The Age of Consequences
May 11, 2009 11:14AM
From the 2007 report "The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change."
For the past year a diverse group of experts, under the direction and leadership of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), met regularly to start a new conversation to consider the potential future foreign policy and national security implications of climate change. The group ... [included] Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, Pew Center Senior Scientist Jay Gulledge, National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone, American Meteorological Society Fellow Bob Correll, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Senior Scientist Terrence Joyce and former Vice President Richard Pittenger, Climate Institute Chief Scientist Mike MacCracken, Georgetown University Professor John McNeill, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Chief of Staff to the President John Podesta, and former National Security Advisor to the Vice President Leon Fuerth.
Key findings include:
Perhaps the most worrisome problems associated with rising temperatures and sea levels are from large-scale migrations of people — both inside nations and across existing national borders.
A few countries may benefit from climate change in the short term, but there will be no “winners.”
We lack rigorously tested data or reliable modeling to determine with any sense of certainty the
ultimate path and pace of temperature increase or sea level rise associated with climate change in the decades ahead.
Any future international agreement to limit carbon emissions will have considerable geopolitical as well as economic consequences.
The scale of the potential consequences associated with climate change — particularly in more
dire and distant scenarios — made it difficult to grasp the extent and magnitude of the possible changes ahead.
At a definitional level, a narrow interpretation of the term “national security” may be woefully
inadequate to convey the ways in which state authorities might break down in a worst case climate change scenario.
