Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Professor Emeritus Michael Klare, trusted military leaders could “bridge the gap” by convincing climate skeptics.
A military perspective on climate change could bridge the gap between believers and doubters
Michael Klare
Professor Emeritus and Director, Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies, Hampshire CollegeFebruary 19, 2020 12.54am AEDT
As experts warn that the world is running out of time to head off severe climate change, discussions of what the U.S. should do about it are split into opposing camps. The scientific-environmental perspective says global warming will cause the planet severe harm without action to slow fossil fuel burning. Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it.
With these two extremes polarizing the American political arena, climate policy has come to a near standstill. But as I argue in my new book,“All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change,” the U.S. armed forces offer a third perspective that could help bridge the gap.
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“Changing weather patterns, rising temperatures, and dramatic shifts in rainfall contribute to drought, famine, migration, and resource competition” in Africa, General Thomas D. Waldhauser, then commander of the U.S. Africa Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2019. “As each group seeks land for its own purposes, violent conflict can ensue.”
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The military’s approach to climate change could bridge the divide between believers and doubters. People who assert that protecting endangered habitats and species is trivial next to health and economic problems, and that society has time to tackle whatever threats may develop, might be persuaded to take action when they hear from respected generals and admirals that the nation’s security is at stake.
This is already happening in some communities, such as Norfolk, Virginia, where base commanders and local officials have found common ground in addressing the area’s extreme vulnerability to sea level rise and hurricane-induced flooding.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/a-military-perspective-on-climate-change-could-bridge-the-gap-between-believers-and-doubters-128609
President Obama tried using the military to convince climate skeptics. How did that work out?
After all these years climate activists still don’t get us. Perhaps they judge us by their own followers, they’re still looking for leaders, magic influencers who can bring us into line.
“Us”?
That would be those not of the left/greens like you Loydo, so those who need indoctrination by Generals. So in Australia basically 90% of the population who won’t vote for this junk but there is probably 40% who will tell you they think about it (thoughts and prayers) so they probably only need a short period in a detention camp to bring them to their senses.
The picture shows a squadron of Russian warships of the past which no longer exist. A bit like climate change!!
Yes. Closest seems to be a Kara class cruiser and the next a Kashin class destroyer.
Cold War Soviet ships.
I remember when the majority of academia were doing all they could to get the military off their campuses. ROTC was persona non grata. ROTCs in uniform were mocked by fellow students and some professors attempted to besmirch them and anything military. Now they’re begging for their help in selling their scam?
The professor is deluded and grossly overestimates his own competence.
Perhaps they could talk about how sea level rise will affect their ships. 😉
A rising sea level lifts all boats (and ships), very slowly.
The same military generals that squandered billions in keeping the USA involved in wasteful wars?
Politicians are the ones who say whether the USA goes to war or not. The generals do what they are told by the national leaders. As long as it’s constitutional.
Who gets to decide which wars are wasteful and which are not?
Why do you believe you get to decide for the rest of us?
Respected huh?
A few years ago here in Oz we made a ‘respected’ army type ‘Australian of the Year’ for reasons that now escape me.
Then he went woke.
He went from a Respected Military Figure to Military Figure almost overnight.
Young Michael, I believe, has all this arse about. Military types don’t think in terms of solutions to causes. They think in terms of solutions to affects.
Scenario – Global Warming causes ‘nation A’ to attempt ‘military action B’.
The solution military types come up with are not ‘how do we stop Global Warming, but how to we apply military force to stop Nation A from attempting Military Action B and instead return to complying with our nation’s current foreign policy, or to put it a tad more crudely, “Who do we have to kill”.
The important parts are ‘Nation A’ and ‘Military action B’.
The ‘Global Warming causes’ part? Interchangeable as far as they are concerned. It could be ‘a radical government put into power by religious veal’ or ‘alien space pimples on the dark side of the moon’. The plausibility of the cause may drive just how deeply they study the problem, but at the end of the day their prime concern to coming up with the most force efficient plan to smite the enemies until they stop.
It might upset the more woke parts of society, but it is a safe bet that your nation has, at one stage or another, put thought into having to fight each and every other nation on the planet. Doesn’t mean they plan to attack, just they have put thought into the question. Tis what they do. Get over it.
