NATO’s Jejune Climate Risk Assessment Ignores the Real Threats to The West

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

NATO, on its 75^th anniversary, has just published a strikingly fatuous Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment, which begins thus –

“Climate change is a defining challenge of our time, with a profound impact on Allied security. At the 2021 Summit in Brussels, NATO Heads of State and Government endorsed a Climate Change and Security Action Plan and agreed that NATO should become the leading organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security.”

Fortunately, threadbare clichés such as “defining challenge of our time” and “profound impact” are now so shop-worn that they serve only to indicate the feeble-minded inarticulacy of the goofs who cobbled together this jejune document.

The assessment goes on to discuss “The Changing Climate” –

“Over the last year, internationally recognised entities whose reports inform NATO’s work on climate change and security highlighted twin themes: the speed and scale at which the climate crisis continues to unfold, and the overwhelming urgency of addressing the root causes of climate change. According to the World Meteorological Organization, for example, 2023 was the hottest year on record, with the global average near-surface temperatures reaching 1.45 C ± 0.12 C above preindustrial levels. The past nine years (2015 to 2023) have been the warmest years within the 174-year observational record of the WMO.

“Similarly concerning observations have been made regarding the loss of Arctic sea ice, rising ocean levels, soil degradation, reduced fresh water availability, and the global increase in the number of extremely hot days. The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30 tonnes of ice an hour, which is 20% more than previously thought. Concurrently, global average sea level rose by about 0.76 centimetres from 2022 to 2023, according to NASA. In total, the global average sea level has risen about 9.4 centimetres since 1993. According to 2022 United Nations estimates, up to 40 percent of all soils worldwide are moderately or seriously degraded.”

Let us dispose some of the errors in this flatulent passage – errors on which the rest of the document is unsoundly predicated.

1. “Internationally recognized entities” do not do science. They do politics, and they have rent-seekers’ vested interests in pretending that warmer weather worldwide is what Sellar and Yeatman called “A Bad Thing” when it is proving to be A Good Thing.
2. “Speed and scale at which the climate crisis continues to unfold”: It is unfolding so rapidly that the world is indeed changing – but changing for the better.

CO₂ fertilization has increased the net primary productivity of flora – the global total green biomass of trees and plants – by 15-30% in recent decades (Zhu and Piao 2017) –

No surprise, then, that the yields of all staple crops in response to a doubling of the life-giving plant food that is CO₂ in the air (Idso 2013) will increase significantly –

The increase in cereal crop yields per acre has been particularly spectacular. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which is, after all, one of the “internationally recognized entities” that so impress NATO’s policy wonks, substantially concurs with Idso’s analysis –

The increase in cereal crop yields per acre has been particularly spectacular. Cereal crop yields have tripled in 60 years. Though much of this tripling arises from better agricultural methods, at the very least it can be said that our sins of emission have done no net harm to crop yields (OurWorldInData, based on UNFAO data) –

Thanks in part to more CO₂ in the air and the consequent increase in crop yields, famines in the past half-century of increasing CO₂ concentration have fallen (OurWorldInData 2023) to record lows. One would have thought that NATO would have provided balance by including facts such as these –

The most basic question, when assessing the risk of warmer weather, is whether the warmer weather is, in net terms, causing loss of life. Bjørn Lomborg takes a refreshingly hard-headed approach, in marked contrast to the self-serving, mannered panic of NATO’s bureaucracy. For some years, he has been analysing the databases of the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the Centre for Research into the Epidemiology of Disasters. Despite a quadrupling of global population in the past 100 years of “climate crisis”, annually-averaged climate-related deaths have fallen. They have not fallen by a little. They have fallen by 99% –

Good news such as this, however, has been meticulously excluded from NATO’s purported “assessment”, just as it has been sedulously excised from the news media from which, one suspects, NATO chiefly obtains its erroneous information on the climate question. What these facts show is that – so far, at any rate – global warming has proven to be A Good Thing.

