06/06/2017

Climate Change Poses A Unique Threat To National Security, Military And Intelligence Experts Say

Business Insider - Sonam Sheth

Skye Gould/Business Insider
President Donald Trump’s bombshell announcement that he was pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement was widely panned by environmental activists and scientists, as well as major business leaders such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
But Trump’s decision has also invited scrutiny from military and intelligence experts who believe a US withdrawal from the pact poses a unique threat to national security and the global order.
The primary link between climate change and national security is instability, according to James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence.
Climate change, which Clapper said significantly contributes to instability, can have a devastating impact on the availability of critical resources such as water, food, and energy. He added that as population centres compete for waning resources, governments will find it more difficult to maintain order.
“And so because of all of these factors, after ISIL’s gone, we can expect some other terrorist entity to arise and a cycle of extremism which will continue to control us for the foreseeable future,” Clapper said in 2016. “And by the way, our more traditional adversaries like Russia and China and Iran and North Korea will continue to challenge us.”
Secretary of Defence James Mattis also emphasised the link between climate change and national security. “Climate change is a challenge that requires a broader, whole-of-government response,” Mattis said during his Senate confirmation hearing in March. “If confirmed, I will ensure that the Department of Defence plays its appropriate role within such a response by addressing national security aspects.”
He added that he believed the effects of climate change, “such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, [and] desertification” continue to impact US national security.
Trump’s decision to pull out of the landmark climate agreement negotiated by former President Barack Obama means the US will join Nicaragua and Syria, the only other countries who are not signatories to the deal.
Former defence secretary Ashton Carter, who served under Obama from 2015 to 2016, also weighed in on the climate change debate in January 2017. Carter said a lukewarm response to climate change could “increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defence support to civil authorities, while at the same time undermining the capacity of our domestic installations to support training activities.”
Carter added that US efforts to combat climate change by investing in clean energy and new technology could serve to mitigate the damage already done.
Trump’s decision also prompted sharp criticism from Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser. “We all know that where there is drought, where there is insecurity, when there is poverty, hunger, poor governance, repressive policies, it may make the tinder in the box more readily ignitable,” Rice said in 2014.
Rice argued, in a New York Times op-ed published Saturday, that the US’ departure from the climate agreement may further threaten a tenuous relationship with key allies around the world.
During the campaign and since taking office, Trump has repeatedly blasted critical US alliances like NATO, which he said was “obsolete.” Though he backtracked on his comments after assuming the presidency, Trump went on to criticise NATO member nations for not paying their defence dues at the NATO summit in Brussels last month.
His choice to abandon the global climate pact further strained a fraying relationship between the US and its western allies.
Trump’s intent to leave the Paris Agreement on Thursday invited fresh criticism from world leaders. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was “deeply disappointed” by the decision. British Prime Minister Theresa May echoed Trudeau’s statement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said they noted the decision “with regret.” Macron called it “a mistake for our planet” and urged US scientists to work in France to help “make the planet great again.”
Rice called Trump’s decision the “coup de grâce” for America’s status as a global leader, and added that it jeopardized US alliances by isolating the country from the rest of the developed world.
His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and other actions Trump has taken over the course of his presidency, Rice said, ensure that the US will “see the cost when next we need the world to rally to our side.”

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German Deep-Sea Research Ship On Climate Change Expedition Docks In Fremantle

ABC News - David Weber

The RV Sonne can deploy instruments into the deepest parts of the ocean. (ABC News: David Weber)
A German research vessel has been taking samples from the ocean floor in Australian waters to investigate the history of climate change.
The ship, described as one of the most high-tech research vessels in the world, is looking into the past to help predict the future.
RV Sonne is described as the most important platform for marine scientific research in the Indo-Pacific.
Captain Oliver Meyer said the RV Sonne's main role was to study the influence of humans on climate change. (ABC News: David Weber)
RV Sonne's Captain Oliver Meyer explained its key role.
"The big headline of all research is, more or less, the mankind influence of climate changes," he said.
"Are there interperiods of warm or hot climate or not, and what is the normal way that happens nature by nature or what is the mankind influence?"
RV Sonne has arrived in Fremantle after carrying out research around New Zealand, the outer side of the Great Barrier Reef and stopping in Darwin.
Its major benefit is to be able to operate in the deepest parts of the ocean, such as trenches in the "hadal zone".
RV Sonne's instruments retrieve sediments from the ocean floor, which acts as a kind of climate library.
Dozens of scientists can live and work on board the vessel during an expedition. (ABC News: David Weber)
Professor Wolfgang Kuhnt of the University of Kiel detailed his team's interest.
"Along the West Australian margin there was about 10,000 years ago a time when the climate was even a bit warmer than today and we want to see how this development, the influence of this relatively warm Southern Hemisphere period was on the Australian monsoon — and the climate," he said.
RV Sonne can deploy two pieces of gear at a time, instruments and devices such as its 'Golden Eye' — which measures electrical and magnetic properties of the sub-seabed — as well as remotely controlled underwater vehicles, drill rigs, and a mobile 3D seismometer.
The ship is equipped with cranes and other machinery to help carry out research. (ABC News: David Weber)
It can also deploy instruments to measure temperatures and salinity.
On its Darwin-Fremantle leg, RV Sonne carried teams interested in the deep and the shallow.
The University of Melbourne's Stephen Gallagher explained that his team was interested in what shallow waters could tell us about the past.
"We can get stories about shoreline, when the sea level fell, where was the shoreline. Are there fossil cliffs? What can we see under the sea when the sea level changes?" Professor Gallagher said.
"The deep climate archive, the hundreds of thousands of years-long climate archive comes from the deep water and evidence of the shoreline, when the sea level fell 18,000 years ago comes from the shallow water."
The ship is renowned for its ability to deploy instruments to the deepest parts of the ocean. (ABC News: David Weber)
After its stop in Fremantle, RV Sonne will head back out to the Indian Ocean on its way to Sri Lanka.
The vessel is equipped with eight laboratories and they can be cooled to freezing when required.
Some 40 scientists can live and work on board during an expedition.
Construction of RV Sonne started in 2012 and it was put into service in 2014.
It replaced the original Sonne, a 1969 stern trawler which was converted to a research vessel in the late 1970s.
The RV Sonne will be open to the public at Fremantle Port's Victoria Quay on Monday. (ABC News: David Weber)