Absolutely! The role of a military is to kill people and break their things. Too many people see them as a very expensive, international, meals-on-wheels program. While they don’t mind supplying things to allies when the chips are down, the preference is to do so only for national advantage. The military is not a charity organization, and international diplomacy is based on achieving national objectives. It’s great when other nations want the same thing you want, but the hard part is convincing them of it.
“Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity when operating in groups.” Colonel Thomas Hammes.
The military would be the last place one should look towards for guidance and conciliation.
Toxic groupthink is endemic in the upper echelons of the military. The Bay of Pigs debacle, escalation of war in Vietnam are simple examples.
Toxic groupthink brought us the joy of the Global Financial Crisis and Toxic groupthink characterises the radical climate change alarmists position.
In a chilling and prescient book “Groupthink” published in 1972; the Yale Psychologist Irving L. Janis observed how panels of “experts” could make devastating mistakes.
“People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.” (Janis, Irving L. (1972). Victims of groupthink; a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.)
The pressure for conformity is enormous in Climate alarmist circles; the echo chambers of Twitter are replete with groupthinkers piling on to annihilate any deviation from the consensus. Deviants such as Professor Peter Ridd, formerly of JCU for example have paid the ultimate price for breaking away from groupthink.
I cannot imagine any conciliatory role for the military in the toxic groupthink closed shop of climate change alarmism.
“Be careful when you blindly follow the masses, sometimes the ‘m’ is silent.”..Anonymous
“The military would be the last place one should look towards for guidance and conciliation. Toxic groupthink is endemic in the upper echelons of the military. The Bay of Pigs debacle, escalation of war in Vietnam are simple examples.”
All those decisions were made by politicians. The military follows the directions of their national leaders.
The military would be one of the first places I would look to for advice. Sure, you can find a few CAGW believers among them, Obama appointed quite a few, but most of the military leaders have their heads on straight.
If we had done what the military leaders wanted to do during the Vietnam war: Invade North Vietnam and destroy their military forces; then the war would have been over in a matter of months instead of being a “war of attrition” that left the enemy in place in a safehaven, took many years, and ended up killing more people than an invasion would have killed.
Military officers are practical people. They like to get the most bang for the least sacrifice. Polticians don’t usually listen to the practical generals and end up screwing things up royally like they did in Vietnam.
Democrat politicians, I would hasten to add. Democrats were and are the problem when it comes to U.S. national defense and military activity. They are clueless and fearful and incapable of defending the U.S. for those reasons, and have demonstrated this on more than one occasion such as in Vietnam and in Iraq where they turned the aftermath of the war into a fiasco that has led to Iran dominating the politics and people of Iraq. We’ll see if Trump can turn this around. But don’t blame any of it on the U.S. military. They did their job.
The Vietnam War was actually won, then the politicians gave away the victory.
Yes, it was one of the biggest betrayals in history. The U.S. was morally and legally obligated to defend South Vietnam if North Vietnam ever attacked it again, but when North Vietnam attacked again in 1975, the Democrats controlled the Congress and refused to go to the aid of South Vietnam. That’s why you saw all the South Vietnamese running away. They lost hope after their only friend abandoned them to their fate.
What’s ironic about this was that all throughout the Vietnam war, the American generals were eager to find some way to confront the North Vietnamese military in a classic military battle where the Americans felt sure they would prevail (and they would have). But, of course, the North Vietnamese knew they could not stand up face to face with the U.S. military for long, so they fough a hit and run battle with U.S. troops, attacking and then disappearing into the darkness, frustrating our generals who were looking for big battles that favored the American military.
So when the North Vietnamese broke the peace treaty and attacked South Vietnam in 1975, they sent a substantial part of their military south in the attack and when they arrived in northern South Vietnam they and the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees who were fleeing in front of them, created a gigantic traffic jam all across northern South Vietnam to the point that the whole North Vietnamese military attack was halted and they couldn’t move forward and they couldn’t move backwards. They were sitting ducks.
The Democrats in Congress would not have even had to send American troops back into South Vietnam to destroy this North Vietnamese attack. All they had to do was order the B-52 bombers stationed at Guam and around the world to carpet bomb the North Vietnamese military and they would have wiped them out in a matter of days. They could have broken the back of the attack and North Vietnam’s military with one fell swoop from the air.
Of course, the Democrats never even considered honoring the peace agreement and told the South Vietnamese to go to Hell. Their delusional anti-war-at-any-cost thinking caused the death and displacemet of millions of South Vietnamese.
Democrats are not capable of defending the United States. They screw it up every time.
