 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Good afternoon and welcome to our fifth issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm Professor John Jackson and I'll serve as the host for today's event. The goal of this series is to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been extended to include the entire Naval War College family, members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the nation. We'll be offering an additional 11 lectures between now and 16 May of 2023. And as a reminder, we will be pleased to offer certificates of participation for viewers who participated at least 70% of the offered lectures. That's 11 out of 16. Looking ahead, due to scheduling conflicts, we must postpone the lecture schedule for Monday, 12 December 2022. This means that we will not have another lecture until after the new year. On 10 January, Professor Tim Schultz will speak about humans versus machines, which should be a great way to kick off the new year. Okay, on with the main event. During the presentation of follows, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of zoom and we'll get to as many as we can at the conclusion of the presentation. Climate change affects security around the world. Our speaker this afternoon will explore the basics of climate change and the ways it interacts with national security. For over 20 years, the Department of Defense has increasingly incorporated a variety of client related considerations into defense planning, culminating recently in a surge of activities. This includes adapting to environmental changes, building resiliency within the infrastructure, and understanding the geo strategic and operational implications. Global changes to climate have significant impacts to local water, food and other resources, leading to potentially destabilizing effects on fragile state systems and migration. You will hear how these changes affect the entire globe, leaving each country allies and adversaries alike, to determine their unique security interest. The countries and organizations that are best to understand and anticipate these changes will be best prepared to fight and win in the unstable climatic environment of the next century. Commander Andy or Nate Cameron US Navy is a permanent military professor teaching policy analysis and our national security affairs department, and she is the founding director of the climate and human security studies group. Her academic interests include climate change and security, climate and energy policy, human security topics, and civil military coordination during humanitarian assistance disaster relief. She is an internationally known expert who was awarded the 2019 eco educator award by the renewable now network. She's earned a PhD in security studies from the naval post graduate school and an educational doctorate and educational technology from Pepperdine University. I am very pleased to pass the podium on to commander Andrea Cameron. Thank you very much. Hear me loud and clear? Hi, I'm going to start today by introducing one of my favorite analogies that a mentor of my uses. It talks about climate change and you're really trying to figure out, well, how does this affect the world? If you think about the world like a chess game, you have the board and you have all the actors playing on it. The actors mostly are different countries, right? And you have teams and you have moves and this is why we war game and we can figure out solutions. You think about how our national security strategy has characterized China as a pacing threat. You're really looking at a chess game and China is one of the lead actors on that chess board now. Climate change. Here's the analogy is the board itself is changing. It's not the pacing threat of another country. It is a shaping threat that is going to change every country and how are they going to respond to it is really the question of the 21st century. The DOD has a simple mandate. The Department of Defense has to protect the homeland and deter conflict. And if they can't deter conflict, fight and win if necessary. So if you think about this chess board and the shaping threat of climate change that's going to change everyone's foundation. All the assumptions about how states interact and the international system is built. Then we have to think about how climate change affects security. Thank you, John, for the introduction. Again, my name is Commander Andrea Cameron and I lead the climate and human security studies group here. For students, you're welcome to join. Just send me an email. I'd like to start with a quick kind of background. How do we get to this point? So you go back to the end of the Civil War, the rise of the industrial age. That one came with that great development and industrialization was the burning of fossil fuels. At the same time, scientists are just starting to realize that this greenhouse effect that literally works with a greenhouse is also starting to affect the atmosphere. That's the late 1800s. You go into the 1950s and 60s, we get now more and more physical science that's focusing on this greenhouse effect. And the first president that was briefed about climate change was Lyndon Baines Johnson. So you're down to the 1960s. 20 years later, the science continues to grow. The international community has mobilized. Something we should really start looking at science. And it's not just what this scientist does and that team does and that country does. We need to start looking at how all of it fits together for this global system. And that was culminated in 1988 with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Program co-sponsored this group of governmental organizations and scientists to come together and start putting all of this science together to understand what it meant for the globe and the resulting impacts to international peace and security. So that's the science side. Shortly thereafter, you have the political side, the international political organization. And by 1992, the UN adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. This