inform corporate strategy by Pierre Wack and other visionaries at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1970s. The key principles of scenario planning include thinking from the outside in about the forces in the contextual environment that are driving change, engaging multiple perspectives to identify and interpret those forces, and adopting a long view.
Before GBN, Peter Schwartz had been employed at SRI International as director of the Strategic Environment Center; following that, he took a position as head of scenario planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, from 1982 to 1986, where he continued the pioneering work of Pierre Wack, in the field of scenario planning.

Pull My Finger said at 5:37 am
Leon Panetta is no more qualifed to be Sec. of Defense than you or me, the man is a flat out politician for life and a civil rights lawyer, not a former military man or international relations scholar.
PMF, you can fill in the blanks for the entire Obama administration: ________________ is no more qualified to be _________________ than you or me, the man/woman is a flat out politician for life and a _________________ lawyer, not a former ____________ or ___________________ scholar. THEY’RE ALL POLITICIANS! THAT’S THE PROBLEM! Most of them are not even career administrators, much less qualified, experienced experts/professionals in a given discipline.
And specific to Panetta, he is also not a scientist but he did serve 2 years in the Army – hey, and during that time he was promoted once! That certainly “qualifies” him to be Secretary – – of something – – in the current “PROGRESSIVE” administration… LOL
And what can one say about a person who makes a statement that the relatively minuscule changes in weather (on average) over more then a hundred years are a “national security threat”….?? It begs a lot of questions about being “qualified” for anything, much less Sec. of Defense. One might also ask, if it is such a big threat, where have you been for the last 20, 30 40+ years? And who in their right mind would put in the “position” in you’re in now – – or keep you there after that statement?