Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Even Democrats are complaining about the lack of detail.
The Pentagon calls climate change a national security threat. Trump isn’t listening.
Democrats seem unhappy with the new Defense Department report, though.
By Alex Ward Jan 18, 2019, 1:50pm EST
The Pentagon released a short report this week detailing how a changing climate is a national security threat and makes the military’s job around the world harder. The problem, though, is that the pithy document will likely fall on deaf ears anyway.
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There’s more, but it’s mostly anecdotal and not all of it deals with climate change directly. “The report is surprisingly clear though that there is no current or desired separate program to track or manage climate impacts,” retired Rear Adm. David Titley, one of the country’s top experts on climate security, wrote on Friday. “The report is disappointing.”
Some Democrats agree, saying the report skimped on some crucial details and must be more robust.
“While this climate report acknowledges that nearly all the military installations it studied are vulnerable to major climate change impacts,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-WA) said in a Friday statement, “it fails to even minimally discuss a mitigation plan to address the vulnerabilities.”
Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, took aim at Trump and the Pentagon in a different statement: “President Trump’s climate change denial must not adversely impact the security environment where our troops live, work, and serve,” he said. “But under current leadership, the Department is treating climate change as a back burner issue.”
That seems to be true: The Trump administration has yet to place serious emphasis on safeguarding complexes even as top defense officials said last year that Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida — which suffered massive damage from Hurricane Michael — was “uninhabitable” in the storm’s aftermath.
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Read more: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/18/18188153/pentagon-climate-change-military-trump-inhofe
The report runs to 17 pages, with 5 pages of appendices. The following is a sample of the kind of “information” provided by the report;
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Drought
Drought can negatively impact U.S. military installations in various ways, particularly in the Southwest. For example, dry conditions from drought impact water supply in areas dependent on surface water. Additionally, droughts dry out vegetation, increasing wildfire potential/severity. Specific to military readiness, droughts can have broad implications for base infrastructure, impair testing activities, and along with increased temperature, can increase the number of black flag day prohibitions for testing and training. Drought can contribute to heat- related illnesses, including heat exhaustion and heat stroke, outlined by the U.S. Army Public Health Center. Energy consumption may increase to provide additional cooling for facilities.
Several DoD sites in the DC area (including Joint Base Anacostia Bolling, Joint Base Andrews, U.S. Naval Observatory/Naval Support Facility, and Washington Navy Yard) periodically experienced drought conditions –extreme in 2002 and severe from 2002 through 2018. In addition, Naval Air Station Key West experienced drought in 2015 and 2011, ranging from extreme to severe, respectively. These examples highlight that drought conditions may occur in places not typically perceived as drought regions.
Drought conditions have caused significant reduction in soil moisture at several Air Force bases resulting in deep or wide cracks in the soil, at times leading to ruptured utility lines and cracked road surfaces.
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Read more: Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense
Imagine you are a policy maker responsible for addressing the issues raised in the report. What measures are required to fix the problems at Naval Air Station Key West? How much additional water do they need to address their current problems and projected future problems? How much would it cost to provide water security to Naval Air Station Key West?
$329,000 is an outrageous sum to charge taxpayers for a document which lacks even the most basic details which a policy maker would require to formulate a policy response.
President Trump should demand a better effort on behalf of US taxpayers from whoever wrote this report. For once the Democrats might support him.
As the US military is the no.1 user of fossil fuels on Earth they can set the good example and convert to Green Power 97%.
For this they will need about U$ 1 trillion only, another bargain for US tax payers from the green men.
/sarc off
An expert on “climate security”?
What the heck is that?
Who dreams these things up?
Just what are the qualifications for being an expert in something that is a meaningless made up nonsense phrase?
Having worked w/ teams of experts reviewing environmental remediation programs at AF and other military bases in AZ, CA, MA, OK, SC, TN, and VA, there are plenty of more pressing environmental issues than the in-exact predictions of climate science. Climate science predictions are moving targets – always morphing (sort of like the weather).
I think I had a beer with one of the guys involved with writing this report! I was in a group of 4 people, so I was kind of zoning when I heard him say, “…I told the Secretary, we’re extremely vulnerable. One foot of sea level rise would wipe out most of our naval bases! And they just don’t care. They haven’t done anything!” I had to check that fact… Quick off the top of my head, 3 mm/year, conversion via the app on my smart phone, then divide… 102 years, I got. I waited awhile for him to stop and take a breath and a drink. Then I showed him the number. “What’s that?” he asked blearily?