is the Umbrella Environmental Treaty. All countries in the world have signed it, including the United States of America, which signed it pretty much. It was in the summer that it came about. By this fall, the U.S. government had bought onto this environmental treaty. This is that Umbrella Environmental Treaty, as I mentioned. And the world community gets together to talk about it. So you might have heard in the news that COP 27 just happened. That's the Conference of Parties, the parties that agree to this treaty. They do us the favor of numbering them. This was the 27th time they met in Egypt this time. And what are they doing? They're figuring out what are the next steps for how the global community is going to address climate change. This wasn't just happening in that kind of 1990s period, just in the international level. We also had the U.S. government very, very interested in what was happening in climate change. Congress passed and established the Global Climate Change Research Program in 1990. They said, this international research is important. Let's build on that. But what we're really interested in, of course, is how it's affecting the homeland. How does it affect our country? So they said, well, we have all these government agencies, 13 in particular, plus scientists within the United States. Let's put them together. And they owe us a national climate assessment. So the fourth national climate assessment came out in 2018. The fifth national climate assessment is being put together right now. I'm a DOD representative, one of the contributing authors to that. What does this do? Really want to look at what are the climate impacts to homeland? So if you look at this, all that was created 30 years ago, and it has evolved since then. It fits and starts. There is some resistance to talking about climate. Sometimes we talk about in other names. Sometimes we deprioritize it as an issue. But this has evolved. 100 years of science went into this part of the decision. And then you start getting the social scientists, people like myself, I'm a political scientist, starting to ask questions. Okay, we understand the science. Well, what does it mean for communities? What does it mean for political systems? What does it mean for our businesses? That's why Congress was really interested. They wanted to know, what does this mean for the U.S. economy? Finally, about the 1990s, you end up with this great question of, wait a second, so it might affect our businesses. What effect does it have on the global security environment? That's the first research we see really trying to investigate climate change and conflict. And this has been the building research body for about 20 years. Is there a causal connection between climate change and conflict? It's not as simple as that. Some people like to make a direct connection. The direct connection isn't there. But you end up with all these variables. What's happening in the physical environment? What's happening in the social environment? What policies are being made? How are different populations reacting? So we're trying to figure out what are these chains that actually say climate change, this factor, this factor, this factor, this factor can result in negative outcomes to peace and security. Why is that important? Because we need to know if we're going to intervene, we're going to put development assistance around the world. It's important to know where you can target that assistance to actually have meaningful effect. If you're trying to lower the causal connection between climate change and conflict, where can you best put those resources? Congress over the last five years has driven most of the government's work in climate change. In fact, in the fiscal year 2020, they gave us our first definition of climate security. And if you look at the definitions, the effects of climate change on U.S. national security and related infrastructure, on political stability and national and subnational levels, on security of allies and partners, and on ongoing or potential political violence and unrest. That's hits on a lot of the themes I've already talked about. And it was our first real good attempt. There are several definitions, kind of from governments, from think tanks, from the academics, but this is a great place to start in thinking about how climate change and security interact. I've talked a little about where we got. Now I'm going to talk a little bit, just a little bit about the science and what are we talking about when we talk about climate change? Did you know that the Earth's average temperature has risen over one degree Fahrenheit in the past century? It might not sound like much, but think about it this way. A one-degree rise in your body temperature can lead to a fever. Five degrees can land you in the hospital. So guess what? Our Earth has a fever, and scientists believe Earth's temperature could rise by three to ten degrees this century. Why? For one thing, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They raise the temperature by trapping heat. And warmer temperatures means, you guessed it, less snow and ice. As they melt, what's left behind are darker patches of land and water. And guess what dark colors do? Here's a hint. Ever try wearing black clothes to the beach? Not a good idea. Black absorbs more sunlight, thus emits more heat, and makes you warmer. Not good for you or the Earth. Here are some other possible symptoms, a planetary fever, shrinking glaciers, shifting plant and animal ranges, sea level rise, more intense heat waves, stronger hurricanes. Experiencing any of these symptoms? It's time to seek attention right away. Remember, the planet you save may be your own. Planet that NASA studies most is actually Earth. And if you're interested in more of these videos or a lot of great information about climate change, the website for NASA is incredibly valid and reliable for great scientific information that is really conveyed to the general public. So what are we talking about? The video mentioned greenhouse gases. So I