Maggie's Farm

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world...The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, both emphasized that they were asked to assume the very worst consequences that would arise from the very worst global warming scenario-one that would increase the Earth's temperature by some 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next five decades. This was not a repressed secret report or a prediction of imminent doom, says Schwartz, who once ran scenario planning for Royal Dutch Shell in London. He said Greenpeace and other critics who seized on the leaked report and portrayed it as a scientific study got it all wrong.
The reality, of course, is far different from the spin put forth by eco-activists and the sensationalist media. There are no references in the report, and there's no environmental or economic modeling'-the report is purely an interview-driven by a Jules Verne "what if" exercise in speculation.

And the report doesn't blame man-made greenhouse gasses, the environmentalists' bete noir for global warming. It merely asks: What if we see a repeat performance of pre-historic climate changes?- focusing on a rapid climate shift that happened 8,200 years ago.

A second key area of Greenpeace's alarmist distortion is its claim that the report calls for immediate action-implying that such actions involve curbing energy use and thus, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. In reality, there is little discussion of man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions in the Pentagon report. In fact, greenhouse gas controls are nowhere to be seen in the report's seven recommendations, which focus on improving our understanding of climate; taking no-regrets actions to secure food and water supplies for the future; exploring adaptation strategies useful if climate begins to change rapidly; and geo-engineering approaches to controlling the climate.

The Schwartz-Randall climate report, indeed, is a purely speculative exercise in readiness planning for extreme climate changes of the sort seen in reconstructions of ancient temperatures. Many scientists saw the hyping of the Pentagon report as an “eleventh-hour” gesture by die-hard environmentalists to salvage the sinking Kyoto Treaty on climate change, which already has been rejected by the United States and Australia and is about to suffer the same fate in Russia.