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Pentagon Unveils Plan For Military's Response To Climate Change
An anonymous reader writes Rising sea levels and other effects of climate change will create major problems for America's military, including more and worse natural disasters and food and water shortages that could fuel disputes around the world, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday. From the article: "The Pentagon's 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap (PDF) describes how global warming will bring new demands on the military. Among the report's conclusions: Coastal military installations that are vulnerable to flooding will need to be altered; humanitarian assistance missions will be more frequent in the face of more intense natural disasters; weapons and other critical military equipment will need to work under more severe weather conditions. 'This road map shows how we are identifying — with tangible and specific metrics, and using the best available science — the effects of climate change on the department's missions and responsibilities,' Hagel said. 'Drawing on these assessments, we will integrate climate change considerations into our planning, operations, and training.'"
Can we get through Ebola, first, and then worry about...
The government should be able to multi-task more than one problem at a time, yes?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Here in the real world, the Secretary of Defense is proposing budget cuts.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/defense-secretary-chuck-hagel-to-recommend-deep-budget-cuts-targeting-pay-benefits/
Because it's already too late. Even if we stopped CO2 production entirely, today, all of this stuff would still happen. The CO2 we're producing today is just compounding the problem for our grand children. Short of discovering cold fusion tomorrow and mass producing small devices with unlimited power that could change the CO2 back into a solid, we're screwed.
Funny to see a branch of the US government that actually has to deal with reality.
There's still some debate as to *how* screwed we are though. Global climate is changing, but if we stopped emitting CO2 within the next couple decades there's still a chance that the change would be short-lived and once the excess carbon has been absorbed, in a century or so, things will be back to "normal" without any further effort on our part. The problem is that the system is bistable, and once we cross the tipping point the positive feedback loops will dump the massive ecological stores of CO2 into the atmosphere, completely dwarfing our own small contributions. Just as has happened in all the previous major warm spells in the planet's history when unrelated events caused warming beyond the tipping point. Once we cross that tipping point then trying to reduce our own CO2 emissions is pointless - the only options are to simply adapt to a much warmer world, or engage in massive, risky geoengineering projects. Getting off fossil fuels would still be a good idea for reasons of pollution and geopolitics, but wouldn't amount to a fart in a hurricane where global warming is concerned.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ebola is easy to stop. We have oceans to protect us. All we need to do is stop allowing the 25,000 VISAS from affected countries from being used to gain entry.
Every complex problem has a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. Most epidemiologists consider restrictions like these to be counter productive because they encourage both individuals and governments to be less transparent. The key to fighting outbreaks to catch them early, and to do that we need to convince governments to report them as soon as they are detected. They won't do that if the report is going to lead to economy crushing restrictions on travel and trade.
This particular problem has a far simpler solution that actually works: Use soap and hand sanitizer, and don't touch dead people.
Though folks are trying to quash debate, much like the catholic church did to Galileo.
Yes, a state Attorney-General conducting an inquisition in an attempt to silence a prominent climate scientist is very much like what the Church did to Galileo.
And debate on the causes...
Seriously?! The causes are fairly well understood. If you can cite anything from the last 5 years which debates the causes please do (it goes without saying, I trust, that "cite" means a citation to a paper published in a recognised scholarly journal).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Of course! Just bomb climate change into submission. Why didn't we think of this sooner?
'Murrica.
2) Mandatory 21 day Quarantine, solves the issue.
The problem with draconian over reactions like this is that they just make the problem worse. A mandatory 21 day quarantine incentivizes people to lie about where they have traveled, and to lie about their health condition. It is a disincentive for a traveler that slips through the net, and then gets sick, to seek medical help.
Lie about it, get caught, and go to prison for 3-5 years.
So if you lie, because you don't think you are infected, and then get sick the next day, you should keep your mouth shut and avoid medical help, so you don't go to jail.
Life if you spread Ebola after lying and somehow survive.
So if you think you have Ebola, and also think you have infected others, then your primary focus should be to avoid any contact with authorities, and discourage your friends and family from seeking help as well.
Why do we have to have finely nuanced approaches that don't work is beyond me.
Because the "nuanced" approaches are working well, while your draconian approach is idiotic and counter-productive.
There is no such as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which is why the LIARS renamed it 'climate change', which means something completely different.
You can always tell someone is a climate science denier when they add the adjective "catastrophic" to the front of anthropogenic global warming. The term "climate change" came before "global warming", not after. Gilbert Plass published the peer reviewed paper "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change." in 1956. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988.
Lie about it, get caught, and go to prison for 3-5 years.
That's not the way things work in the real world. Move along and let the adults discuss the issue.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There are many different ways that Ebola can reach out and touch people who are not from Ebola Land, shutting down foreign visas is not the solution.
Exactly. That's why I don't encrypt passwords on any of my machines. Passwords can be brute forced so they're not a solution.
I also have no locks on my doors. Someone can use C4 to blow them up and render them useless. Locks aren't a solution.
Sometimes, even if you can find some way around the proposed idea it doesn't mean the idea isn't good, just that it isn't complete. Nobody said it was. But shutting down travel directly from ebolaland is an obvious first step.
Do you have ESP?
What about San Francisco?
Neither?
Then most coastal US military bases are probably fine too. There might be some on a couple pacific islands that are having a hard time... but I believe the last time I checked every single one of them was due to erosion and not the rising of global sea levels.
Furthermore, what are we talking about as of now?... 7 centimeters or something? Any harbor that could be made viable or non-viable by 7 fucking centimeters was an accident waiting to happen in the first place. I'm quite sure that the vast majority of harbors have far more robust tolerances.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
you should be worried.
Not really. Even without any containment measures, an infected person passes the disease to only 1 other person. If there was a disease as deadly as Ebola, where that number was ~20 people (as it is with measles for example), then I would be worried.
The low transmission rate is why the outbreak has fewer than 10,000 people after several months.
.: Semper Absurda
Airline safety. Interstate highway construction. Moon landing. Mars landing. Social Security. Medicare. OSHA and what they do. NIST and what they do. NiH and what they do. NOAA and what they do. The U.S. Coast Guard. The U. S. Army. The U.S. Navy. Yet not the U.S. Air Force who never met an expensive plane they weren't determined to fly and who announced proudly to the world they were standardizing on Microsoft Malware. EPA and what they do. U.S. Forest Service and what they do. NTSB and what they do.