have a NOAA chart here that kind of talks about what are some of the greenhouse gases that go into this portfolio that we should be concerned about? The largest chunk on the bottom here is carbon dioxide, CO2. Sometimes you hear greenhouse gases and CO2 be used synonymously. That's because it's such a large percentage of the overall portfolio. So it's about two-thirds carbon dioxide. About 20% of it is methane. Methane is important. It's a smaller piece of the pie, but it has bigger impact within the Earth. And then there's nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons to kind of build out this full portfolio of the greenhouse gases that we're talking about that are getting tracked in the Earth's atmosphere. So these gases are increasingly in the Earth's atmosphere that doesn't give them any place to go. It's either in the air, the water, or the land. Sometimes the water includes the ice as well. So scientists have some great ways of measuring. These are some of the basic measurements that you might hear talked about in the news. Temperature is the most prevalent one. We're really looking at what is the temperature of the Earth doing? The Earth has a fever, as the NASA video says. The goal previously was to try and stop the global warming to about two degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels. Scientists realized about five years ago that probably wasn't aggressive enough to curb some of the effects. So now the number you might hear a lot in the news is 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's that key indicator of temperature and degrees Celsius. And it's the number one thing we're looking at measuring. We're looking at the second one, greenhouse gases in parts per million in the atmosphere. The third one is sea level rise. It's measured in millimeters per year. And land ice measured in gigatons per year. That's a massive unit. In general, temperature, the amount of greenhouse gases and sea level is on the rise. And land ice is on the decline. NASA uses everything, all different types of sensors. They use remote sensing from satellites. They use aircraft. They use surface materials and submersibles that go under the water. They're looking at all dimensions of the atmosphere to try and get as accurate as possible measurements on this, especially over time, so they can gauge what they're looking at. So now we've talked briefly about what is climate change, the warming created by the greenhouse gases and which gases they are. Now we have a couple different types of tools for what we can do about it. The first one on here is mitigation. So CO2, excuse me, greenhouse gases are going into the atmosphere. Mitigation is how do we stop putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere? If you're talking about fuel-efficient buildings or transitioning to electric vehicles, anything in that line, you're trying to do some kind of mitigation effort. The DOD is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels. It is expensive. It is inefficient. And what really happens is it's a critical vulnerability. We've learned this in conflict after conflict operations that we've been in. Mitigation has become a critical tool that we're trying to use to see what are the alternative sources of fuel that we could use so that we can not only minimize our impact to the world, but we really want to become more effective operationally. So a lot of the DOD stuff I'll talk about at the end is looking at this mitigation piece. The second option for addressing climate change is geoengineering. So somehow using some kind of large-scale engineering project to affect the level of CO2. There's two types I want to talk about. One is carbon capture. The other is solar radiation management. Carbon capture is any kind of thing you do to say CO2 come out of the atmosphere. So whether you're planting trees, which reforestation is a common tool that's being used, the Trillion Trees Initiative, that's the intent of that type of program. Pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere or try and stop it from going out. So scrubbers on factories, CO2 coming out of the seawater, any type of that that's trying to remove CO2 or greenhouse gases is under this carbon capture type of header. And the second one is solar radiation management. This is manufacturing what the effects we see like from a volcanic explosion. So the heat comes from two places. It comes from the sun hit coming into the atmosphere and heating up the planet and then the greenhouse gases. So it's the combined impact of both of those things that's causing global warming. Solar radiation. We learned from volcanoes that enough particulates go into the high levels of the atmosphere that for a brief period of time some of that solar heat is reflected back out of the atmosphere. Can we simulate that type of effect on the earth? This is a growing school of thought stratospheric aerosol injection putting sulfur particles way high up in the atmosphere to try and get that level of cooling. This is a highly controversial option but you've probably heard it talked about in the news and if you haven't paid attention before you might notice it now that you have some understanding about it. Why is it so controversial? One, you have to if you're doing it you generally would want many countries to agree that that's what we should be doing. We don't know what the second third fourth order effects of this are going to be. We are in essence what NASA would say hacking the planet. We're trying to do something to solve a problem but we might end up creating a lot more out of this. It's also ethically challenging. You know where would you do this? How would you do this? Would you do it in a way that possibly would have negative effects for someone else? Would you unilaterally do it? NASA has a great kind of buzz line with this. They basically say at best it is a band-aid. You can cause a temporary thing to cover up this problem. At worst it's a self-inflicted wound. However if we can't get mitigation and we can't do the things that