Is the Military Prepared for Climate Crisis?

Sep 13, 2017 | Sharmini Peries
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If you live in the U.S., it is not news that we have been hit by two devastating hurricanes in the last two weeks. First, Hurricane Harvey brought extreme flooding into Texas last week, and this was then followed by Hurricane Irma that hit Florida and many adjacent states. While these devastations have been extremely well-covered hour after hour on corporate news networks, you will hardly find the words climate change among the coverage. Little attention is paid to the connection between climate change or the level of preparedness for such events, even if reporters talk about preparedness or responding to the crisis, they talk about it in terms of this immediate crisis we are dealing with and not whether we are prepared for ongoing devastations of this nature in the future. The kind of extreme weather events we are seeing today have been predicted by scientists that do climate change modeling and over the last several decades, they have presented bigger and bigger data sets that suggests that the frequency of these events is to be expected. So, then, how are we dealing with these weather events from a climate change and a national security point of view?