“That’s how many years it will take to get a foot of sea level rise at the current global average rate. We have time. Just resurface a runway and add three inches, that will give you another 25 years.”
“Well, where did you get that number?”
“I don’t know if I know the ultimate source. That’s the number I remember seeing every time I start reading about sea level rise.”
“Well you might want to check your number, cause that’s not right. And it’s not linear!” I couldn’t find, on my smartphone, the graph that shows pretty conclusively that it’s as near as golly linear, so I let that one go.
I think he rambled on for awhile before he said, “…more and stronger storms…”
I didn’t wait as long this time, I piped up immediately and said, “But the data doesn’t support that.”
“Hunh?”
“The evaluation of storms and storm strength does not indicate either an increased frequency nor an increase in average strength of hurricanes. The calculated trend for both shows a slight decline.”
“Well it’s not what’s happened in the past, it’s what’s gonna happen. It’s the future storms we need to worry about!”
I thought I’d offer him a bone, so I said, “Even if we assume no trend, though, we don’t even prepare for the storms of the past.”
“Right!” he said enthusiastically.
I let the conversation die there. (It didn’t occur to me ‘til the next morning to even consider, did he have the ability to get me fired? See, I work for a company that provides services under contract to a branch of the military, and I shan’t get any more specific. He works for a different company that provides a different service to branches of the government. But it has been two months now and I’m still employed, so maybe he doesn’t.) But my own comment caused some musings, to wit… Tyndall Air Force Base is the second Florida Air Force Base to be completely “leveled” by a hurricane just in my lifetime, and this one undoubtedly was not even as strong as the one that leveled Homestead Air Force Base 26+ years ago. Post-storm then, just as now, the powers that be looked at the situation, and considered how much it would cost to rebuild. Top number was how much to rebuild completely. Then, consider how much do we really need to rebuild? Then look around and see if/where the mission(s) could be absorbed elsewhere, then do the figures again… This is the same thing happening now at Tyndall AFB.
Whatever number they conjure will then be funded, and rebuilding – to whatever extent deemed necessary – will happen. We have numbers from Homestead, we can inflate those numbers to today’s values and get a rough estimate. We have probably passed the first iteration of the cost calculation to rebuild everything at Tyndall just exactly the way it was, we will play with the numbers some more. The reason I am pointing all of this out is, we will rebuild it with a future government appropriation, using tax payers’ money, the U. S. government does not carry insurance. And that’s probably the best thing, many a thinker has calculated the amount of money they spent on insurance over a lifetime, and how much they collected from insurance over a lifetime, and they nearly always lose. It’s a fact of life, if you want to call it a competition then the insurance company will win, overall the insurance company will make money, and if they didn’t they wouldn’t be in business. So I’m not for a second suggesting the U. S. government change their policy about self-insuring.
Now, let’s take this a step farther. I said we don’t even build for the past, and that’s true. After Hurricane Andrew everyone everywhere involved with buildings took a look at the damage, and scratched their heads and hemmed and hawed, and in the end issued an increase in the design wind speeds; i.e., the wind speeds used as an expected maximum when calculating stresses in order to size building components. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it occurred to me, that wasn’t a real significant change, and most assuredly did not reflect the actual maximum experienced by destroyed buildings in the path of Andrew. Why not? Because those codes are always a trade-off. We may be able to design and build a hurricane-proof building, but I wouldn’t 100% guarantee it, but if we could, how much would it cost? I think it would not be just a matter of a-factor-of X, I think it would move the decimal point, maybe significantly. And what would that gain us? Consider, the area around Homestead AFB, had it been struck by a hurricane of similar magnitude in known history? Hurricane Camille struck the Gulf Coast of the U. S. almost 50 years ago, has a storm that strong come ashore in the same area since? How many buildings have been built in that area, and then torn down in obsolescence, since Hurricane Camille came ashore? I’ll bet some buildings constructed since Hurricane Andrew have already reached end-of-life and are gone, or will be gone soon.