are starting to lower our CO2 and other greenhouse gases it's entirely possible that governments will be increasingly drawn to something like solar radiation management as a potential solution. So we've talked about mitigation taking or lowering your greenhouse gases. We've talked about what we can do to kind of absorb the greenhouse gases or stop the cooling or stop the warming effect. And the last one is adaptation. This is where you see a lot of effort. Adaptation is what can we do? We know some of these effects are happening. What can we do to adapt to those effects? It can be everything from populations moving to building seawalls to different types of irrigation, all different types of things. Anywhere, every country is going to determine what their own climate vulnerabilities are and their own solution sets for adapting. The DOD has really kind of looked at adaptation for a long time. This has been our primary focus for many years. Recently we've kind of picked up mitigation a little bit but adaptation has really been what we've been interested in. Why? Because all of our installations are really concerned about being able to continue their missions. We want us to do what we need to do at home as well as support the warfighters abroad. We've done a couple things in this adaptation plan recently. First, in 2021 October, about a year ago, we released the DOD climate adaptation plan. I'll talk about all the adaptation plans in a minute. This is a really good well thought out document that puts together an end state for the DOD. Also, we've come up with a DOD climate adaptation tool, kind of a methodological approach for assessing our installations. We are in the process right now kind of doing all of that for the bases within the United States. We also want to do this for our bases abroad and this is an engagement tool of how we can work with other countries by sharing the tools we have for assessing our vulnerability. Last fall, we also put out the DOD installation exposure to climate change at home and abroad document, which is a great one. Each service listed their own climate vulnerabilities. What's fascinating to me about this one is every service, including the Navy, listed drought as the number one climate vulnerability. Finally, the DOD has a regional sea level rise database. You can go in, you can look at the different bases and you can kind of, there's a timeline, you can look at what kind of impacts sea level rise will have to those bases over time. Understanding all of that is part of adaptation. We need to know what the impacts are and what we can do about this field was relatively small. Like I said, it's kind of had ebbs and flows of priorities in the different administrations over the last 30 years until the Biden administration came in and put it front and center, which was 21 months ago. Within days of inauguration, we have Executive Order 14008 and that was tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad. This was broad and sweeping. I was president of Biden's administration telling the entire executive branch of the government, we're going to start looking at a lot of things climate. UOS, this, this, this, this, this, this, we're going to talk about a few of them right now. First one, for about 10 years, the intelligence community in their national intelligence estimates and their global trends reports have been including climate risks. But finally, this Executive Order said, intelligence community, you're going to give me a national intelligence estimate on climate change directly. That's going to be 100% your focus. That came out last fall. We also have a climate strategy by USAID. How are the different ways we're going to engage with other countries on our development efforts? Most of them are focused on mitigation and adaptation. This Executive Order asked the DOD to do a climate risk analysis. So we look at the risks to the DOD, particularly at the different regions around the world, their geographic combat demands, and we have this risk analysis. It is publicly available, so if you're interested, you can go take a look at it. That was one of the deliverables. And finally, the DOD climate adaptation plan. The Executive Order asked every department in the U.S. government to do an adaptation plan, and they're all publicly available. This is the DOD's. There was a lot of information in this climate adaptation plan. One thing I really liked about it is it actually had an end state. Ensuring the DOD can operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and man-made systems essential to the department's success. It has five lines of effort for enablers. This is a great, really well mapped out and thought through plan. Why is it so important? It's the start. All of the services have now come up with their own adaptation plans, their own strategies, and this is the starting point that we are all building off of. There's so much great activity happening within the Department of the Defense right now. There's a couple great places that we kind of had long-term looks, operational energy. How can we make our troops more sustainable in the field? So we can carry on the fight, carry on operations, operational energy. The other one, installation energy. How can we make our installations more resilient and more sustainable, less dependent perhaps on the local grid, et cetera? Those things have come ongoing and are getting a lot more attention at the moment. There's a couple other things that are relatively new. One of them is climate literacy. Most people don't have kind of this really vague orientation that I've given you today about what climate change is and what does it mean for security interests. So climate literacy is something that we've spent a lot of time on. We have a working group and we're really trying to figure out who do we need to educate, what do they need to know, and then how do you expect them to do that? We've come up with this decision, definition. This is the short definition of climate literacy. We have a long one too, but I give you the