Pentagon: Climate Change Disrupting Military. It Will Get Worse

Even as wildfires drain National Guard resources, the Pentagon is racing to develop computer models that can better guide decisions about sustainability efforts.

The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive, multi-year effort to better adapt to climate change and reduce greenhouse emissions. But the changing climate is already imposing costs on the military and even challenging how well it can prepare to fight other nation states.

“In terms of current operations, we have National Guardsmen, we have active-duty soldiers, we have active-duty airmen right now participating in firefighting support efforts. So these are…folks who are not doing a primary job. So right now we are experiencing climate change and effects. Right now, we know that these are going to only increase over time,” Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant defense secretary for environment and energy resilience, said in an interview.

That’s just one of the most obvious examples of climate impact on the military. Humanitarian assistance and support for civil authority are also Defense Department missions, as outlined in the National Defense Strategy, and climate change is growing those missions’ size and scope, Kidd said.

“We have already seen anecdotal evidence for increased demand for domestic support. If you track the number of days the National Guard was needed to provide support for civil authorities, last year was the highest year on record,” he said.

Part of that was the response to massive protests across the country. But this year, with far fewer protests, “We are on track to exceed that amount. This is National Guardsmen called up to fight forest fires,” he said. “Likewise, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers response for hurricanes and droughts in support of the national response through FEMA,” will also increase, he said.

Supporting firefighters and other people dealing with natural disasters is satisfying work for a lot of troops, Kidd said. But, he added, “There’s an opportunity cost: if equipment and personnel are being used for that, they aren’t doing other things. They aren’t doing the sort of warfighter training that they need to do.”

Eventually, dealing with the effects of climate change will become a key area of military involvement, he said. “We absolutely predict that that demand set will only increase, and yes, we can do that.”

More and more security experts agree.

In June, the International Military Council on Climate and Security released its second report on the impacts of climate change on issues such as governance and civil unrest across the globe. They surveyed experts from a variety of institutions—including the Planetary Security Initiative at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, and the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs—asking them how they expect various risk areas like biodiversity, water availability, and instability within nations to evolve over the next decade. The experts held a dim view.

“Respondents expect a majority of risks will pose high to catastrophic levels of risk to security. Ten and 20 years from now, respondents expect very high levels of risk along nearly every type of climate security phenomena,” the report said.

The experts concluded that the global governance system isn’t prepared for many of the risks. So, in part because of that lack of preparedness, more and more of the international response to climate-change-related issues will fall to men and women in uniform.

“Militaries will be increasingly overstretched as climate change intensifies. As the pace and intensity of extreme weather events increases, countries are increasing their reliance on military forces as first responders,” they wrote. “While direct climate change effects regularly threaten military infrastructure and threaten to reduce readiness, the most pressing security threats will come from climate change-induced disruptions to social systems.”

In 2019, the Pentagon launched a broad review of the effects of climate change on the military. This review put no price tag on current or future costs—in part because they depend on just how much the Defense Department can reduce its own emissions.

“In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, if we were a country, we would be the 55th largest emitter of greenhouse gases by country status,” Kidd said.

“The department absolutely recognizes we have to be part of the solution.”

Reducing emissions at the department’s hundreds of installations, which produce about one-third of its greenhouse gases, may seem to be the easy part, since buildings and infrastructure are simpler to model and modify. But that’s also the problem: Mistakes are literally cemented. Simple wrong choices can cost millions and the “wrongness” of any choice usually becomes clear only over time.

“Six inches or a foot of a seawall equates to millions of dollars in construction costs,” said Chris Massey, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mathematician.

But it’s hard to predict just how much seas will rise and storms will intensify over the next decades.

Decreasing the U.S. military’s operational carbon footprint is a different sort of game, one of understanding as perfectly as possible how any decision may result in a better or worse outcome, or lives lost. Here, too, a better understanding of the associated risks in trading in a fuel-hungry technology for something greener will be the key.

This is where new technologies like virtual twinning come into play. High-resolution modeling techniques will make it possible to better understand the effects of climate change and find ways to reduce the department’s carbon footprint.

Understanding how to better predict the weather has been a Defense Department dream since the end of World War II. But the technologies on hand today have made realizing that dream a real possibility.

