As if the environmental and financial costs of global warming won’t be enough.

A new U.S. intelligence report says that greenhouse gas emissions will exacerbate epidemics, the planetary refugee crisis, and food and water shortages, leading to global destabilization and increased vulnerability of governments. The report says that “as many as 50 million additional people could be at risk of hunger by 2020, and as many as 1.2 billion people could suffer from ‘water stress,’ ” the Los Angeles Times reports. These are eye-popping numbers..story

Going one step further, “logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by global warming] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, said before the House on June 24. This is the quote that seems to have caught the media’s attention more than any other, as if the only thing that Americans care about is the chances of increased terrorist activity directed at the United States. The hundreds of millions of people affected by climate change should be enough to tug at anyone’s heart.

Predictably, the Republicans are crying foul. “I think it was a pathetic use of intelligence resources,” huffs Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. This is the same Hoekstra who has been busy outdoing even the Bush Administration in peddling fraudulent intelligence claims on Iraq and Iran. He actually held a triumphant press conference in June 2006 (with Rick Santorum) to announce that 500 chemical munitions had been found in Iraq. And the IAEA called “outrageous and dishonest” an exaggerated report that the House Intelligence Committee issued under his chairmanship on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The pronouncements of people like Hoestra would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.

But they are. The Senatorial counterparts of Hoekstra killed earlier this month the most significant legislative measure to deal with global warming. The bill died in the Senate, in spite of getting 54 votes, a clear majority, since it didn’t obtain the assent of 60 Senators needed to move the bill forward. Among the naysayers were Hoekstra’s esteemed fellow Republican, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, erstwhile chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who on the floor of the Senate in 2003 said that global warming “is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

The Bush Administration has been almost as pathetic on global warming. When he found the ground shifting under him, President Bush went from denying its reality to attempting to derail global attempts to do anything concrete about it to, most recently, unveiling completely lame proposals to supposedly address the problem. His plan to stop greenhouse gas emission growth by 2025 was so half-hearted that it included an absolute lack of specifics on how to get to that point. (Indeed, the more sinister interpretation of the announcement was that it was a way to derail the then-pending Senate bill.) “The best science indicates that to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, we need to cut our emissions by at least 80 percent by mid-century,” said Alden Meyer, strategy and policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Unless the President is prepared to support binding emissions reductions of 15 to 20 percent by 2020 to get us on that path, he should do us all a favor and step aside.”

Just a couple of days ago, James Hansen, the NASA scientist who has been sounding the tocsin on global warming for decades (see August 2006 profile in The Progressive), made headlines with his testimony before the Senate on the undeniable reality of the phenomenon.

“Global warming now is large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect,” Hansen said. “Our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”

If only the Republicans listened to the experts on the issue, rather than to their paymasters.