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Trump Will Make The US Face Loss And Damage Claims

Daily Star - Saleemul Huq*

Image: Sarah Wasko-Media Matters
Since the announce-ment by President Trump that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, he has been facing a whirlwind of push backs and rejection by all the 195 countries who are parties to the Paris Agreement (only Syria and Nicaragua did not sign it), and it looks like the US will be on its own on this issue from now on, and is already being termed a rogue state by many.
I want to focus on a little known Article of the Paris Agreement, which may well come to haunt the US and will be an unintended consequence of the US withdrawing from it.
This is about Article 8 of the Paris Agreement, which is on an issue called Loss and Damage from climate change, a fiercely fought topic in the negotiations going into Paris which was not resolved until the last hour of the final agreement in Paris at midnight on December 12, 2015.
Before going into the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) to be held in Paris in December 2015, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there were a series of negotiations to prepare the final negotiating text which would then be finalised over the two weeks of COP21.
Going into Paris, every Article had some proposed text from the developed countries (called option 1) and another few paragraphs of text from the developing countries (called option 2), and in many cases, the two options presented opposing ideas. The idea was that all countries would spend two weeks in Paris at COP21, finding a compromise text between the two opposing options to emerge with a consensus text as part of the Paris Agreement.
However, the exception to this pattern was Article 8 on loss and damage where the developing countries proposed a few paragraphs of text, but the option from the developed countries wasn't just to offer no text but to instead propose that this Article be deleted completely!
Why was this the case?
The reason is because the issue of loss and damage from climate change refers to the residual impacts of human induced climate change when efforts to prevent impacts by mitigation have been insufficient, and also when efforts to adapt to those impacts are not enough either. The resulting impacts and the resulting loss and damage, thus, can be attributed to human induced changes to the climate.
In such cases, the loss and damage is no longer due to natural causes but due to human interference in the climate system. Hence, there is a potential liability and claims for compensation to be made by the victims against the polluters.
That is why the developed countries had fought tooth and nail to refuse to accept any discussion of liability and compensation in the UNFCCC talks for over twenty years. However, the breakthrough came at COP19 in Warsaw, Poland in 2013, where they were forced to accept the setting up of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (which was understood to be a euphemism for liability and compensation).
So coming in to the COP21 talks in Paris in December 2015, the developed countries did not want to accept a new separate Article on Loss and Damage in the Paris Agreement at all. Hence, this Article became one of the most politically charged and sensitive issues in the COP21, talks. The developing countries, led by the small island developing states and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, in which Bangladeshi negotiators played an important role, pushed to include loss and damage in Article 8.
After very hard negotiations for two weeks, initially at the level of the technical negotiators and then ministers, it was still not resolved until the last few hours of COP21 when Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga of Tuvalu, on behalf of the developing countries, and US Secretary of State John Kerry, on behalf of the developed countries, requested their negotiators to leave the room and agreed on the final text that was eventually accepted as the Loss and Damage Article 8 of the Paris Agreement.
The reason that John Kerry of the US finally accepted Article 8 on Loss and Damage was because the Prime Minister of Tuvalu allowed him to insert a paragraph into the COP21 decision associated with the Article which specifically stated that Article 8 of the Paris Agreement could NOT be used to claim compensation on the basis of liability from the polluting countries. This was specifically inserted to protect the US from potential future claims for compensation once loss and damage from climate change is established.
So as per President Trump's announcement when the US officially withdraws from the Paris Agreement, the US will lose the protection of this clause and hence will be open to claims for compensation from people, communities and countries that suffer loss and damage that can be attributed to human induced climate change. I am not sure if any of President Trump's advisers told him about this unintended consequence of his decision to leave the Paris Agreement!

*The writer is Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University , Bangladesh. 

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