Tillerson: Climate change not ‘imminent national security threat’

Testifying before the Senate, Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson says that climate change is not an “imminent national security threat” as Senate democrats claim.

SENATOR JEFF MERKLEY: “But, we are also viewing often climate change as a national security issue. And, since you believe– So, I wanted to ask, do you see it as a national security issue?”
REX TILLERSON: “I don’t see it as the imminent national security threat as perhaps others do.”
MERKELY: “One of the things that’s noted is how the changing climate in the Middle East concentrated Syrian villages into the towns and sparked the civil war that has now produced something like four million and counting refugees having profound impacts on European security, and that would be an example. Is that something you’ve looked at or considered to be real or perhaps misleading? Any thoughts in that regard?”
TILLERSON: “The facts on the ground are indisputable in terms of what’s happening with drought, disease, insect populations, all the things you cite, but the science behind the clear connection is not conclusive. And, there are many reports out there that we are unable yet to connect specific events to climate change alone.”
MERKELY: “What we’re seeing are a lot of scientific reports that will say we can tell you the odds increased, we can’t tell you any specific event was the direct consequence. For example, hurricane Sandy might have occurred in a hundred year period but the odds of it happening are higher with the higher sea level, the higher energy in the storms. So, do you agree with that view point that the– essentially that the odds of dramatic events occurring whether it’s more forest fires or more hurricanes with more power is a rational observation from the scientific literature?”
TILLERSON: “I think as you indicated, there’s some literature out there that suggests that. There’s other literature that says it’s inconclusive.”
MERKLEY: “One of the things we– I’m sorry to hear that viewpoint because it’s overwhelmingly– the scales are on one side of this argument.”
Nominations Hearing for Secretary of State Nominee Rex Tillerson
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee
January 11, 2017

Cheers! Trump’s national security adviser doesn’t think climate change is a national security threat

Via: https://thinkprogress.org/kt-mcfarland-climate-national-security-denial-b7d34bb0d91e?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds

The newest member of Trump’s national security team is Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland, recently tapped to be deputy national security adviser. And like Trump’s earlier national security picks — National Security Advisor Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and CIA Director Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — McFarland dismisses the idea that climate change constitutes a threat to national security.

In 2015, McFarland criticized President Obama’s decision to attend the U.N. climate conference in Paris just months after terror attacks rocked the city. Obama called his attendance “a powerful rebuke” to the attacks.

“President Obama thinks that climate change is the greatest strategic and geological and existential threat to our future,” McFarland said on Fox News following Obama’s remarks. “Here we are, and the irony. If it were not so tragic, it would be funny. Here we have ISIS, who are attacking with suicide vests and Kalashnikovs and potentially chemical weapons in the French water supply. What are we doing? We’re going to fight ISIS. We’re going to have windmills, we’re going to have solar panels. We’re going to show them.”

McFarland continued: “All it does is it gives encouragement to the terrorists who feel that they have been selected and chosen by Allah to establish the caliphate and kill everybody who disagrees with them. They now look at this and they are laughing.”…

The Atlantic mag: ‘Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene’ – ‘Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism’

donald-trump-is-the-first-demagogue-of-the-anthropocene-the-atlantic-clipular

More from The Atlantic’s associate editor Robinson Meyer:

Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees. I pictured, in other words, something not so far from Trump 2016.

I just assumed it wouldn’t pop up until 2040.

Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees.

Trump is showing us how ill-prepared the United States is for post-climate demagoguery, and he gives us an opportunity to improve our societal immune response.

Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict, but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.

In effect, it could erode people’s sense of security, pushing them toward authoritarianism.

 

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Global Warming Doesn’t Actually Cause Wars, Scientists Say

By Andrew Follett

New research by Scandinavian scientists claims the link between global warming and war is greatly exaggerated.

Claims that global warming causes war don’t hold up to scrutiny, according to the study. The scientific team, led by Dr. Nina von Uexkull, examined conflict data for Asia and Africa since 1989 and found that ethnic political exclusion, political tensions, proximity to pre-existing violence or other various country-specific risk factors are much better explanations for why wars occur than global warming.

Researchers paid particular attention to the Syrian civil war, which environmentalists typically blame on a drought they say was caused by global warming.

“Calling Syria a climate war, for instance, means ignoring longer-term historical tensions across the region, and lets the humans involved off the hook,” states a summary of the research. “Our well-meaning celebrities and politicians would perhaps be surprised to hear that Uexkull and colleagues found the impact of drought on conflict was generally ‘limited.’”

The new study concurs with previous research by scientists at the free market Cato Institute, which said that blaming the Syrian civil war on global warming was “absurd” and stated rainfall models that blame global warming for Syria’s drought are “fudged.”

The research was financially supported by the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Department of Peace and Conflict Research, which are supported by the Norwegian and Swedish governments respectively.

