The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-pentagon-climate-change-how-climate-deniers-put-national-security-at-risk-20150212

By Jeff Goodell February 12, 2015

Naval station Norfolk is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet, an awesome collection of military power

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But within the lifetime of a child growing up here, all this could vanish into the Atlantic Ocean. The land that the base is built upon is literally sinking, meaning sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average.

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"It's the biggest Navy base in the world, and it's going to have to be relocated," says former Vice President Al Gore. "It's just a question of when."

There are 29 other military bases, shipyards and installations in the area, and many of them are in just as much trouble. At nearby Langley Air Force base, home to two fighter wings and headquarters for the Air Combat Command, base commanders keep 30,000 sandbags ready to stack around buildings when a big storm comes in. At Dam Neck, another Navy base, they pile old Christmas trees on the beach to keep it from eroding. At NASA Wallops Flight Facility, NASA armored the shoreline with 3 million cubic yards of sand to protect its launchpads from sea surges. "Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise," says Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who mentions that with all the flooding, it's becoming difficult to sell a house in some parts of Norfolk. If the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica continues to accelerate at current rates, scientists say Norfolk could see more than seven feet of sea-level rise by 2100. In 25 years, operations at most of these bases are likely to be severely compromised. Within 50 years, most of them could be goners. If the region gets slammed by a big hurricane, the reckoning could come even sooner. "You could move some of the ships to other bases or build new, smaller bases in more protected places," says retired Navy Capt. Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. "But the costs would be enormous. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars."

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The House Armed Services Committee is now chaired by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.

Any official who draws a link between climate change and national security is guaranteed a rabid reaction from right-wingers. Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently called climate change "a threat multiplier" that "has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today — from infectious disease to terrorism." In response, The Wall Street Journal editorial page blasted Hagel as a delusional tree-hugger:

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Before climate change became taboo for Republicans, it was possible for even conservative politicians to have rational discussions about the subject. In 2003, under Donald Rumsfeld, former President George W. Bush's defense secretary, the Pentagon published a report titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." Commissioned by Andrew Marshall, who is sometimes jokingly referred to within the Pentagon as Yoda — and who was a favorite of Rumsfeld's — the report warned that threats to global stability posed by rapid warming vastly eclipse that of terrorism. Some of the climate science in the report was flawed, but the broader conclusions were not. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," the report stated. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

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This kind of talk vanished from the party after 2008, when the GOP turned into a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Since then, Republicans have worked hard to undermine any connection between climate and national security. Case in point: In 2009, then-CIA director Leon Panetta quietly started the Center on Climate Change and National Security. It was a straightforward attempt by the intelligence community to gather a better understanding of the changes to come. Among other things, the Center funded a major study of the relationships between climate change and social stress, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most respected scientific organizations in the country. Climate deniers in Congress didn't like it, especially Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Big Coal state. By the time the report was completed, Panetta had left the CIA and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, let it wither. "We felt constant pressure to water down our conclusions," says one of the co-authors of the National Academy report. The day the report was released, the press conference was suddenly canceled, and the report was buried. A few weeks later, the Center on Climate Change and National Security was disbanded.

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Deniers in Congress have gone after the Pentagon where military officials feel it most: their budget. Last year, House Republicans tagged an amendment onto the defense appropriations bill that prohibited the Pentagon from spending any money implementing recommendations from the latest report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The amendment had no effect on the defense budget, since the IPCC's recommendations don't really apply to us," one Pentagon insider told me. "But the intent was clear: This is going to be war."

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Nearly every naval and Air Force base on the East Coast is vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges,

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In the West, the problem is often drought and flash flooding.

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Just as there are climate-change hot spots, there are also climate-denial hot spots — and Virginia is one of them. The Republican-dominated Virginia General Assembly has been hostile to discussion of climate change — one legislator called sea-level rise "a left-wing term." Instead, the politically acceptable phrase in Virginia is "recurrent flooding."

This makes it hard for the Navy to deal with the most immediate problem Norfolk faces: keeping its roads open.

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For now, the Navy's strategy is just to buy time. In the late 1990s, Navy engineers realized that the 13 piers at the base, some dating back to World War II, were reaching the end of their life spans. Because they had been built at a time when nobody gave a thought to sea-level rise, the piers were relatively low to the water. At high tide, the utilities that ran along the underside of the pier decks — electrical, steam, phone, Internet — were often immersed in water, rendering them unusable. "It was not a nuisance problem — it was not a minor operational issue," says Bouchard. "Sea-level rise was interfering with combat readiness for the Atlantic fleet."

So far, four new piers have been built, which are higher, stronger and better-designed than the old piers. Bouchard, who was commander while the first new piers were constructed, says "they were built with sea-level rise in mind." But out on the base, nobody wants to talk directly about spending money to deal with sea-level rise, mostly because they are worried about drawing scrutiny from climate deniers in Congress, who are happy to redline any expenditure with the word "climate" in it. Instead, many people in the military end up talking about the climate similar to the way eighth-graders talk about sex — with code words and suggestive language.

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Sea-level rise is only one of the climate-driven threats that are making the world more dangerous and volatile. Drought contributed to the escalating food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, in 2011; it also helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and killing thousands of Nigerians.

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"It's our job to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it could be," says Robert Freeman, a meteorologist and member of the Navy's climate-change task force.

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