One must ask why these same people are happy to give China, the largest emitter of CO2 @ur momisugly 30%, a free pass to emit as much CO2 they please up to 2030 and then wonder why some people are sceptical.
I don’t care who calls it roast beef, I’m still not holding my nose and swallowing. I know how to read the menu myself, thank you.
“Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it. ”
It helps one to understand other people if you listen to them.
If he listened, he would know that this is hardly an accurate summation of the beliefs of the heathen he hopes to bring into the fold.
For one thing, “mainstream climate science” is not a science, it is a collection of suppositions, dubious conjectures, making stuff up, doomsday fearmongering, an appalling ignorance of history, and the worst case ever documented of selective attention.
Skeptics do not reject science, they reject the wrong ideas of bad scientists.
Warmistas, on the other hand, ignore that they are basing their fearmonger on a small amount of warming from what was the coldest period in 12,000 years.
They ignore that the world is in an ice age, and in fact even during the interglacial we remain at close to the coldest temperature in Earth’s history.
They ignore that cold is what is deadly, not warmth.
They ignore that vast areas of our planet are locked into a state of deadly perpetual cold, and that a large portion of the inhabited regions are seasonally cold enough to kill an unprotected person in minutes to hours.
They ignore that life flourishes in warmth, and dies graveyard dead in cold temperatures.
The pretend CO2 is a deadly and dangerous pollutant, and ignore that it is in fact the basic molecular building block of the entire biosphere, and that the amount of it in the air is precariously low…close to the level that will lead to the extinction of all life when the current interglacial ends.
They ignore that all of their predictions have failed to materialize.
They ignore that in complete opposition to everything they have been saying for three decades, the planet is providing an ever more bountiful supply of food for a growling number of people.
They ignore that poverty is at an all time low in human history.
They ignore that more people are living longer than ever, and remaining healthier while they are alive than ever before in human history.
They ignore that by every objective measure and metric, the world is getting to be a better place for people to live, that prosperous people take better care of that for which they have stewardship, and that our prosperity is based almost completely on our having and maintaining a continuous supply of abundant and inexpensive energy.
In fact they ignore all of reality, and live in an make believe dystopian world of fever dream fantasy, enforced ignorance, institutionalized propaganda, and imaginary problems that are perpetually and forever just over the horizon.
And they wonder why sane people are not cheering them on?
“Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it. ”
It helps one to understand other people if you listen to them.
If he listened, he would know that this is hardly an accurate summation of the beliefs of the heathens he hopes to bring into the fold.
For one thing, “mainstream climate science” is not a science, it is a collection of suppositions, dubious conjectures, making stuff up, doomsday fearmongering, an appalling ignorance of history, and the worst case ever documented of selective attention.
Skeptics do not reject science, they reject the wrong ideas of bad scientists.
Warmistas, on the other hand, ignore that they are basing their fearmongering on a small amount of warming from what was the coldest period in 12,000 years.
They ignore that the world is in an ice age, and in fact even during the interglacial we remain at close to the coldest temperature in Earth’s history.
They ignore that cold is what is deadly, not warmth.
They ignore that vast areas of our planet are locked into a state of deadly perpetual cold, and that a large portion of the inhabited regions are seasonally cold enough to k!ll an unprotected person in minutes to hours.
They ignore that life flourishes in warmth, and dies graveyard dead in cold temperatures.
The pretend CO2 is a deadly and dangerous pollutant, and ignore that it is in fact the basic molecular building block of the entire biosphere, and that the amount of it in the air is precariously low…close to the level that will lead to the extinction of all life when the current interglacial ends.
They ignore that all of their predictions have failed to materialize.
They ignore that in complete opposition to everything they have been saying for three decades, the planet is providing an ever more bountiful supply of food for a growing number of people.
They ignore that poverty is at an all time low in human history.
They ignore that more people are living longer than ever, and remaining healthier while they are alive than ever before in human history.
They ignore that by every objective measure and metric, the world is getting to be a better place for people to live, that prosperous people take better care of that for which they have stewardship, and that our prosperity is based almost completely on our having and maintaining a continuous supply of abundant and inexpensive energy.
In fact they ignore all of reality, and live in a make believe dystopian world of fever dream fantasy, enforced ignorance, institutionalized propaganda, and imaginary problems that are perpetually and forever just over the horizon.
And they wonder why sane people are not cheering them on?
