Wargaming Climate Change
On Point had an excellent show last week on the national security implications of climate change.
All of the scenarios, however, make me think that climate change is too much of a meta-phenomenon to directly examine in a war game. One can game out the consequences of melting glaciers on the Indian-Chinese border, but then you’ve turned climate change into a resource conflict scenario. Or you could game out the competition over newly open sea lanes through the North Pole, but then you’ve turned climate change into a sea control competition scenario. Or, you could game the humanitarian response consequences of increased tsunamis and hurricanes, but - again - you’ve turned climate change into a military support to disaster response scenario.
In every case I can think of, the effects of climate change are transformed into a more concrete national security issue that is already on our radar. What the climate change-driven forecasts do is change our assessments of the relative likelihood of all of these scenarios happening, both individually and collectively.