Predicting the weather

For the U.S. military, the idea of using computers to better model the climate is older than computers themselves. Just after World War II, the U.S. military briefly entertained the idea that it might be possible to precisely predict the weather, and thus control it, through the use of vast electric calculators. As bizarre as the notion sounds, two of the best minds in the country firmly believed it and managed to convince the U.S. Navy to fund their research.

In October 1945, mathematician John Von Neumann—credited with some of the most important computational discoveries in history—and Vladimir Zworykin—the father of the television—marched into the office of Adm. Lewis Strauss and pitched their idea: a machine that could perform calculations quickly enough to account for all the variables in weather and climate, and eventually predict rain or snow as plainly as time.

Strauss provided them with $200,000 to construct their machine, which helped pave the way for random access memory, or RAM, and the future of modern computation as we know it. What it did not do is accurately predict the weather.

While Von Neumann and Zworkin grossly underestimated the number of calculations a machine would need to make in order to perfectly predict weather, they were on to something. More computation allowed for much more precise modeling of weather conditions, which the U.S. military of 2021 is using now to rethink how and where they build installations.

In July, the Army announced that it had entered into a new cooperative research and development agreement with Microsoft to test how the Army’s coastal storm modeling system, CSTORM-M, works in Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment. The hope is that the movement to a massive enterprise-level cloud will allow them to run new, never-before-deployed simulations of the coastal sea rise and also to allow researchers to use the model results to look at coastlines in more detail.

“To do that we need high-fidelity models,” Massey said. “They are computationally efficient, but at the same time expensive. They require a lot of CPU hours to get that level of accuracy. When it comes to construction cost, accuracy matters.”

C-STORM-M takes about 10,000 historical records of past storms and models them to understand what might happen with future storm sturges and other climate-related weather events. Moving the operation to an enterprise cloud will allow researchers to run the model over and over again much faster, and that should improve the model’s accuracy. It’s the difference between 100 practice hours and 1,000 or more. It will also allow them to bring in other forms of data and further improve understanding of potential probabilities.

“If for some reason that’s limited, and instead of running a thousand simulations you can only run twenty, well then the uncertain parts in your answers in the whole probability space are much larger. That equates to large dollars when it comes time to actually construct something,” Massey said.

Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, the principal scientist at Microsoft’s AI for Earth Program, says running the model at higher frequency in the new environment will also improve how well the Army can apply the model in different locations. Incorporating new data layers related to satellite images, infrastructure, etc.. will allow the military to much better understand not only what areas will be underwater or hit by heavy hurricane winds, but also model resiliency. For example, how the shutdown of a particular road might affect traffic, or how long it will take for the base to get back on its feet after a major event.

In essence, running a high-resolution climate model in an enterprise cloud environment thousands of times is a sort of prediction machine, but instead of perfectly predicting the weather, it offers a sense of what the weather will cost and what problems it will bring, Nuño said.

“More than a ‘what if’ forecasting tool, [the output] would be an assessment of risks under certain circumstances,” he said. “Any asset, any service, any population is going to be threatened by those storm surges, and so it’s extremely important to understand those risks and then use that,” to inform building decisions.

The computations, Massey said,  “are giving you the answers to see how high do you need to build? How high does that levy need to be? …Those construction costs, if you are off or you haven’t done enough modeling to really satisfy your accuracy requirements, then that could result in you needing to add six inches or more of uncertainty or engineering safety margins on top of what you’ve already done.”

The Navy is doing similar modeling work for its facilities in Hawaii, as well as its shipyard in  Portsmouth, Virginia, through a process called digital twinning. In essence, they create a very high-fidelity digital mockup of the new base, building, or piece of infrastructure you are trying to build—a virtual twin—then hammer it over and over again with disasters: high winds, too much rain, too little rain.

“We actually do modeling through digital twins where we can actually look at the probability of an event occurring and the costs associated with mitigating that, and that would actually drive some of the construction work,” said Rear Adm. John Korka, commander of Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, during the recent Sea Air Space event in Maryland.

In April, the Defense Department announced it would make its Climate Assessment Tool, or DCAT, available across the department. The tool allows planners to “look at the effects of climate change on our installations over two time periods, two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios in eight areas, drought, temperature, riverine, sea level rise, these type of activities,” Kidd said.

All of that climate prepping is putting the Defense Department in the lead as a developer and purchaser of microgrid technology, which could help bring down the cost and spur innovation.

