By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
A recent post at The Nation titled “Climate Change Is the Real National Security Threat” claims that climate change is the reason hurricanes Helene and Milton were so damaging and that it is the premier national security threat to the United States. This is nonsense. Not only is there no evidence supporting the idea that climate change is “supercharging” hurricanes, but contrary to The Nation’s assertions, mass migration and unrest are also not being caused by climate change.
The Nation begins by describing the usual threat assessment reports given to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). This report covers a range of international threats like our enemies abroad, international conflicts etc., but The Nation highlights and amplifies a section in the report which cites climate change is a threat.
The Nation writes:
“…in a section on “transnational issues,” are we told that climate change also poses a risk to US security, by triggering mass migrations and unrest overseas. Missing from the DNI’s warning, however, is the threat that climate change poses to our country—to our lives, communities, and vital infrastructure. Now, in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, this oversight should be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest intelligence failures ever.”
The Nation claims that “while we’ve spent trillions of dollars on the ostensible effort to defend our country and our allies from hostile nations, we’ve done pitifully little to protect ourselves or others from the destructive forces of climate change.” This claim is ironic since federal, state, and local governments have spent trillions of dollars on green energy boondoggles, climate related subsidies, and implementing and enforcing climate restrictions over the past couple of decades. This fact is conveniently ignored by The Nation and the numerous climate grifters, who keep demanding ever more money and power.
This is an especially grotesque amount of money spent because there is no evidence that the money being spent or the restrictions imposed on people’s freedom have had or will have any impact on climate change; or that climate change, based on the impacts so far, is a problem warranting government action to prevent it at all.
For instance, the DNI report claims that climate change triggers mass migrations and unrest overseas. This is false. So-called “climate refugees” have not materialized in over a hundred years of climate change, even as alarmists claimed that nations would be displaced due to rising seas. As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Climate Refugees, nearly all the nations that are commonly listed as at risk due to crop failures have actually seen increasing crop yields during this allegedly dangerous period. Data show that deaths due to climate and weather-related disasters have actually declined over the past few decades. (See figure below)
Bad weather can cause unrest, but it doesn’t mean climate change is the cause of any bad weather or weather related unrest abroad. As discussed in more than 70 posts at Climate Realism addressing similar claims, in the countries where mass emigration has occurred in recent years, it has been driven by war, civil strife, and political unrest, and economic conditions unrelated to changing climate conditions in the form of long term trends in worsening weather or agricultural or economic decline.
The Nation’s claim that hurricanes Helene and Milton were made more destructive because of climate change equally lacks any basis in scientific fact or data. The magazine writes: “[t]he destructive powers of Helene and Milton were vastly amplified by the effects of climate change,” because of rising water temperatures due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which then created “the energy that transforms ordinary hurricanes into superstorms like Helene and Milton.” This is false. Climate Realism has debunked similar claims made by various mainstream media outlets that climate change caused or contributed to Hurricanes Helene and Milton in multiple posts, here, here, here, and here, as a few examples.
While warm waters do contribute to hurricane formation, this has always been the case. However, the majority of this year’s warming is known and widely reported to have been driven by a natural El Niño event in the Pacific. It is notable that The Nation neglected to mention this fact, when other outlets, for instance, the typically-alarmist BBC acknowledged it. Warm water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for hurricane strength and formation. In a recent Climate Realism post, here, the South China Morning Post admits that, in addition to warm waters, factors such as wind shear and favorable regional circulation patterns contribute to or prevent the formation of cyclones.
Data show that hurricanes have not been getting more extreme amid the modest warming of the past century, as discussed dozens of times at Climate Realism. This fact is backed up by hurricane records that have been reported even by outlets like CBS.
Weather resilience is worthy of planning for and funding and critical for national security, but what The Nation is asking for is not that. They are asking for societal restructuring based on the false premise that current and future weather can and needs to be changed by human efforts, otherwise, the magazine implies, U.S. national security is at risk. No one should fall for this falsehood. The U.S. does face a variety of national security threats; climate change is not among them, much less it being the most important threat security threat the nation faces. Quite simply, the claim that climate change poses a national security threat to the United States is, in the words President-elect Trump uses to describe climate change itself, “a hoax.”