short one. It's pretty simple though. What are the understanding how climate impacts the DOD? How the DOD impacts climate? That understanding is great, but the third part of it is how do you make climate informed decisions? We want the action. We want leaders to go out and take this information and say, what does it mean for my warfighting community? What does it mean for my acquisition purchases? What does it mean for fill in the blank, whatever part of the DOD that you're representing here today? That is what's important about climate literacy. This is in its nascent forms right now, but we're truly trying to figure out who needs to know what so that we can start shaping DOD policy accordingly. The other really fun one is climate wargaming. That is a big one that has not had a lot of attention in the past. I was part of the first DOD, climate wargames. I was part of the first Navy climate change wargame. There's a lot of really great questions because what really matters at the end is how does climate change affect warfighting? The great way to figure that out is to look through wargames. What are these potential scenarios we might be dealing with and then how can we gain that out and figure out what the impacts are? Couple great areas to look at. How does climate change affect global power competition? If we're back on that chess board and we're doing something with another country, how does climate change change that scenario? Also, climate change affects a lot of countries. In general, we look at general states of fragility and instability. What are the likely factors that might change that calculus? We can look at any country around the world and see this stability and fragility and how it might change, how we engage with that country and what we can do to support them. Another way to look at this is to take any mitigation or adaptation decision that's being made right now. That's what wargames are. There's a decision made and you want to figure out what are the effects of that decision. Right now, we're making all kinds of decisions, a great adaptation. We're trying to change certain vehicles to electric vehicles, right? Large percentage. What does that mean? Do we lose some capability? Do we gain some capability? Do we lose funding? Not that we lose it, but do we change? We're spending a lot more money because now we're purchasing this type of vehicle instead of that type of vehicle. We can game that out. Finally, you can look at how do you prepare now? If you know in 10 years that something might happen, which we can have pretty reasonable estimates on these kind of impacts. If you know that in 10 years, what would you change about your decision making right now? We've asked a lot of installation commanders this, especially after they had that 1,000-year flood that they weren't expecting. They said, what would you have done different if you had known six months ago? What would you have known different if you'd known three years ago or five years ago? We have reasonable assessments about how climate is going to affect our infrastructure in particular. We can start figuring out in wargaming, what would we do now if you know that's the impact later? Those are some of the compelling questions with wargaming. There's a lot of emphasis and energy going into climate right at the moment. I think I will go ahead and close out by talking about the three services. By that, I mean all of them have now put out a climate strategy. The Army came out first in February, less than a year ago, put out their climate strategy. The Department of the Navy, Navy and Marine Corps came out in May. Both of them put out a strategy. Then there was a whole lot of energy and effort because they needed an implementation plan. The Air Force watched all of that and said, oh, we're just going to release everything all at once. It looks like they're behind, but they're actually quite ahead of us because they have put together their implementation plan and their strategy all in one document. That was just recently released in October. What that does is they've put out their implementation plan and some of the milestones they're actually working on, whereas the Army and the Navy are just starting to get caught up on that. But they've all come out now. The Coast Guard will be releasing one probably within the next month. Really, what does this mean for our services? It means something very different for the Army than it does for the Air Force about how climate change is going to impact it. They took all that end state and those lines of effort from the climate adaptation plan and applied it to their respective services. Now we're planning at the service level. That covers some of the global situation on climate change, what it is, how are we working on it, both internationally and domestically. Most importantly, a lot of the major things that have happened within the Department of Defense. I believe I will go ahead and take questions if anyone has any. Thanks, John. Thank you. Super, super presentation. Andrea mentioned that Congress has played an important role in the work it's being done. And I'd like to acknowledge that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's staff is watching today. Don't get nervous. But she is certainly one of the experts in this area. And we're very pleased to have the Senator's staff online with us today. And if they have questions, we'll get to those in just a couple of minutes. Are there any questions here in the auditory? And if you'd use your microphone, please, so we can make sure everyone hears from you. In the middle, please. I left a comment at the window from Sri Lanka. So we heard of the risk of the increasing greenhouse gases and the temperature rise. So and the global warming. So and we have seen some actions taken by US government. So we all know that US being the global leader, when you push for something, everybody will follow it. So I mean, if it is a good one, that is good for all the world. But this is kind of observation. So we'd come to use of petroleum products like