“In a world that sees 2 meter sea level rise, with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look far beyond its own salvation. If Americans have difficulty reaching a reasonable compromise on immigration legislation today, consider what such a debate would be like if we were struggling to resettle millions of our own citizens—driven by high water from the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and much of the East Coast reaching up nearly to New England—even as we witnessed the northward migration of large populations from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such migration will likely be one of the Western Hemisphere’s early social consequences of climate change and sea level rise of these orders of magnitude. Issues deriving from inundation of a large amount of our own territory together with migration toward our borders by millions of our hungry and thirsty southern neighbors are likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns. Globally as well, populations will migrate from increasingly hot and dry climates to more temperate ones.”
—R. James Woolsey
Key selected environmental stresses based on scenario assumptions
- Water scarcity affects 3.2 billion people
- Increased morbidity & mortality from heat waves, floods, & droughts
- Approximately 30 percent loss of coastal wetlands
- Up to 120 million more people at risk of hunger due to crop failure
- Possible collapse of the meridional overturning circulation
- Migration toward U.S. borders by millions of hungry and thirsty southern neighbors is likely to dominate U.S. security and humanitarian concerns
Key selected national security implications based on scenario assumptions
- A shrinking Russian population might have substantial difficulty preventing China from asserting control over much of Siberia and the Russian Far East; the probability of conflict between two destabilized nuclear powers would seem high
- Rage at government’s inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises
- Religious fervor, perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-days cults
- Hostility and violence toward migrants and minority groups
- Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted
- U.S. military’s worldwide reach could be reduced substantially by logistics and the demand of missions near our shores
- Electricity generation and distribution highly vulnerable to attack by terrorists and rogue states
