The Defense Department financed a climate-change study more than a decade ago that warned of apocalyptic scenarios. Consultants who wrote the study predicted that Sacramento River levees would fail, creating an “inland sea.” They claimed floods would render The Hague uninhabitable by 2007 and that global temperature would soar by as much as a half a degree Fahrenheit a year.
The report also predicted that “more severe storms and typhoons” would bring about “higher storm surges and floods.”
But none of that has happened, The Washington Times reported in an analysis of the study. Today, there is no island sea in California, and The Hague is still inhabitable.
Global temperatures have not increased since the late 1990s, and even the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expresses “low confidence” that there will be increases in tornadoes or hurricanes.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the United States appears to be experiencing fewer tornadoes today than 50 years ago, and the U.N. climate panel reported this spring that “no robust trends” in tropical storms and hurricanes had occurred in the last century in North America.
Yet despite its dubious record in predicting climate trends, the 2003 report, entitled “an Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” is credited with giving a critical boost to the political movement connecting climate change and U.S. national defense.
Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, believes the Defense Department’s efforts to forge ahead on climate change amount to wasting defense dollars on a political agenda while ignoring genuine national-security threats.
“The president’s misguided priorities with our national security can be seen in the $1 trillion defense cuts he has put into motion since taking office and then using the limited defense budget to support his green agenda,” Inhofe said.
“His green spending in the defense budget is based on the belief that climate change is the ‘new weapon of mass destruction.’ In the meantime the president has loosened sanctions on Iran, [which] has maintained their resources to develop and launch a nuclear weapon — the real weapon of mass destruction.”
A recent report published by the Heartland Institute appears to confirm Inhofe’s concerns.
In the report, three retired senior naval officers warned that the Obama administration’s embrace of solar, wind and biofuels is a massive waste of money.
Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, Vice Adm. Edward S. Briggs, and Capt. Donald K. Forbes asserted that the administration's support for biofuels is "based on an unproven belief that carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels is the major cause of climate change."
In an interview with Newsmax, Forbes, who has 33 years of service in the military and a degree in engineering, said the report showed that Obama administration policy “is based on a false belief that there is a scientific basis to claim climate change is a threat multiplier. Second, their pursuit of biofuels and renewables is a waste of money because it is more expensive and ignores what we have available to us, which is an ample supply of fossil fuels and other sources that are cheaper.”
"This administration continues to pursue policies that restrict the use of fossil fuels, which requires us to use alternate and more costly sources," Forbes said. "It also diverts critical resources away from other missions at a time when there is less money available to meet our defense needs, including supporting troops by providing them with the hardware they need."
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