the vehicles because I observe some, I mean, here in US, electric vehicles are not that famous. So like people used to use gasoline like gas and diesel, maybe not electric ones. But maybe in China, like they mostly promote electric things. So maybe this is kind of disadvantage for the US like because people are looking at you. So how you advocate on that and how you explain what are any plans to overcome this situation. Thank you. You cut quite right to the core of the matter, right? And this is the fundamental tension that just was played out at the COP 27 in Egypt. There's a couple of different pieces here. One, the developing world has reaped the benefits of using all of these greenhouse gases to industrialize and develop. And the developing world is really, they want to develop too, rightly so. That's a very rational choice. And there's this friction between the two of how do we get everybody to continue to grow and develop while in this situation of the climate changing. And because the climate is changing, this energy transition, it's a friction point, right? We saw it play out. One of the things the developing world really wants is financing. Climate finance has been a key issue after COP, COP after COP after COP when they all get together. And what they're wanting is, hey, developed world, you've gotten rich off of your full development. We are disproportionately affected and we don't have as much funding as you. And we're trying to figure out a deal where you give us some assistance and you give us financing. And, you know, we can all kind of reconcile this a little bit together and have a global solution that works for all of us. COP 27 made a huge advancement in that, which was the loss and damages. You might have seen that on the news, which is the biggest step forward in climate finance that we've had at any COP so far. And it was the first time parts of the developed world has agreed to do any kind of climate financing in a robust way to kind of set this balance between the two types of countries. Did I answer your question? Would you like to follow up? Yeah, I think my question was in the US. In the US? Yeah, use of electric vehicles or at least hybrid vehicles are not that famous. I mean, it's kind of a negative for your topic. In the US, electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular and reliable as they are around the world. We will see that. I think we'll continue to see that as there have been more investments and it's business sector decisions. You'll see some states leading it like wanting to change emissions standards and you'll see private industry more and more mobilizing to completely move some of their fleets from fossil fuel to electric vehicles. That's not just a US centric. I think I'll challenge you that electric vehicles aren't that popular because if you just drive on two years ago to today, you can see a lot more EVs on the road and having some of the mainstream automobile industry come on board with that has really shifted that as well. Yes, next question. Thank you for your presentation. I'm a commander junior grade Taoist there from Latvia. So regarding global warming, we already know how it changes the situation, the security situation and different countries interest in Arctic regions. So there's accessibility of resources and northern sea passage. But I would like to ask you about Antarctica. So what are possible implications of global warming to Antarctica from international security perspective? And you mentioned the global power competition. So are there any indications of any kind of power competition regarding use of Antarctic continent? Thank you. Excellent question. First, Antarctica is not a country. It's not a member of the UN. It doesn't have people. So that's an important distinction of why Antarctica is different. However, there is an international agreement about who gets to work in Antarctica and what type of activities they get to do. Most of what's happening down there is kind of a lot of research and science, little technology development. And that's really what they're looking at. So we might end up in some kind of scientific competitive space. There hasn't been a lot of discussion of militarizing Antarctica like there is for the Arctic. So does it have the potential to get in a competition, possibly, but it's not near as contested as the Arctic region at the moment. Would you like to ask a follow-up? So as I understood, so there are no indications of interest from terms of military use of the Antarctic continent. There's not that they'll not not to the same degree as in the Arctic. And most are and most of it is like I said, most of the activity down there is science based. So we might end up with some friction points, but in general, not being militarized. Another question here in the auditorium. Ma'am. Thanks, Dr. Cameron. I've heard in the news a bit about the biodegradability of the electric car batteries. Are there any, it's a popular argument, are there any lines of effort to really work on the components of those batteries to mitigate that? Thank you. There are lines of effort. Most of all of it is happening of course in private industry, but there are lines of effort. We call this kind of usually maladaptation where you've created something to kind of solve a problem, but you've ended up having further problems, right? You hear this with the wind turbines. You hear this with the batteries. You hear it with solar panels. You've kind of created something that maybe has a short term solution and an alternative energy source. Isn't that great? However, you've created a separate type of long term problem. To answer your specific question, yes, there is efforts to do so. They're really what we're always looking at. You hear the buzzword sustainability. You're trying to build something that has as little impact as possible. Yes, there's been a lot of things to do. I could have this argument with a colleague. It's not worth it to have wind turbines that have more impact than they'll ever gain. However, you have to start