After reading the new report on global climate change just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security one might be inclined to ask, am I afraid? But afraid is such an insufficient word. A better question is, am I panicked? And if your answer is no, then you need to ask why not?

While warnings, projections, and predictions about the planet’s environmental future are hardly novel, most writings limit themselves to the actual physical consequences resulting from global warming. And by now we should have heard them often enough to be able to cite them in our sleep, i.e., mass migrations, flooding of costal cities, fighting over resources, adverse impact on agriculture, desertification, collapse of ocean fisheries, et cetera.

Still, as someone who regularly reads the latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  I have to say that this new report, The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change does a great job of making you shudder.

Now normally, I’m not one for fearmongering. In fact, much of what is wrong with our foreign policy today is based on exaggerating threats, i.e., Iran may develop nuclear weapons so we must bomb them now or Al-Qaeda wants to attack America so we must fight a global war on terrorism.

But the issue of climate change is different. Bush and Cheney might still disagree, albeit privately, but we’re now at the point where we no longer have an excuse. Climate change is happening now. We can’t say it might be a problem for a future generation, such as our children or our grandchildren. The fact is that it is already a problem for us. It will be a bigger problem for our children; and an even bigger problem for our grandchildren.  And this is under the best case scenario. We are already living in the “age of consequences.” And so far our reaction to it is laughably inadequate.

We need to understand that as things now stand climate change is not merely a phenomenon. It is an ongoing global disaster. The fact that its more dramatic effects won’t start happening until after most of us are dead doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to be working on this NOW.

What we need, in fact, is an entirely new way of thinking about this and a new vocabulary. Right now, our imagination fails us. As the report puts it,

Even among our creative and determined group of seasoned observers, it was extraordinarily challenging to contemplate revolutionary global change of this magnitude. Global temperature increases of more than 3°C and sea level rises measured in meters (a potential future examined in scenario three) pose such a dramatically new global paradigm that it is virtually impossible to contemplate all the aspects of national and international life that would be inevitably affected. As one participant noted, “unchecked climate change equals the world depicted by Mad Max, only hotter, with no beaches, and perhaps with even more chaos.”
While such a characterization may seem extreme, a careful and thorough examination of all the many potential consequences associated with global climate change is profoundly disquieting. The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life. The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War.

One useful approach would be to think that our planet is going to die, unless we take immediate steps to save it. For example, every student in school needs to be instructed on how to reduce their environmental impact

And, though it will sound heretical, we likely have to rethink our economic systems. For the United States, a country which explicitly premises its national security on the spread of free markets around the world and generally thinks globalization is the neatest thing since sliced bread it should think about this:

In order to emerge from a period of severe climate change as a civilization with hopes for a better future and with prospects for further human development, the very model of what constitutes happiness must change. Globalization will have to be redirected. It cannot continue forever in its present form, based on an insatiable consumption of resources. The combined demands of China and India alone cannot be satisfied in a world already heavily burdened by the consumption patterns of the United States, Europe, and Japan.

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