“[W]hat this study by Uexkull and colleagues confirms is that most communities are in fact quite climate resilient,” researchers concluded. “It generally takes a lot more than a dry spell to kick off a war. This should give us some hope that more intense weather events, such as severe droughts, do not automatically lead to more conflict or even civil war among those affected.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/18/global-warming-doesnt-actually-cause-wars-scientists-say/#ixzz4NSBRvC24

America’s most influential enviro McKibben: Use America’s defense budget to fight climate war

Via The HARRY READ ME File: Described by the Boston Globe as “America’s most important environmentalist”, 350.org founder Bill McKibben says America’s defense budget must “be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face” — climate change.

BILL MCKIBBEN: “It should be possible to build large quantities of solar panels and turbine blades, and it should be possible to put lots of people at work on good jobs doing that, okay? And it should be a huge priority, and if you think we don’t have the money then you’re not paying attention. We have things like the defense budget that need to be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face. The conceit of that New Republic piece was that we are in fact already at war though we do not really recognize it. But, by all the measures that we normally count as warfare, that’s what’s going on. We’re losing territory day by day. People are being killed day by day in great numbers. There will probably be added to that death toll tonight someplace along the coast of Florida. We’re at war, we’re just not fighting back, and the time has come to do that, and it will take as the history of WWII shows, government leadership to make that happen. It will take a concentrated national effort and a concentrated international effort to make that happen. It won’t happen on its own, it requires leadership.”

Bill McKibbin: The Hottest Fight in the Hottest Year
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
October 6, 2016…

Blameshifting: Obama tells DiCaprio climate change ‘contributed’ to the Syrian civil war

WASHINGTON DC — Discussing the threat of climate change with Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, President Obama on October 3, said “powerful” studies suggest “the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “There’s already some really interesting work — not definitive but powerful — showing that the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war. Well, if you start magnifying that across a lot of states, a lot of nation states that already contain a lot of poor people who are just right at the margins of survival, this becomes a national security issue. And, that’s why even as we have members of Congress who scoff at climate change at the same time as they are saluting and wearing flag pins and extolling their patriotism they’re not paying attention to our Joints Chief of Staff and the Pentagon who are saying this is one of the most significant national security threats that we face over the next fifty years.”

SXSL: President Obama Participates in a Discussion with Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (Also see: DiCaprio: Climate deniers ‘should not be allowed to hold public office’)
The White House
October 3, 2016

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Climate Depot Debunks President Obama’s claim:

Scientific studies, data and history refute Pentagon’s climate/national security claims – Climate Depot’s Rebuttal

Der Spiegel: Even Warmist Scientists Dismiss Climate Change As Cause Of Syrian Conflict, Refugee Crisis

Flashback 2014: ‘Why Climate Change Had No Impact on the Syrian Uprising

OBama Shifts Blame From Assad To Global Warming As The Cause Of The Syrian Civil War: ‘National security experts have pushed back against these claims. Former U.S. Army Gen. Robert Scales told Congress in March the “administration’s new-found passion to connect climate change to war is an example of faulty theories that rely for relevance on politically-correct imaginings rather than established historical precedent.” “The point is that in today’s wars, politically-correct theories inserted into a battle plan might well extend war needlessly and get soldiers killed,” Scales said.

Obama’s claims are wrong on three levels: 1) There is no evidence that Climate Change causes drought, nor is there evidence that the number/scope of droughts are increasing.
2) At the time the Syrian civil war started in 2014 the Earth’s temperatures hadn’t warmed for 16 years
3) The Syrian civil war grew out …

Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns

Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns

http://www.thegwpf.com/renewable-energy-poses-growing-security-risks-gwpf-warns/

In light of the statewide blackout in South Australia, the GWPF is warning that intermittent wind and solar energy pose a serious and growing energy security risk and threaten to undermine the reliability of electricity generation. A paper published by the GWPF two years ago (UK Energy Security: Myth and Reality) shows that the ability of the electrical grid to absorb intermittent renewable energy becomes increasingly more hazardous with scale. In fact, wind and solar power, because of the intermittent nature of the electricity generated, are the real risk to security of supply. Full paper (PDF)

— gReader Pro…

Alarmists Freak Out That Global Warming Will Expose Top Secret Nuclear Facility, It Won’t

Global warming will expose a secret Cold War-era nuclear base in the coming decades — that’s according to The Guardian newspaper on a recent climate study.

The tone of the article is that Camp Century, a defunct U.S. military base in northwest Greenland, is on the verge of being exposed by global warming. The camp and the supposedly radioactive waste it conceals were part of an “underground cold war network that had been thought buried forever, until climate change made that highly unlikely,” according to The Guardian.

Camp Century is “likely to be uncovered by rising temperatures within decades,” The Guardian urgently reported. The study’s lead author added to The Guardian article’s sense of urgency.

“They thought it would never be exposed,” William Colgan, a glacier scientist at York University, told The Guardian.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/28/liberal-paper-claims-global-warming-will-expose-a-secret-us-nuclear-base-within-decades-heres-why-thats-misleading/#ixzz4LZK39nXa