Climate Change Looming As Threat to U.S. National Security

When he was asked last March to name the nation's biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region, U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III gave a response many people didn't expect: climate change.

“People are surprised sometimes,” he said in an interview with the Boston Globe, adding that the disruption caused by rising seas and storms in a slowly but steadily warming world "is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen ... that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

That's exactly the message now being taken across the country by a group called the American Security Project – made up of past high-level members of the military, former U.S. Senators, businesspeople and others – in an effort to urge their fellow citizens to look at the full scope of how climate change will impact the world, beyond the environment, including:

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