Most of us on this site are well aware that climate change impacts will exacerbate marginal living in poor and desperate nations particularly those in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. These humanitarian and natural disaster impacts will be occurring in multiple places all around the world, possibly occurring all at once and on a scale human civilization has never seen before. But what about the developed world, particularly the United States?

National Security and the threat of Climate Change prepared by CNA and released in 2007 with an advisory board of 11 of the country's top retired generals and admirals summarizes those threats and how the military will need to adapt.

The report finds that in the US, security threats will consist of an unimaginable need for worldwide humanitarian aid and increasing migrations to the US from our neighbors to the south. This does not take into account that we will be dealing with our own catastrophic climate change impacts. There will be scarcity of water and melting of glaciers which currently provide water for millions of people. Drought and decreased rainfall will cause more severe droughts and devastate food production. For example, the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides 27% of the irrigated land in this country, is very stressed from human impact. The water table level is down 100 feet in some areas. Three of the top grain producing states, Texas, Kansas and Nebraska each get 70 to 90% of their water from the Ogallala which will be stressed even further with the predicted lack of rainfall. The Colorado River Basin, the source of water for 10's of millions of people, is already experiencing reduced river flow. The World Meteorological Organization predicts an increase in tropical hurricane speed strength and increased rainfall amounts potentially devastating coasts up and down the eastern seaboard, GoM, and the Caribbean as the climate continues to bake.

From Earth Island Journal:



"As greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, opposition to the fossil fuel industry has taken on a more urgent and confrontational tone. Some anti-fracking activists have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and the protests against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have involved arrests at the White House. Environmentalists and civil libertarians worry that accusations of terrorism, even if completely unfounded, could undermine peaceful political protest. The mere possibility of surveillance could handicap environmental groups’ ability to achieve their political goals. “You are painting the political opposition as supporters of terrorism to discredit them and cripple their ability to remain politically viable,” says Mike German, an FBI special agent for 16 years who now works with the ACLU"

Given this information the Department of Defense has created the Minerva Initiative.

"The Minerva Initiative is a DoD-sponsored, university-based social science research initiative launched by the Secretary of Defense that focuses on areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy. Its objectives are to foster and improve the Defense Department’s social science intellectual capital in order to address future security challenges and to build bridges between the Department of Defense and the academic social science community. Minerva will do this by bringing together universities, research institutions, and individual scholars; and by supporting multidisciplinary and cross-institutional projects addressing specific topic areas determined by the Department."