The Patriot Post® · Changing Climate or Changing Subject?

On Wednesday, our illustrious commander in chief addressed the latest graduating class of the United States Coast Guard Academy. Barack Obama rightly noted in his remarks that we need these newest USCG members to face a number of challenges including terrorism, drug interdiction and maritime security. But the biggest threat, Obama argued, is so-called “climate change.” Seriously, Obama is proposing to reshape the Department of Defense’s capabilities to comport with his Socialist climate agenda.

“So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security,” Obama declared. “And make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act — and we need to act now.” Worse, he insisted denial is “a dereliction of duty.”

Meanwhile, the words “radical Islam” never showed up on his teleprompter. Instead, he blamed conflict in the Middle East in part on the climate. “Understand, climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world. Yet … [i]t’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”

Unfortunately, our military strategy is increasingly being based on the unproven notion that climate change is a “serious threat to global security,” as the Department of Defense last year adopted a “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap.”

To reinforce the point, Team Obama released a new study on the subject, warning, “Climate change will directly impact U.S. military readiness, impacting installations and operations in a number of ways that include the availability of quality land and ranges, reductions in water supply, greater flood and fire hazards, and weather risks to the electricity supply. Installations near the coastlines are threatened by coastal erosion and sea level rise, damaging infrastructure and reducing the land available for operations.”

Climate alarmists claim sea levels could rise — perhaps by as much as an entire foot! — which threatens civilization as we know it. And here we thought Obama meant it when he declared in 2008, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that … this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

So much for that.

You may recall this climate scare was once again a hallmark of last year’s Democrat midterm election platform, though the message focused more on the economic effects of “global climate disruption,” or, as we call it, weather. Call us deniers, but we’re somewhat skeptical of counting on any weather forecast outside of a couple days, let alone a century. Perhaps that’s because the warming predicted decades ago is belied by an increase in sea ice and admittedly fudged government data.

We’ll humor Obama by conceding that some incremental change in sea level is possible in that time span. We just think that the variance is a natural fluctuation, given that the earth has been through both ice ages and warm periods that spanned centuries long before the modern industrial period.

There’s also the more serious aspect of actual, credible threats to our national security stemming from Obama’s foreign policy failures — such as our premature withdrawal from Iraq, the disintegration of Yemen, and our failure to address Russia’s ever-increasing aggression. Even China is getting in on the act. Rather than do something about those tangible threats, however, Obama is tilting at the windmill of an issue entirely outside the realm of military readiness.