‘The real threat to national security will be damage done by those claiming climate change is a threat’

Special To Climate Depot

Climate doom progenitors and their fallacies

By Scott Wheeler

The Obama Administration has recently taken to making fantastical claims about global warming–or its latest catchphrase, climate change–and calling it a national security crisis. It seems the more time that passes without the catastrophic doom that has been promised since the ice age scare of the 1970s failed to materialize, the more dire the warnings become.

Last May, President Obama announced to graduating cadets at the Coast Guard Academy:

“So, I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.”

Immediate risk? In what way? The president doesn’t say, but his administration seems to have gotten the message.

Recently, CIA director John O. Brennan delivered a speech to a group of national security contractors in which he linked climate change to most major global problems:

“Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, and parts of Africa are clear examples. The human toll is reflected in the UN’s recent announcement that the number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world is the highest it has been since World War II. And of course, all this localized strife gives rise to the persistent threat of international terrorism.

When CIA analysts look for deeper causes of this rising instability, they find nationalistic, sectarian, and technological factors that are eroding the structure of the international system. They also see socioeconomic trends, the impact of climate change, and other elements that are cause for concern.”

Notice how cleverly Brennan uses his words.  He claimed that CIA analysts looking for deeper causes of instability see “the impact of climate change”. He uses the words “climate change”, because of course something like a flood will displace people and cause refugees, but that happens in any temperature. That is the normal cycles of a changing climate, not global warming. But then Brennan added this:

Last year was the warmest on record, and this year is on track to be even warmer.”

To be clear, whether or not 2014 was hundredths or one-tenth of one-degree warmer than any other year is in question, but even assuming it was, how could that one-tenth of a degree or less have affected the events Brennan named? The wars in Syria and Libya started before 2014, not to mention the fact that none of the supposed consequences of global warming have actually had any effect on human populations, at least not in any measurable way.

This is an attempt to conflate a natural disaster that could cause a small change in defense strategy, assuming we had forces deployed in the affected area, with one-tenth of one degree or less of possible temperature increase from one year to another. Brennan used a logical fallacy apparently to mislead people into thinking that a minuscule rise in temperature is responsible for things that occurred before the increase even happened.

The real threat to national security comes from using the politics of global warming to drain needed resources from our defenses against real threats and reallocating them to imagined threats. And that is actually happening. Obama has cut the defense budget while using defense resources for such things as eco-friendly ammunition and renewable energy sources. The U.S. government has a history of false projections when it comes to weather. In 2004, the Environmental Observer section of the UK Guardian ran a story about a “secret” Defense Department report warning of climate disaster that would be, if it were true, occurring right about now.

“A secret report, suppressed by US defense chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world” all due to global warming.

The Guardian of course accused then-President Bush of suppressing the release of the report and went on to use it as a cudgel against the President for not taking it seriously. It is a little difficult to take that report seriously now considering no European cities are under water, and Britain is not Siberia.

The real threat to national security will be the damage done by those who claim that climate change is a threat. This raises questions about the left’s real agenda. Is the global warming ruse providing an opportunity to weaken the military, something many Democrats have been trying to do for decades? It wasn’t that long ago that many of the global warming alarmists were nuclear war alarmists insisting that the U.S. disarm to avoid confrontation with the Soviets. Now they expect us to leave our security apparatus to the whims of the unpredictable weather.

Scott Wheeler is a former investigative journalist, television producer, and author. He Currently is Executive Director of the National Republican Trust PAC.

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