[MCN] Climate change could be 'catastrophic' national security threat : "Even at scenarios of low warming"

[Lance Olsen]

USA Today Feb 24, 2020

Climate change could be a 'catastrophic' national security threat, report warns
Doyle Rice <https://www.usatoday.com/staff/2647905001/doyle-rice/>
<<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/24/climate-change-could-catastrophic-national-security-threat-report-warns/4832552002/ <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/24/climate-change-could-catastrophic-national-security-threat-report-warns/4832552002/>>>

No region of the world will be left unaffected.
Climate change is a pressing risk to national and global security.
The report recommends "quickly reducing and phasing out greenhouse gas emissions."
Excerpts

"Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades," the report states. "Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century."

The report, titled “A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change: How Likely Warming Scenarios Indicate a Catastrophic Security Future" was released Monday by the Center for Climate and Security, a non-partisan security policy institute.

To avoid such dire future impacts, the report recommends "quickly reducing and phasing out greenhouse gas emissions."

In North America, under a low-warming scenario (1.8 to 3.6 degrees by 2050), the region "will experience more intense, extreme events like storms and wildfires, with significant impacts on life, property, security infrastructure and democratic institutions," the report said. 

"The assessment is clear – climate change is a pressing risk to national and global security, and will evolve to become a severe and systemic threat the more we allow global temperatures to rise," said report co-author Sherri Goodman, a former deputy undersecretary of defense. 

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”Precipitation is just the supply side," said study coauthor Jason Smerdon, a Lamont-Doherty paleoclimatologist. "Temperature is on the demand side, the part that dries things out." 

"If we don't see it coming in stronger in, say, the next 10 years, we might have to wonder whether we are right," said Marvel. "But all the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places."

Precipitation over much of central America, Mexico the central and western United States and Europe is projected to stay about the same, or even increase. But, according to both the new study and a separate 2018 paper, rising temperatures and resulting evaporation of moisture from soils in those regions will probably predominate. 

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/eiac-ssf042919.php <https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/eiac-ssf042919.php>
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