You know climate change has become a top priority in Washington when it starts penetrating the thinking of leaders in the U.S. military and intelligence community.
Eleven retired generals and admirals have sent out a warning shot about national-security threats from climate change, calling it a ``threat-multiplier'' that will make unstable regions shakier through increased drought, extreme weather, migrations and rising extremism.
No less than President George W. Bush has issued a clarion call, citing the ``serious challenge of global climate change'' in his last State of the Union address. His administration's intelligence community had begun work looking at how global warming could pressurize unstable regions even before the Senate introduced legislation calling for a National Intelligence Estimate on it.
``Moving climate change into the national security realm is a watershed event,'' says Sherri Goodman, a former Pentagon official who directed the Military Advisory Board at the CNA Corp., a national-security research organization in Alexandria, Virginia.
That's all further evidence of a seismic shift in America on climate change as a mainstream issue, which may soon have the world's biggest energy user leapfrogging Europe and elsewhere on the science of reducing emissions and on studies of the political consequences if those efforts fall short.
Read the full article: Kempe on Climate Change
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