Yesterday’s Huffington Post piece by the head of NATO cuts right to the core of what Operation Free has been saying for months: climate change is a direct threat to our national security. I could not have put it more bluntly:

“Some may wonder why NATO would be interested in climate change. To me, this is a bit like asking why a person would be interested in a change in gravity.”

What he is saying, is that the threat climate disruption poses to global security could not be more pressing or clear. In fact, he goes further, saying:

“NATO may be called upon to address the consequences of climate change directly. The military is often the ‘first responder’ to natural disasters. We saw this in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, and floods that more recently struck Eastern Europe.”

This will have very real security implications for the US military – by far the greatest contributor to NATO forces – at a time when resources are already stretched thin by conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet perhaps the most powerful imperative for action is this:

“Climate change presents security challenges of a magnitude and a complexity we have never seen before.”

That the most successful defensive security alliance of all time, views climate disruption as its biggest threat and greatest challenge – bigger than terrorism, bigger than nuclear war, bigger than any other challenge they have yet faced – says it all.

Sun Tzu, writing thousands of years ago said, “a good general knows the outcome of the battle before it begins.” Our generals know how fighting the planet will turn out, and are trying to tell us it is not a battle we want to have.

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