User:ClaudeReigns/Climate, Stability, and the West

As the conversation continues to turn to climate change, there are few who can enter that conversation with a maximum of both confidence and clarity. As someone who has followed the climate situation for the past twenty years, comfortable in looking at the situation from a strictly material perspective, raised within a tradition of civil service and ecological responsibility, and having a passable layman's background in academic research, I feel duty-bound to share some of the information I have unearthed over the past twenty years, especially the latest findings which have come from this line of thought, and give you the maximum probability of making good decisions. The point of this information should be to explore the implications of a changing environment, their tactical considerations at a regional level, and to suggest solutions. My expectations are that this will be an adult conversation devoid of both denial and paralyzing despair.

The relevant media to this phenomenon entered publication in the 19th century. Fourier accurately concluded from observation that the composition of the atmosphere was likely to affect climate in 1824, Arrhenius with some accuracy quantified this theory of climate change in 1896, but in these cases no bold assertion proved succinct or timely. Likewise HA Phillips, published in Nature in 1882, overshot the point by declaring our atmosphere would by 1912 become unbreathable due to cigarettes. Wrong, but highly influential. In 1912, Popular Mechanics published an accurate estimation of the time scale in which contemporary global carbon dioxide output would cause a shift in climate. Its only failure was in underestimating the fervor in which industry would pursue the extraction and consumption of even newer fossil fuels.

Many of you will be more familiar with the recent developments. Albert Gore advanced the work of Harvard professor and atmospheric researcher Roger Revelle in two books, Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore seemingly underestimated the vigorous response from vested interests such as Exxon, The Heritage Foundation, and the Koch brothers, and vastly overestimated the ability of institutions founded to maintain the status quo to create sweeping change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988, meanwhile began a series of somewhat palatable yet wholly underestimated studies and projections until this year sounding 'code red'. What are the implications nationally and regionally?

Here's what we know: climate has an inertia of approximately twenty years. In other words, you could cut off the tap right now and the climate would keep warming for another two decades. This is important both looking back and looking forward in order to see where we are today. Where were we twenty years ago? Launching campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and through the United States military, the chief polluting "growth sector" of the highest polluting nation in the world. That exponential increase in fossil fuel consumption is the trend now feeding the consequences we see today. The Army War College also studied where we are heading and in 2019, they published Implication of Climate Change for the US Army, wherein they project that due to supply chain collapse, infrastructure collapse, and food shortages, not to mention the severity of individual climate events, the US Army will have zero combat readiness by 2040. And anyone not studied in what this means for societal constructs such as nations, let me tell you: it takes food and a military to maintain a state.