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Military intelligence

27 May 2020 | News Roundup

One of our recent videos reviewed the predictions from a high-powered US military report on climate change published nearly 20 years ago. Laughable hardly describes it. But here they come again, this time according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation story in the person of one Kate Guy, a senior research fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Security. According to the story, “Recent research she did with military officials on climate scenarios over different time horizons found ‘near-term impacts are much more severe than we thought they would be’ – something already seen in worsening wildfires, storms and other disasters.” Things that haven’t yet happened are far worse than expected, as seen in other things that exist in slogans but not reality. Welcome to the new era of military planning.

“From collapsing supply chains to power grabs by populist leaders, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed how a crisis can swiftly ramp up wider security risks – a clear warning as climate change looms large, security experts warned”. Funny we’ve lived with climate change for over a century and it looked nothing like the pandemic, but now one self-described expert you never heard of before told an online event you weren’t at that climate risks are “the next big thing – the longer-term, more intense form of this (coronavirus) crisis”. We had no idea global warming would soon require a lockdown and vaccinations. But then, we’re not experts.

In this case the one person whose say-so is that of an expert says she draws her conclusion from the fact that little research has been done on the subject. Which is OK, we suppose, given that with climate change the customary procedure is verdict first, trial afterwards. (Hence Facebook restricted PragerU for saying polar bears were not vanishing without worrying about whether, oh, you know, polar bears were vanishing.) It saves time, and time is apparently a luxury we don’t possess.

The story also warns of a crisis in the Amazon as the water dries up and the trees die off. And as usual it’s a downward spiral as climate change causes security threats like organized crime and organized crime causes climate change. But on the plus side, “In the United States, framing climate change as a security issue has helped draw interest from conservative lawmakers”. So there’s an opportunity to twist the issue so we can use psychology to bypass rational discussion. And who wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?

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