somewhere. You don't get to the point where you have sustainable wind turbines or other means if you're not going through the development process of those types of capabilities. Kerry, do we have any Zoom questions? Thank you, Professor Cameron. A couple of questions in Zoom. Does the military have any plans to develop and use alternative energy like solar or wind? What are your suggestions with ships and new ships to make them more efficient and environmentally friendly? Excellent question. Yes, a lot of bases are. You can go out the gate 17 right here and you see solar panels. Wind and solar is being something that we're really looking at on a lot of bases. Sometimes you even hear geothermal or others mentioned. We're trying to diversify and we're trying to increase resilience. We want to be as resilient for as many days as possible. And especially we don't want dependence on like when the power goes out in the city of Newport, the whole base goes dark. We want to make sure that we have enough resilience within our system so that we can stay open as many days as possible. A lot of effort, both for those types of capabilities, especially wind and solar, on installations all over the U.S. About Navy ships. That's a great question. That's under a lot of research and development. Sometimes you might have heard of the Great Green Fleet where we're trying to experiment with some biofuels. You might hear a lot of people like to hold up the carrier fleet in nuclear as a good option for an alternative source. So we're trying to, is there a way you can kind of make nuclear smaller for some of the other types of ships? That is all in discussion and under development. Of course, any type of pipeline from design of a platform all the way through building and then the service life, that's just a multi-year process. So it's been in discussion all along because we want to have that kind of sustainability and reliability. I say that as not the flip side. We don't want the vulnerability on our ships. So this is not something new that we were thinking about because of climate change. We're just thinking about it because of operational effectiveness. Thanks, Gary. Anything else, Gary? Yeah, I guess a follow-up to that in the chat was because of the across different administrations, how well has DOD been able to maintain their programs for building out solar farms on local bases? Have they been impacted by the changes in administrations? Largely the answer is no, just because these are multi-year processes, especially on the installation energy side. I would say we have a good 10, 15 years pushing, getting more solar, getting more wind. On the operational energy side, it's a little bit different, mostly because if you think about the green fleet, when the secretary left the Navy, the fleet, the program kind of dissolved a little bit. We still had some of that tacit knowledge. We can pick it up or we can look for alternatives, but it can ebb and flow, but for the most part on the installation side, it's been pretty consistent. We are trying to get to a place where it's built into the programming of the fleet so that we can start to not have kind of political decisions changing the robust nature of how we develop our platforms. I think it was interesting that we used biofuel in an aircraft known as the green hornet, which I thought had a great ring to it. Another question here in the auditorium, back further up, please. You're it. Good evening. I'm Lieutenant Cody Roberts, US Navy. One question I have is with the climate change that is happening, there's all this focus on the negative impacts on certain countries and how the DoDs can have to respond to that. There's also a conversation, I believe, of the economic, the potential economic benefits of such as the northern sea route and potential winners in the global climate change. Just wondering about your opinion of who do you think those necessary winners are and how does that affect the current global power order? Or what should the US military be looking at in that sense? I don't know if there's a winner. So I'll just say that up front. Every country has their own climate vulnerabilities. In general, the Petro States, the oil producing countries, are very concerned trying to look at the trend away from the fossil fuels and into the critical minerals. Why is that important? Because that shifts our focus of countries we're interested in and where our priorities are for future national security interests. We need to better have supply chain resilience within that critical minerals. We know that the government knows that. And over the last couple of years, we've been trying to shore that up a bit because we know that China in particular has dominance over those types of markets. So that's the national security impact. And I think if you're looking at who the winners are, if you are a country that has some of those critical minerals, you just became some of the bigger players in the international scene where you might not have had as much political clout 10 years ago. Are there questions here in the auditorium down front? Yes. I was wondering, it seems like your assessment based off the future is that rising temperatures are going to continue to go up based off of the last 10 years, as outlined in the video, of one degree. Is that all the historical data that we have or does it go back further than the last past 10 years? So the initial science started happening late 1800s. Our real understanding of it started right around 1958 and some of the research that was happening then. And then it's just been this growing pool of data about global warming. What we generally have, and if you're interested in kind of seeing these global numbers, you can look at NASA or at the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And they'll show you kind of this projection chart, if you look at an XY axis. And they have the kind of low end of the scenario, the high end of the scenario, and their projections right now. I'll tell you this about scientists. A lot of times within the