You can’t build a perpetual building (even if there are some 1,000-year old buildings still in use, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and none are in identical condition to the day they were first complete). The all-volunteer Army necessitated new facilities all over the Army, most especially barracks, and in the interests of solving a problem once, they specified a 50-year design life. Those barracks were funded during the ‘80s and completed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but by 2006 they were obsolete and the Army had to begin a program to overhaul and update them. They were already obsolete and failing several years before that, so to be charitable, let’s give them an actual 30 years. So even if we spent enough money to build a hurricane-proof building, new technologies and techniques would overcome it sooner rather than later and we would end up tearing it down to start over.
Now here’s why I’m boring you will all of this… my friend wanted to solve the problem, and I mean immediately! He wanted the Secretary to immediately request funds to rebuild every Naval base, heck, every U. S. military base anywhere, as far as I could tell, to get ahead of this mythical (to me, but undoubtedly seriously real to him!) climate change monster! But why should we? Use my analogy, plan for the past, but even then, what response is most appropriate? We can subject this to a cost-benefit analysis. We can continue replacing buildings on U. S. military installations as they wear out and/or become obsolete, we can build new facilities when the mission changes and no existing building fits the need, and we already have in place codes and standards on how to build those, and we know (roughly) how much it costs to do that. We know how much we spent to address the Air Forces’ needs after the destruction of Homestead AFB. In short order we will have a number and a plan, how much it will cost to address the Air Forces’ needs after the destruction of Tyndall AFB. And there has been testing and calculating on building hurricane-proof buildings, we can come up with a cost for that level of construction. And we can compare: The cost of business-as-usual and replace it after a disaster vs. the cost to immediately rebuild every vulnerable military installation at a higher disaster-proof level of construction. And what would be the best use of our taxpayer $$$? All those number$ I just mentioned, I don’t have at my hands, and I don’t think I can get my hands on them, or I would do the analysis myself, but I have a feeling that continuing with business as usual, let’s keep doing that, at the attendant cost, and when there is a disaster, of whatever kind, that destroys parts or all of any installation, we rebuild it.
Let’s take a realistic view of these things, as recommended by Bjorn Lomborg; Climate Change may be a problem, but even by the warmists’ own calculations, the costs of the solutions far outweigh the costs of the problems, and we have many more pressing, and more beneficial, places to spend our money. That’s the kind of analysis I would expect to see from a $329,000 report!
Had to look it up myself :
https://www.google.com/search?q=ruptured+utility+lines&client=ms-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Well a lot of the evidence on the impact of climate change on the Us military has already been collected…
this is a summary linking to detailed research on which US Naval bases are affected by rising sea levels, for example
https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/sea-level-rise-flooding-us-military-bases#.XEQ0DvZ2sy8
giff quotes the Union of Concerned Scientists ROFL.
Even at the outrageously unrealistic SLR rates used in your linked study (which is better than most you link to, griff, except for 2 things: Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate Central. Either of those would put the report’s credibility to 0, with both you might be in the negative, but still…), we still have plenty of time. We can wait and see. And as I already said, at the current rates of SLR, just resurface a runway, that’ll get you another 25 years.
Perhaps it is worth considering how one gets to $329 000. Just think, a Lt Commander from Navy and the equivalent ranks from Army and Air Force. Employ for two months (1/6 annual salary). Add 2 Lt (jg) and corresponding four others from Army and Air force. Add in cost of shorthand typist and filing clerk, and rental of office space – I am pretty sure you can easily get to $329 000 without trying really hard.
Undoubtedly they were given the job “Write a report on how climate change will affect the Defence Department and military priorities”, and told to do it in 6 weeks. No indications given as to the answer required (remember, …”two basic rules of government: ‘Never look into anything you don’t have to. And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.’ (The Complete Yes Minister, p. 453)” Quotation found in http://moksheungming.tripod.com/yes.html
Hence you get a report that is a backstop against the question “What will happen to the DoD regarding climate change?” – Answer – “We have produced a report on it.” And it is a load of fluff. So woolly that no one can argue that it is wrong – or right!
A pointless meaningless report, that carries a pointless made up cost of production. How else could anyone explain a figure of $329,000? It would be a remarkable thing to find any US defence dept activity having that degree of cost accuracy!
The insignificance of the cost is exceeded only by the insignificance of the report.
That is some achievement.
