In memory of Armistice Day, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when World War I ended, let’s help the military get us off of oil and to deal with climate change so fewer people will die in wars.

John M. Broder wrote for NYTimes 9 November 2012, Climate Change Report Outlines Perils for U.S. Military,

Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.

The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.

Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.

“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

…

Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.

This is in addition to the even more obvious connection between war and U.S. dependence on foreign oil which the veterans in Operation Free want to fix by helping us shift to clean renewable energy.

“In Iraq… the lines would stretch up to ten miles long under the hot sun, under constant risk of attack by extremists. I realized then just how vulnerable it makes any country to be dependent on oil, especially the United States, which uses nearly a quarter of the world’s supply.”

We also heard last year from Col. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) that the Marines in Afghanistan realized Continue reading →