climate, when you're hearing reporting about climate change, everyone's like, this is very alarmist. People are trying to get, raise attention, etc. And they're pointing to the science saying, why is it so alarmist? In fact, what's happening is scientists to get their work published have a very vigorous review process. And what they tend to do is actually not put the alarmist stuff out there. They get vetted and challenged quite a bit by their peers. Scientists love to poke other scientists and challenge their assumptions. So they're published reporting. This meta analysis that's going into these global reports is generally pretty conservative, which is why when you hear, you know, a couple years ago, they're like, Oh, it's not two degrees Celsius is 1.5 degrees Celsius is because as the science continues to grow, they get a better and better understanding of what the impacts are and maybe what we need to do about that. There's some great charts, I didn't put them in here, but it kind of shows some of the projections over time. The other lever, you know, you have the one how much gas is going in. The other lever is what are the policy decisions we're going to make? You know, if the world commits to significant mitigation, if there's a massive technology development that says we can do a whole bunch of different carbon capture that we didn't know about five years ago, that changes, right? So we have these, you know, what is the physical system going to do? And what are the human systems going to do? What are the choices that we're going to make that might change this balance as well? So both of those go into climate assessments of the future. You might see a timeline. A lot of people think this is a far out problem. That's because most of the graphs usually go to about 2100. So right now about 80 years out. So it starts kind of narrow in the now. And again, it goes bigger in the long run. I'm commander for it from Bangladesh. So the climate adaptation or the mitigation, it requires the huge amount of fun. Now, for many of the developing countries are there, which do not have this capacity. So accordingly, the UNFCCC, there is a fund has been created, which is called like green climate fund, which was initially agreed upon that the developed countries will have significant contribution to that. As it is widely believed that there are many developing countries or least developed country around the world, which are extremely vulnerable for the climate change, despite not being or not having enough contribution to this climate change. It is mostly believed that because of the industrialization and other things, this and developed countries are mostly responsible for that. But it has been observed later, especially in the last decade and last couple of years that many developed countries are not willing to contribute to the fund. And it has been also widely believed that this has got significant bearing to the international peace and security. So your comment please on this. I agree with you completely. Really, you've hit the nail on the head. This, like I said, the kind of friction between the developing world and the developed world and the developing world really looking for a lot of assistance because there's two pieces of it. Adaptation, the developing world needs more resistance because they're getting disproportionately impacted. So they have the adaptation piece of it. They also, under the Paris Agreement, for example, all countries were now asking them, lower your climate emissions. Find your own mitigation strategies. So to meet the energy needs within the developing world, we're telling them, hey, maybe you don't have all these coal plants or something else that helped you build and industrialize. Now leapfrog the technology and do wind and solar, right, which is what you mentioned. To do that, we need the developed world needs to provide some funding to do that. And that'll be the best way we can help you, the developing world, reach their mitigation goals. Adaptation and mitigation are just two of the most important things we can do. And there's a lot of areas of opportunity within both of those to assist. Any final questions here? Yes, sir. Yes, I'm Captain Paras Kevokoulos from the Greek Navy. So we have one fact that the emissions of greenhouse gases are increasing. And we have another fact that refers to the global warming. The question is, have we been able to establish 100% that the cause and effect relationship between these two facts? Or in other words, the global warming is a human-induced consequence. Is there a correlation factor between these two? Thank you. Yes, that is the consensus of the scientific community that's been reported both internationally in the IPCC reports and domestically international climate assessments. So yes, that has been proven. We know about the greenhouse effect and we know it's contributing to it. There's a couple other things that people might say, oh, this is a natural variation of the earth. Or it's not, in fact, warming at all. Most of those have been kind of dismissed as alternative theories because of the massive increase in those metrics that I've been talking about all along. We know the science. We know how it works on the earth system. And we can see the projections going forward. Climate is obviously a very important topic. And I'd just like to let you all know that in the spring, the Naval War College and Salvet Regina University are partnering to bring a climate conference here to the college and at Salvet. So keep an eye out with strong support from Senator Whitehouse and the Secretary of the Navy. We will be organizing that conference and our speaker today will be the brain that's going to help us pull all this together. So last thought is I'm going to start a GoFundMe page to buy her a Tesla so she can use electrical transportation. And if anybody wants to chip in, you can do that. Thank you very much for coming this evening. And we'll look forward to see you after the first of the new year. Take care. Bye-bye. Happy New Year, everyone.