3. “2023 was the hottest year on record.” So what? Warmer weather saves lives, for it is cold that is the real killer, as paper after paper in The Lancet and other medico-scientific journals attests. Here is one example (Zhao, Guo, Ye at al. 2021) –

4. “The past nine years (2015 to 2023) have been the warmest years within the 174-year observational record of the WMO.” Again, so what. And, since Whammo is one of the “internationally recognized entities” foolishly worshiped by NATO’s High Command, one would have thought that someone would have done enough basic research to work out that it only came into existence in 1950 and that, therefore, the 174-year global-temperature dataset is not Whammo’s dataset. It is, in fact, kept by the Hadley Center and the University of East Anglia.
5. “Loss of Arctic sea ice”: I was in Bali almost two decades ago, sitting next to Al Gore, shortly before he stood up announced that all the sea ice in the Arctic would be gone by 2013. But it is still there: he was, as usual, wrong. Again, even if the loss of sea ice were not a cyclical event (there was probably less ice during the medieval warm period than today), why is it thought to be a Bad Thing? I once attended a fascinatingly ludicrous lecture at the Cambridge University Business School, where a hapless economist calculated that sea-ice loss would cost the planet trillions of dollars as the reduced albedo greatly increased the rate of global warming. As usual with this sort of analysis, there were no quantities. So I sat down and worked it out. The solar zenith angle at the Poles is such that the loss of albedo in the polar regions would be negligible even if all the ice in the Arctic disappeared altogether.
6. “Rising ocean levels”: Once again, all the original extremist predictions have proven unfounded. New York is still there. So is Florida. So is London. Sea level is rising on average at a rate of about 4 to 6 inches per century. The most comprehensive analyses were performed by the late Professor Nils-Axel Mørner and by the late Tom Wysmuller. They showed that, after correction for regional variations in the continuing rate of isostatic rebound of tectonic plates following the end of the last Ice Age, sea level everywhere is rising at more or less the same harmless rate.
7. “Soil degradation”: So far, the alleged “soil degradation” seems to have had a very strongly net-beneficial effect on the growth of trees, plants and crops worldwide (not that you would know it from reading the NATO document). Nor is it explained why NATO imagines that more CO₂ in the air, and the consequent slightly warmer weather, contributes in net terms to “soil degradation”. Failure to adhere to sound agricultural practices, such as crop and livestock rotation, will lead to local soil degradation: but that cannot legitimately be blamed on climate change.
8. “Global increase in the number of extremely hot days”: Yet again, NATO has failed to check its facts. In those parts of the world where temperature records have been kept for at least a century, it is plain that the Grapes of Wrath dustbowl years of the 1930s set far more heat records than have been seen since. The United States is a good example –

9. “The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30 tonnes of ice an hour, which is 20% more than previously thought”: Well, that is little more than 250,000 tons a year, which is negligible, and well within natural variability. It is also probably untrue, because ice has been accumulating on the high Greenland Plateau: so much so that the old DEW-line ICBM detection stations from the Cold War are no longer on the surface of the ice but 20-30 feet below it. There has been some loss of ice on the coastal plain and in the surrounding sea, but evidence from old whaling records and from the early history of Greenland’s settlement by Leif Eriksen shows there was less ice in Greenland during the medieval warm period than there is today. For instance, the Viking burial-ground near Hvalsey is under permafrost today, but it was not under permafrost when the Vikings buried their dead.

It is tedious to have to refute, time and time again, such tendentious and ill-informed litanies of supposed net harms from warmer weather worldwide.

But the most serious defect in NATO’s “assessment” is that it altogether ignores the real strategic threat posed not by climate change itself (which is net-beneficial) but by the climate-change panic among the official classes – almost exclusively in Western nations – to which its limp, inadequate document is just one more tired, me-too, retread contribution.

For it is only in the West that anyone is doing anything about the imagined (and imaginary) threat supposedly posed by warmer weather. Western nations – most of them belonging to NATO – are trashing their economies in the most directly damaging way they possibly can, by making energy needlessly and disproportionately expensive, unreliable and scarce.

Windmills and solar panels are no substitute for proper, base-load electricity. The most efficient ways to generate continuous power are coal-fired and nuclear power stations, but the climate Communists in the West oppose both. As a direct result, electricity in the West now typically costs about seven times what it costs in Russia and China, India and Pakistan, the four Communist-led giants of the East. This colossal, self-inflicted terms-of-trade disadvantage is a real strategic threat. It needlessly compounds the commercial difficulties that Western countries already face given the cheap labor, non-existent health care, poor social provision and negligible industrial safety regulation in the largely totalitarian East.

