Right Wing’s Global Warming Denial Takes New Form, Now Attacks Advice Of Military Generals

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes and House Select Committee on Global Warming Chairman Ed Markey recently pushed through a bill that would authorize a National Intelligence Assessment to study the impact of global warming on national security and fund research by the Defense Department into the consequences for U.S. military operations posed by climate change.

Global warming deniers have jolted into action. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) — who has expressed doubts about the need to urgently address global warming — said, “There’s no value added by the intelligence community” in assessing global warming’s security impact. And the House Republican Policy Committee put out this farcical statement:

The right-wing’s attempts to politicize this issue reveal their ignorance of the assessments made by national security experts. Last month, the Military Advisory Board, a panel of esteemed retired military officers including President Bush’s former Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni, recommended that “national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies.”

In its first hearing, the House Select Committee on Global Warming heard testimony from Ret. Gen. Gordon Sullivan, chairman of the Military Advisory Board, who said:

Speaking for the members of the Military Advisory Board, I am confident in stating we as individuals and collectively support your legislative initiative to authorize a National Intelligence Estimate on the National Security Implications of Climate Change.

Earlier this year, the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College assessed:

The significance of the climate change challenge and its requirement for better cooperation across governments and agencies might be best addressed in the United States by a new National Security Act of 2010.

In 2003, the Pentagon issued a report stating the following:

Because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change…should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.

The national security consequences of climate change are real and predictable. Leading environmental scientists have already said that climate change will bring about reduced access to fresh water, impaired food production, more diseases, land loss and displacement of major populations. This is most likely to affect the world’s poorest regions, thus providing an incubator for extremist ideologies and terrorism and fights over scarce resources.