I am completely serious. And this may actually be the best reason to draft/beg/demand Al Gore to run for President.
Yahoo News: (h/t E)
Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.
"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."
[..]He cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.
Experts at the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute said it was likely that global warming would create huge flows of refugees as people tried to escape areas swamped by rising sea levels or rendered uninhabitable by desertification.
Tickell said terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publish its report, the most complete overview of climate change science, in Paris on February 2 after a final review. It will guide policy makers combating global warming.
The draft projects more droughts, rains, shrinking Arctic ice and glaciers and rising sea levels to 2100 and cautions that the effects of a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will last far longer.
To anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth, this is not news. But these are not dots connected by anyone in this administration. I'd like to be Oprah-like and find gratitude in my heart that Bush even deigned to use the term "global climate change" in his SOTU, but I can't. This is THE front on the War on Terror. And it's one that if we paid more attention to, we could affect a peaceful change not just for us, but for millions of people on this planet. Peaceful, what a concept.
This is the chance to show the rest of the world that the US is not a hypocritical bully, but a global leader in pursuing what is in EVERYONE'S best interests. Everyone, that is, but terrorists who play to the disenfranchisement and alienation of dislocated and struggling populations. Think how much benefit it would be for us economically if our President would provide incentives to corporations to be ahead of the curve environmentally as well.