Frankly, it is extraordinary that what purports to be a serious analysis of the threats posed to the Western alliance by climate change makes no mention whatsoever of the fact that the ever-more dangerous alliance of Communist-led states – Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and many Muslim countries in the Arab world and elsewhere – is not only paying mere lip-service to the climate nonsense but is actively promoting that nonsense in the West via its agents of influence here. The result is a collapse in Western manufacturing industries that is now so severe that we can no longer even maintain effective national defense.

The outgoing Chief of the General Staff in the UK has issued a barely-reported warning that the cuts to defense spending made by the previous, unlamented, nominally-“Conservative” government have reduced Britain’s armed forces so greatly that at best we could take part in a small war for not more than a week. After that, we would run out of materiel. And we no longer have the industrial capacity to replace it – and the UK spends more on defense than most other NATO allies. Donald Trump is right about this, as he is about much else. Nearly all NATO nations have relied far too much, for far too long, on the military might of the United States, and NATO has accordingly done far too little to maintain its own defenses.

Not the least reason for this collapse in military capability is the obsession of Western governments with the climate nonsense. War materiel requires heavy industries such as steel-making, and heavy industries require large amounts of energy, and Western governments’ pathetic obsession with global warming has led them to interfere so much in the energy market that practically no heavy industry can afford to turn on the machines.

In Britain, for instance, the sole remaining steelworks of any significance is Port Talbot, but it has already closed one of its two large blast furnaces and proposes to close the other in a few months’ time. The excessive cost of energy caused by the unilateral industrial hara-kiri committed by Western nations destroying the free market in energy and replacing it with a grossly inefficient managed market makes it impossible to operate large-scale steelworks anywhere in Britain. The Chinese, who owned several blast furnaces in the North of England, have already closed most of them, and the Indians, who own Port Talbot, are now begging the new Socialist government for subsidies.

If the KGB-led regime in Russia were to invade Britain, this country – unlike Ukraine – would collapse almost immediately. Thanks in no small part to the destruction of our manufacturing base wrought by half-witted climate policies, what was once the world’s most formidable military nation is now among the world’s least capable. There is little comfort in the fact that, aside from the United States, all other NATO nations are still less militarily capable than Britain. And yet the NATO “assessment” is culpably silent on the significant contribution of Western-only “action on climate change” in destroying the manufacturing base without which no military power can be maintained.

As usual in propaganda documents from the Swamp and the Blob, the NATO “assessment” takes very great care not to address the central question in economics, which is the candy-cane question. Tom Sawyer goes into the sweetie-shop, slaps a few sticky coins on the counter and says, “Gee, mister, how many candy-canes can I git fer this?”

The climatic equivalent of the climate question comes in three parts. First, even if the whole world attained net zero emissions by 2050, how much global warming would be prevented by that target year? Answer: 0.1 degree. Secondly, what would that 0.1 degrees’ abatement cost? Answer: derived pro rata from the $3.8 trillion cost of net-zeroing the UK national power grid, which accounts for a quarter of UK emissions, which account for 0.8% of global emissions, the cost of abating 0.1 degrees’ warming would be $2 quadrillion. Thirdly, value for money? Answer: Each $1 billion spent would abate just one 20-millionth of a degree of warming by 2050. Would it not have been better if NATO’s High Command had argued for spending $2 quadrillion on getting the Alliance’s armed forces up to strength again?

To summarize: it is not climate change that threatens the West’s military capability: it is costly but useless climate-change mitigation policies, applied unilaterally by the West against itself and ignored in practice by just about all other nations, that are arguably the major cause of the continuing and now terminal decline in the military capability of NATO.

Yet the leadership of NATO, and the leaders of the States Parties to whom its High Command is answerable, are individually and collectively unaware of the extent to which hostile agents of influence in the West, working under the direction of the intelligence apparats of totalitarian nations that act increasingly in concert to complete the destruction of the economic and military hegemony of the hated West, are responsible for the relentless indoctrination and the ruthless silencing of free speech that have led so many to believe without doubting that global warming is a net threat, when on every legitimate measure it is not. It is a net benefit, of which other nations are taking full advantage while we destroy ourselves.

For the NATO “assessment”, go to https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_227571.htm.