Center for a New American Security

 An ice island calved off of the Petermann Glacier, located in northwest Greenland, on August 5th.  This image, taken by NASA's EO-1 satellite, shows the 275 kilometer island's migration (upper-left quadrant of the image).  The calving was significant because it represented the single largest area loss for Greenland. Professor Jason Box, posting on the Byrd Polar Research Center's blog, points out that "while it is unreasonable to pin an individual cracking event of a glacier on Global Warming, even if enormous, the retreat of Petermann glacier is most certainly part of a pattern of global warming."  The Petermann Glacier has retreated 21 kilometers since 2000, and based on data and images taken since 1962, its retreat has reached a new minimum. The 2009-2010 winter and May 2010 were the warmest on record in Nuuk, Greenland.  Abnormally high air termperatures in Greenland have been linked with observations of reduced sea ice concentration and warming sea surface temperatures this year.

Photo: NASA-EO

Note from Alex: This is officially my last post on the Natural Security blog!  I have learned so much in my time at CNAS. I had a blast writing for the blog and I look forward to engaging with the Natural Security community for years to come.  Working with Christine and Will, as well as the rest of the CNAS staff, has been a truly wonderful experience. As always, thanks for reading!

  Photo: Navy News Service/Tech Sgt. Cohen A. Young USAF

Yesterday The Washington Post reported that US gasoline prices have hit an 8-month low.  The article reports that “the sagging commodity market price for gasoline is good news for American motorists, promising a mild easing in pump prices. It also marks the end of a summer of relative stability for retail gasoline prices, which have fluctuated by about 20 cents per gallon since the beginning of the year and have stayed in an 8-cent range for the past 69 days.”  But the drop in oil prices may ultimately prove to be a bad thing for America’s energy policy, and particularly for the way that DOD shapes its energy strategy.

That’s because the high and volatile price of petroleum serves as a major incentive for DOD to switch to a greater use of alternative fuel sources.  In 2008, according to the US Department of Energy, about 78 percent of DOD’s total fuel use was petroleum. Since DOD is so reliant on petroleum as a fuel source, even small price fluctuations can have major budget effects: for example, in 2008 Defense Secretary Gates said “every time the price of oil goes up by $1 per barrel, it costs us about $130 million, and frankly, my credit card limit is getting narrow on that.”

This post was originally published yesterday by the Climate Compass blog at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change where Dr. Jay Gulledge is Senior Scientist and Director of the Science and Impacts Program at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Last fall I posted a blog about the unusual number and severity of extreme weather events that have been striking around the globe for the past several years. That entry focused on the alternating severe drought and heavy flooding in Atlanta in 2007-2009 as an example of the roller coaster ride that climate change is likely to be. As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming; I’ll return to this question later.

Tempestuous 2010

The weather of 2010 continues the chaos of recent years. In the past six months, the American Red Cross says it “has responded to nearly 30 larger disasters in 21 [U.S.] states and territories. Floods, tornadoes and severe weather have destroyed homes and uprooted lives …” Severe flooding struck New England in March, Nashville in May, and Arkansas and Oklahoma in June.

Nearly the entire northern hemisphere is experiencing a massive heat wave this summer. Back in February, heavy snowfall in D.C. prompted some politicians to decry global warming, but those voices are now silent in the searing heat that has gripped much of the world this summer. The first half of 2010 has been the warmest January-July period in the global temperature record, stretching back to 1880. I would be the first to question the significance of this single-year observation, but it fits perfectly into a multiple-decade pattern in which each year between 2000 and 2009 was warmer than the average temperature of the 1990s, and every year in the 1990s was warmer than the average temperature for the 1980s.

Two articles this weekend especially caught my attention.  The first, an article in The New York Times, starts to draw the climate connections between the extreme weather events that have been happening all over the world throughout the summer with frightening intensity and regularity.  The article asks the question that many have probably been asking themselves: are these bizarre events mere coincidence or related to a broader pattern of global change?  According to the Times: "the collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably."  Extreme high temperatures are particularly indicative of a changing climate, when taken as part of a larger pattern.  Climate change models predict that warming will result in an overall pattern of more record high temperatures and fewer record lows, which is apparently exactly what is playing out.  Even higher amounts of snowfall fit into the predicted patterns (a fact that certain DC residents might be surprised to hear).