Excellent posts, Nicholas. 🙂
Oops!
I thought that first one did not post.
If you repost something and get a message that you have already posted that comment, then your comment has been accepted, it just isn’t displaying yet.
It is worth repeating, ad nauseum
I’m sure there’s plenty of concern for sea level rise at the Norfolk Naval Base. But the notion that sea level rise can be stopped if only we ban fossil fuels is ridiculous as well as totally ignoring geologic history.
Current Generals are all just seen as Politicians, sucking up, pandering, doing what their boss wants. For this to work, the general would have to be the level of an Eisenhower.
If Ike were alive, he would carefully weigh both sides of the issue and not just parrot what one side was telling him.
Given the evidence, there is a greater that 50% chance Ike would come out as an AGW skeptic and rail against the Climate Industrial Complex.
Great plan.
“Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it.”
Another non-truth fabricated by the UN Propaganda Council.. The truth is that many, likely most, skeptics, who reject the propagandists and their “Control Initiative.” believe that the climate is cyclic, naturally variable and man’s contribution is minimal and beneficial.
We are currently living in a golden age supported by increasing CO2 and when the shoe falls humanity will be plunged into the next Ice Age. Then things will really become effed up. And because there is nothing the Governments of the world can do about warming; there will be nothing they can do to prevent the next Ice Age.
Most of the Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals I know of are complete boobs in anything but their own profession, and most are not very good at that either. Government work.
Someone should explain that most skeptics do not buy the “Argument from Authority” irregardless of who the authority is. Climate change believers lives are run by others and they think everyone works that way. That’s why fear is the only real weapon they have and once they hit a thinking person, not an emoter, even then their goal is often thwarted. They have zero understanding of skeptics, preferring to believe that simply pummeling them into submission is the only answer. It’s not science at all.
A) This is oddly reminiscent of leftists claiming tyrannical despotic societies are best at combating climate whatever.
B) I can think of few ways that destroy credibility quicker than military administrators proclaiming and proselytizing ‘climate nonsense’ well outside of their areas of expertise.
C) Obviously, Klare is another urban professor imagining things from the comfort of his couch..
The US top military ranks STILL have credibility?
With whom? As a retired airman, I can tell you anyone above O-5 is a politician in uniform, and O-5s are politicians in training. 90% of senior officers I met in my career had degrees in something other than science and engineering, and most are out of their element when having to discuss anything technical. What they are very good at is figuring out what they need to say to get their projects funded and playing to their bosses’ priorities. If the SecDef is a Warmunist, then all your proposals include addressing CAGW elements in them. You spend money on crazy stuff because the person controlling the purse strings believes it. Many of them come to believe crazy things because their careers depend on believing those crazy things.
Although I’ll agree that many 0-5s and above are political and got their rank by keeping their nose up the rears of those that could effect their promotions, there are still plenty of real warfighters who’s primary concern is the troops and their ability to make war effectively. Men that will not sacrifice their subordinates when the lawyers come calling because they recognize that warfare is a life and death issue and the fog of war still is a major factor thus it’s just not right to expect an E-5 making life death decisions under fire to constantly have his every move questioned.
Military Officers can suffer from Human-Caused Climate Change Derangement Syndrome, too.
I “liked” because it made me laugh.
last people Id trust to tell me jackschitt re climate
or the truth about much at all really.
The military uniform as a great effect on minds, as observed after the performance of Alexander “it’s Lieutenant Colonel” Vindman.
Just not on the ones that needed to be convinced of climbal warange.
The Democratic candidates’ proposed budgets to “fight climate change” are beyond enormous. Much of that money is likely to go the military. Read below:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/democratic-candidates-presidential-climate-plans/
Good luck finding a general officer willing throw away his hard-earned reputation for the climate scam.
When you hit “general” level, you are a consummate organizational politician. If someone is supplementing the general’s retirement income at a sufficiently high level, I don’t doubt you could find one to go along.
Proof that Climate Change is a farce is that there is NO concentrated “existential” effort to build nuclear power plants for the production of electricity needed to power the world, all the EVs they want built that will double the amount of needed electrical power AND actually REDUCE CO2. More people die in one day from the flu than have died from the production of electricity by nuclear power.
More evidence that the First Church of Climate Change Hysteria is out of scientific evidence (if it ever had any that wasn’t produced by cooking the books). Sorry, garbage elite, generals and admirals won’t convince us.