There is some evidence that the US military was not always so timid in the face of inclement weather:
Just after I read this from the GWPF
https://www.thegwpf.com/secret-pentagon-report-climate-catastrophe-due-next-year/
“A secret report suppressed by US defence chiefs”
Yep back in 2004
“The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists.”
Really!
A classic from the Guardian/Observer archives, from February 2004:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
There, I fixed it for them and I won’t even charge the government a single dime!
BTW:
Those are ADAPTATION measures; not the MITIGATION that the (censored) Admiral was advocating.
(Just sayin”).
Salute!
Great points, George, and you can see the Key West layout really well. They have been thru many storms and unless the water comes up ten feet in ten years ( just an example), they will be using fairly short seawalls like Galveston and such. Of course, there will eventually be a limit unless the looming glacial epoch gets here early.
@ur momisugly Red94 et al. The Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas building codes are now immensely more practical and effective than what existed as late as the early 80’s. Even in the 80’s we had local codes along the coast that were more demanding than those of the 60’s, and we also had some contractors that built for storms using their past experience
.
Homestead was a good example of shoddy construction and outdated building codes. The base there actually came out a lot better than the surrounding civilian structures and especially the homes. If the terrain was lower and the coastal seafloor countour was the same as in Waveland, MS all damage would have been an order of magniture worse, as well as loss of life. The surge is a function of the seafloor countour, the shoreline shape and the length of time the storm wind field had to push water ahead. Go look at the Wunderground Katrina surge “diary” some one did going from burg to burg along the coast. It is hard to believe unless you or friends/family have been thru something similar or driven it as I did after the storm to help my folks there and get my old school up and running ( first public high school to reopen in New Orleans).
Tyndall AFB came thru much better than Homestead, and Michael was a minimal Cat 5 in some opoinions, but otherwise at the upper limit of Cat 4. Most of the base housing was built in the 50’s or early 60’s, but they were sturdy. Overhead pictures do not show severe wind damage, but many prolly got inside water damge from the surge. The eye went right over the top and one video as the eye went over appeared that was taken by an individual that had to ride it out ( military has its duties, huh?} Due to the seafloor countour here, we did not see a huge storm surge except in a small area east of the base. Over at Mexico Beach, many of the homes built since the early 90’s are standing, with minimal damage, whilst everythinmg around for 100 yards built in the 50’s and 60’s is a collection of concrete slabs with pipes sticking up. The pictures are impressive, and make tornado pictures look weak. You should check out some of them as well as the overhead pictures from :
https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/
and maybe
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2018-10-21-michael-before-after-photos-florida-coast
That latter one has a 3 minute segment of a home built to current standards plus a little more. That dude was not the only one to build strong. And the old motel that was there in 1966 when I rented a closeby cottage is still standing, albeit damaged. The cottage is now out in the Gulf or a half mile inland.
In short, the hurricane stories of gloom and doom are a lot like the ones we see over and over by the climate alarmists. If you are prepared, you will come thru an order of magnitude safer and better than if you are not.
Gums sends…
I would rather have a DoD toilet seat or wrench set over that study…for the same amount of expenditure.
As Yogi Berra once observed: It’s deja vu all over again!
Back on July 23, 2015, the United States DoD released a similar report assessing the “national security implications of climate change.” That full report is available at https://archive.defense.gov/pubs/150724-congressional-report-on-national-implications-of-climate-change.pdf?source=govdelivery
The first paragraph in that report’s conclusion states:
“The Department of Defense sees climate change as a present security threat, not strictly a long-term risk. We are already observing the impacts of climate change in shocks and stressors to vulnerable nations and communities, including in the United States, and in the Arctic, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America. Case studies have demonstrated measurable impacts on areas vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and in specific cases significant interaction between conflict dynamics and sensitivity to climate changes. Although climate-related stress will disproportionately affect fragile and conflict-affected states, even resilient, well-developed countries are subject to the effects of climate change in significant and consequential ways.”
In other words, it was an inconsequential fluff piece.
That report was only 14 pages long and cost $22,000 (2015 USD). It was a real bargain for US taxpayers when compared to the recent DoD report discussed in the above article, which runs 22 pages including appendices and cost $329,000 for a similar amount of fluff. Just one more reason that US Defense budgets need to get bigger, I guess.
This reads like a high school science report.