Navy Releases Global Climate Change Roadmap

In addition to the release of the NOC on Monday, the Navy also released the Roadmap for Global Climate Change. According to the press release, the roadmap was actually released this past Friday, but in typical Navy communications excellence the press release was on Monday, and who knows exactly when a download will be made available.

For now, the press release is all we have.

The Climate Change Roadmap is intended to be a companion document to the Navy Arctic Roadmap, released in November 2009. While the Arctic Roadmap serves to promote maritime security and naval readiness in a changing Arctic, the new Climate Change Roadmap examines the broader issues of global climate change impacts on Navy missions and capabilities.

"We issued the Arctic Roadmap first because that is where the most significant evidence of climate change is occurring," Titley remarked, "but the Arctic is not a vacuum. The changes that are occurring there, from both an environmental and political standpoint, reflect changes that will occur in the rest of the world."

The roadmap lays out a chronological approach divided into three phases.

Phase 1, focusing on near-term goals, includes defining the requirements for improved operational and climatic prediction capabilities through cooperative efforts within the U.S. government and scientific and academic communities.

Phase 1 also calls for inclusion of climate change impacts on national security in Naval War College coursework and in strategic "table top" exercises.

Phase 2, which is targeted for fiscal years 2011 and 2012, identifies as a priority the development of recommendations for Navy investments to meet climate change challenges. These challenges include protecting coastal installations vulnerable to rising sea levels and water resource challenges and being prepared to respond to regions of the world destabilized by changing climatic conditions.

Phase 2 also calls for the formalization of the cooperative relationships defined in Phase 1, and targets incorporation of climate change considerations in strategic guidance documents and fleet training and planning.

Phase 3, looking out through fiscal year 2014, addresses the execution of investment decisions and the initiation of intergovernmental, multilateral and bilateral activities with various partners to better assess and predict climate change, and respond to the military impacts of climate change.

I don't want to be a prick, honestly, but...

The Arctic issues are not trivial, indeed with potentially 13% of the uncharted global oil reserves and 30% of the uncharted global natural gas reserves, the Arctic represents a gold mine. We already see actions by Canada, Denmark, and Russia (among others) looking to leverage the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as the legal foundation for claims to those resources, while the United States does not take that route primarily because we are not a signatory of the treaty.

That is just a sample of the mixed and confusing messages being sent by the United States on these issues. Whenever I hear someone use the phrase "whole of government" I shake my head, because on the most complicated issues we don't even have half of government on the same page in regards to the objective to be clearly articulated in communication to our friends, much less our competitors.

Now we are looking at the broader issues of Climate Change, and again, what are we telling our friends, allies, competitors, and even the American people here? Do we intend to study the problem, or simply prepare for a series of contingencies? How does one tell the difference between a weather phenomenon related to climate change and one that is not related to climate change? Does it really matter to the Navy?

What exactly is the Navy planning for? Flood response? Hurricane response? How one country might leverage water access over another country? Resource wars? Is any of this something new the Navy has never considered or planned for, or simply a new context to study age old issues that might call upon military power?

Sorry, but absent significantly more information than has ever come forth through traditional communication channels of the Navy, I find Task Force Climate Change to be nothing more than another example of the Navy Redundant Department of Redundancy Department spending money on studying activities the Navy has been capable of managing for scores of decades, if not almost two centuries.

Seems to me building a new Icebreaker able to support oceanography and sea floor mapping for the Arctic Ocean would have been a better use of money than to put a bunch of sailors in a box to ponder the absence of any specific unique behavior associated with events that might result from global climate change.

After all, what is important to the Navy in regards to events that might be associated with Climate Change is the unique behavior governed by geography and the human terrain of the places a climate change event may occur. Other than Arctic areas that might represent new operating environments for the surface Navy, it seems to me Task Force Climate Change is a huge waste of time and money.