I know you've probably heard enough from me on climate change, but hear me out on this one.  Last week, I wrote that sometimes the best way to sway a climate skeptic is to let them see tangible changes from warming, like a melting Arctic, with their own eyes.  A friend who kindly reads my blog posts asked me whether that matters for most people in the world, saying "we can't very well ship everyone up to the Arctic." Fair point, but maybe we don't need to.  A quote from the article explains the general global patterns that we can expect to emerge from climate change: "theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves."  Sound familiar?  Yes, it's pretty frightening that we may be seeing the tangible impacts of climate change sooner than expected, and in our own backyard too.  But ever the optimist, this also offers me a little bit of hope for those pessimists and deniers out there, because the sooner that more people reach a consensus that climate change is real, immediate and will change our world for the worst, the sooner we'll be able to take concrete steps to potentially avert this crisis.

A few months ago Will wrote about climate skepticism and the relationship between scientists and the public, explaining that individual consumers of information often view scientific information about climate change through a lens of personal interests.  This raises the question: what does it take to change peoples’ minds – people who have a vested personal or political interest in burying their heads in the sand?  Perhaps it takes seeing the effects of climate change with their own eyes.

Yesterday, Joss Garmen wrote on ClimateProgress about a recent article by Michael Hanlon, one of the UK’s most prominent climate skeptics.  Writing for The Daily Mail, where he is the Science Editor, Hanlon acknowledged blatantly in the title that, “yes, global warming is real – and deeply worrying.”  What prompted Hanlon’s about-face? A week-long trip to the Arctic where Hanlon accompanied a British science team investigating increases in summer ice melt.  Of the trip Hanlon said, “I have long been something of a climate-change skeptic, but my views in recent years have shifted.  For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic.”

In a year-long study that we completed back in April, Broadening Horizons: Climate Change and the U.S. Armed Forces, we noticed similar parallels when it came to the military’s engagement on climate change. In particular, the Navy to date has been the most forward leaning service to take hold of the implications of climate change, standing up its own Take Force Climate Change to study the impacts on U.S. naval forces. But why was the Navy the first and most active service to engage climate change? The Navy noticed measurable changes in its operating environment as a consequence of climate change, including a melting Arctic.

Squeezed in amongst last week’s apocalyptic news reports on the floods, fires and mudslides that Christine mentioned yesterday, the BBC reported that international climate change negotiations are veering even farther of course since Copenhagen (if that’s even possible).  Negotiators from both developed and developing countries apparently are in agreement on one issue only: negotiations are moving backwards. 

Climate change negotiators have met several times already throughout the year in an attempt to pull together a negotiating text for the upcoming UN climate talks in Cancun this December.  Negotiators are also meant to be accomplishing the less tangible task of “rebuilding trust” after the disappointing outcome at the Copenhagen Conference last December.

According to the BBC report, some major developing countries are backing away from the commitments they made to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  The chief U.S. negotiator, Jonathan Pershing, is quoted as saying that some countries had “walked away” from the commitments they made in Copenhagen under the non-binding Copenhagen Accord: “at this point, I am very concerned... unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from progress made in Copenhagen, and what was agreed there,” Pershing said.  On a more technical level, the negotiating text has apparently ballooned from 17 to 34 pages, as countries race to make more additions.  The EU’s co-lead negotiator described the changes to the negotiation text as a “tit for tat” exercise. 

This is shaping up to be a summer marked by its extensive natural disasters around the world. In addition to the heat waves, projections hinting at a bad hurricane season in this hemisphere, Russia’s massive wildfires, and floods hitting Central Europe, Pakistan’s already-terrible flooding is expected to grow worse. First, according to The New York Times, the Russian wildfires have “forced the military to transfer rockets away from a garrison near the capital” after “they burned through forests toward a nuclear missile warning center outside Moscow.”