“We want to build installation resilience. How do we do that? Basically on-site microgrid and on-site power generation,” said Kidd. He pointed to reports showing that the Defense Department could make up one-third of the market for microgrid and large-scale power storage due to new resilience requirements stemming from climate change.

New buildings will also be outfitted with new sensors to feed more data into future modeling, through the smart installations initiative, which should help the Defense Department much better understand how it’s using—and in some cases wasting—power.

Read the rest here: defenseone.com

Header image: Die Welt

PSI editor’s note: This article is just more virtue-signalling and Big Green propaganda by the government. The actual data shows climate change remains within natural variability.

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Comments (7)

  • Avatar

    very old white guy

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    Yep, more computer models should fix it. I hope they don’t fix it as well they have fixed the flu virus.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      CodexCoder

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      Exactly right, VOWG. If any model is not able to verifiably predict reality, it is total and utter crap and should be assigned to the bit bucket, the circular file, ./dev/null, touched out of existence and replaced with something that is empty, but at least useful.

      Reply

      • Avatar

        DeadHeartDiary

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        I mean, it’s pretty easy to predict something if you cause it hey. You can do ALL kinds of religious belief stuff with that.

        I guess I’ll trouble the sea…for you to see, more sharply.

        Reply

  • Avatar

    DeadHeartDiary

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    “Climate change disrupting military”

    That’s laughable. More like Military disrupting climate. Which is PROBABLY why they’ll try to peddle their “prediction” methods. I mean, it’s pretty easy to predict something if you cause it hey. You can do ALL kinds of religious belief stuff with that.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      DeadHeartDiary

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      It’s been a while since some military shit blew up real good. I’ll try connect with the other shaman/magicians. See if we can get a convocation thing going.

      Reply

    • Avatar

      Carbon Bigfoot

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      THIS WILL DEFINETLY FIX THE PROBLEM

      “Ecosexuality” and Marrying the Earth: It’s Not Your Grandparents’ Wedding
      by E. Calvin Beisner
      This will not be the usual post you find on this blog dedicated to Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s going to talk critically about sexual perversion. But by the end you’ll recognize why it’s appropriate for this venue.
      Annie Sprinkle is famous (or infamous) as a “performance artist” a “certified sexologist and advocate for sex work and healthcare … a sex educator, feminist stripper, pornographic actress, sex film producer and sex positive feminist” who “identifies as ecosexual,” as Wikipedia starts its article on her, which I don’t recommend reading (which is why I don’t link it here). For what it’s worth—which is nothing—she holds a Ph.D. “in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, an unaccredited, for-profit, degree-granting institution and resource center, in San Francisco (1996).”
      Yesterday CNN celebrated her with a feature article, “The ‘ecosexuals’ hosting joyful weddings to the Earth.” I do recommend that you read that—which at least isn’t as prurient as Wikipedia’s article about her.
      What you’ll find there is that Sprinkle and her lesbian partner Beth Stephens “married the Earth in 2008” and go around doing well-attended “weddings” in which they’ve married the earth, the sky, the moon, the Adriatic Sea, and more. (By the way, did they ask the earth’s, the sky’s, the moon’s, the Adriatic Sea’s permission to marry them? Doing so without their permission seems to me the height of anthropocentrism, which all environmentalists supposedly condemn.)
      It’s fitting that CNN published this under the “Style” category, because it has no substance. This is theater of the absurd—and it’s as disturbing that the media and public pay attention to it as that it happens in the first place.

      more at Cornwall Alliance

      THIS WILL DEFINETLY FIX THE PROBLEM:

      Reply

  • Avatar

    Tom O

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    I couldn’t convince myself to waste the time it would have taken to read this entire article. My bad. But that first paragraph told me a lot –
    ““In terms of current operations, we have National Guardsmen, we have active-duty soldiers, we have active-duty airmen right now participating in firefighting support efforts. So these are…folks who are not doing a primary job. So right now we are experiencing climate change and effects. Right now, we know that these are going to only increase over time,” Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant defense secretary for environment and energy resilience, said in an interview.”

    Wake up call Richard – That is precisely the purpose of the National Guard – to train for war if necessary, but to be their for civilian support in disaster. As for active duty? I’d be willing to bet that if they ARE involved in local effort, it is because the disaster threatens a military post, not in support of the civilians.

    A skim saw mention of “climate change, computer simulations, and AI.” I have read way too many fiction stories about these to want to read any more. I see them in the MSM all the time. I like my science “non-fiction.”

    Reply

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