Texas A&M says Global Warming will Impact U.S Military Operations

With the summers becoming hotter in College Station due possibly to Global Warming, Professors at Texas A&M have started to research about what global warming holds for our earth's future. A professor of oceanography, Kennicutt, has started during research on how global warming will not only affect the oceans but also the US military. His research shows that warming climate presents not only National and Homeland security challenges that will cause the US military to have to find new ways of doing business with other countries and navigating. He says that “the U.S. military needs to know what the world will look like 20-30 years from now if it is to make the preparations today to cope with tomorrow’s realities”(Texas). Kennicutt has been doing a report with fellow employees that "...presents a rather foreboding series of possible outcomes as our planet warms and reacts to past and continued greenhouse gas emissions” (Texas). Kennicutt points out in his research that "if the polar icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica continue to melt, sea levels around the world will dramatically rise" (Texas). Rising sea levels could have wide ranging impacts on naval facilities across the globe now and in the future. In the Arctic, the Northwest Passage could become seasonally ice-free, allowing for routine transiting of ocean going vessels across the Arctic Ocean. This would be helpful in reducing shipping time by "as much as one-third from Europe to Asia alone" (Texas). Kennicutt says “It would open large areas of the Arctic Ocean that were previously inaccessible to fishing, tourism, oil and gas exploration and possible environmental disasters. Studies suggest that as much as 30 percent of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves are above the Arctic Circle, so it seems inevitable that exploration, exploitation and transport of oil and gas in the region will increase.” Though these would be great opportunities it would also cause future changes in the politics and military strategies in the north, it has also been predicted that with these ice melts "...over the next few decades droughts will be more severe, and so will storms such as hurricanes and typhoons, and this could put a severe strain on the military as it tries to respond to increasingly frequent natural disasters worldwide" (Texas). Since the military responds in help to these disasters this would cause them to have to deal with natural disasters more often. The issue of global warming may have some positive changes to some in the future but these changes will only cause political issues between country boundaries, and cause trading and terrorism and easier opportunity, killing more animals and animal habitats, and causing military strategies to change.

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