On September 27 the House Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, will hold a hearing to examine current thinking on the nature and magnitude of the threats that global warming may present to national security, and to explore the ways in which climate-related security threats can be predicted, forestalled, mitigated, or remedied.

The National Security Implications of Climate Change
Thursday, September 27, 2007
10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
2318 Rayburn House Office Building

The hearing will be Webcast live and archived on the Committee’s Web site.

From the Committee’s Hearing Charter:

Among the many direct consequences of warming temperatures may number: flooding, drought, soil and coastal erosion, melting of glaciers and sea ice, and change in the range of disease vectors. Such phenomena can lead to water shortages, diminution of food supplies from both agriculture and the oceans, the spread of disease to new areas and the emergence of new diseases, increased risk of fire, and decreased production of electrical power. Through famine, epidemic, and competition of resources, these can contribute to the breakdown of civil order – and, where governments are already stressed, disintegration of the state – as well as rampant human misery, mass migration, the rise of extremist ideologies, and armed conflict. This hearing will look at the current state of research into these possibilities, as well as the strategic thinking that is being developed in hopes of anticipating and coping with such threats.

Witnesses

Panel One

General Gordon R. Sullivan, USA (Ret.), is the former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and is serving as the Chairman of the Military Advisory Board that The CNA Corporation formed in conjunction with its report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.

Mr. James Woolsey, a former Director of Central Intelligence and currently Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton, is the author of a chapter of the forthcoming Center for Strategic and International Studies report “The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.”

Panel Two

Dr. Kent Hughes Butts is the Director of National Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership.

Dr. Alexander Lennon is a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-director of the forthcoming CSIS report “The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.”

Dr. Andrew Price-Smith, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado College, Director of the Project on Health and Global Affairs, and author of the book The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development.