Second and even more concerning in its scale, yesterday The Washington Post highlighted concerns of Pakistani officials that the extensive damage from flooding, which has killed about 1,600 to date, could set back gains against insurgents:

Over the past year, Pakistan's army has succeeded in driving Taliban fighters out of key sanctuaries in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley. But the damage from the floods could jeopardize those gains, officials acknowledge, unless infrastructure is quickly rebuilt -- an undertaking that will cost billions of dollars and will likely take years.

In domestic news of bad (but likely politically necessary) investments, the Department of Energy announced last week that we’re putting another billion dollars into a reconfigured plan for the FutureGen project, which has proven about as successful as the attempts to keep Lindsey Lohan out of jail.  Several articles covering this move by DOE pointed out that a simpler option (that’s technically feasible today) could be to use natural gas for power generation rather than continuing reliance on coal, as several other countries are already beginning to do. But they reveal that part of that decision is coming back to price: if you ignore price supports and externalities that we don’t price at all, coal is cheaper than natural gas. And as we’ve seen lately, policies to price in externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions are unfortunately beyond the political will of Congress at the moment. (On that note, The Washington Post’s “On Leadership” section yesterday included commentary on why the country can’t muster the leadership needed to act on climate change.)

Could Russian President Medvedev’s recent statement on climate change be the beginning of a change in attitude among skeptical world leaders (and others in their country) that climate change threatens security and the world needs to respond?

You’ll recall that we first reported on Russia’s dramatic drought and wildfires last month, but the situation has grown even worse: as of July 30, the wildfires had scorched more than 25 million acres of grain – what Time Magazine reported as an area equivalent in size to the state of Kentucky – which has affected food prices throughout Russia and prompted the government to declare a state of emergency in many parts of the country. Time reported on Monday that the wildfires, which have also destroyed 1,500 homes in more than a dozen regions, provoked comments from President Medvedev that suggest that Russia’s extended drought and summer wildfires could be linked to global climate change, noting that the “weather is anomalously hot” and that “What's happening with the planet's climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”

While the historical record shows that no states have ever fought a war over transboundary water resources, such resources have long served as focal points for potential conflict. But despite growing water scarcity in regions of the world – due in part to global population growth and increased drought in those regions – there are still great efforts among states to negotiate and even cooperate over many contentious and increasingly constrained water resources. 

Two examples strike me as being particularly relevant to U.S. national security: the Nile Basin Initiative and the Mekong River Commission.  The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) is a partnership of all 10 Nile Basin riparians to develop the river in a cooperative manner, share the socio-economic benefits, such as hydropower, that the river provides and “promote regional peace and security.”  Similarly the Mekong River Commission, an agreement between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam and with China and Burma as “dialogue partners” but not full participants, is meant to help regional riparians to manage the Mekong River’s shared water resources and develop the economic potential of the river.  

Both organizations are good examples of integrated water resource management, a process to manage a river or body of water as a whole to maximize the development potential of an entire river.  Yet both organizations are still missing a crucial piece: that is, the cooperation of the most powerful state in the river basin and the state that has historically been able to control the river’s water resources. 

Last week, the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Review Panel released its final report on the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The five-month review of the QDR was an opportunity for a panel of national security and defense experts (including CNAS Commander-in-Chief Dr. John Nagl) to assess the shortcomings of the QDR and its processes, and to analyze U.S. national security priorities and challenges from outside the Department of Defense bureaucracy. According to the report:

The issues raised in the body of this Report are sufficiently serious that we believe an explicit warning is appropriate.  The aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition, and force structure. (Emphasis mine)

When I hear train wreck I think Li Lo or Mel Gibson. Despite that distraction, I kept reading.

The panel of experts identified four key national interests that have shaped U.S. national security policy since WWII:

Since 1945, the United States has been the principal architect and remains the principal leader of a durable and desirable international system. American security rests on four principles: the defense of the American homeland; assured access to the sea, air, space, and cyberspace; the preservation of a favorable balance of power across Eurasia that prevents authoritarian domination of that region; and provision for the global “common good” through such actions as humanitarian aid, development assistance, and disaster relief. (P. 25)