He Warned Us About Terror. Now He’s Warning About Climate. Will We Listen? May 24, 2017

Remember that time when security experts warned the Bush administration about the dire, imminent threat of a terrorist attack?

Those are some of the same experts warning about the security impact of climate change. And some of the same people are not listening again.

Washington Post, March 25, 2004:

President Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday. Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging “policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier,” according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book. Clarke told the commission in testimony yesterday afternoon that whereas the Clinton administration treated terrorism as its highest priority, the Bush administration did not consider it to be an urgent issue before the attacks. “I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue,” Clarke told the 10-member panel. “. . . There was a process underway to address al Qaeda. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don’t think it was ever treated that way.”

KQED:

Charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cybersecurity and terrorism are topics that have recently dominated the national security conversation. But according to Richard Clarke, it’s climate change that poses an imminent threat to our nation’s shores. Clarke is the former U.S. national security adviser who gained notoriety after criticizing the George W. Bush administration for the war in Iraq, saying Bush is guilty of war crimes. He was in San Francisco last week for the 2017 RSA Conference — the world’s leading conference on cybersecurity — but he had rising seas on his mind. “Californians and anyone living on the coast need to be worried about sea level rise, which can happen much faster than we anticipated,” he said. Clarke is concerned about chaos that will occur not just in California, but around the globe from rising seas that could displace millions of people. He noted that the drought in Syria contributed to that country’s refugee crisis, and pointed to the situation as an example of how a changing climate can lead to political instability. “If sea level rise happens to the extent it could … when you have millions of people who are on the move … that usually results, as we’ve seen in the Syrian refugee crisis, in political disruption and security problems.”

Inside Climate News:

NATO’s member countries published a series of draft reports this week highlighting the economic and security risks posed by climate change, and encouraging nations to stand by their international climate commitments. The reports, released ahead of a NATO summit on Thursday, also raise concerns that the Trump administration may undermine global efforts to tackle the issue. “The United States played a leading role in pushing for the Paris Agreement, but there are now signs that it may reject its structures and even the science underlying it. This would represent a serious setback,” said one of the draft reports, released by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. The assembly is not part of NATO but represents the legislative bodies of member nations; the reports were drafted by legislative members for assembly discussion. “International action becomes very difficult without U.S. participation, and there needs to be a dialogue to keep the United States within the reigning political and scientific consensus,” the draft report said.