For the past six years, the radio program Marketplace, hosted by Kai Ryssdal, has run a “climate solutions” podcast called “How We Survive.” The latest season, which debuted last month, focuses on the intersection of climate change and national security – specifically, how the US military is dealing with, and could ultimately shape, the changing climate. Ryssdal himself served in the Navy during the 1980s but, by his own admission, never heard much about climate change or global warming during his time in uniform. Forty years later, however, it’s become a major topic of discussion and debate within the Department of Defense (DoD). Over six episodes, Ryssdal explores those debates and speaks with a number of prominent members of the Center for Climate and Security (CCS).
In the first episode, which unpacks the security threat posed by climate change, Sherri Goodman, board chair of the Council on Strategic Risks, shares the story behind how she coined the term “threat multiplier” as the descriptor of the interlocking dynamics of climate change and national security. As she says, “Climate change amplifies all the other instabilities we face. …We always have to perform our mission, but climate change is part of the mission today. It’s part of being able to get those bombs on target in the right way, because if you can’t fly your plane anymore because it’s become too hot and you need more fuel to have it take off in the hotter temperatures, then you’re not going to be able to get your munition on target.”
Ryssdal’s conversations with service members in Alaska and Kwajalein bear out Goodman’s point. Lieutenant Colonel Albert Mose, who runs the Point Barrow long-range radar in Utqiagvik, Alaska, tells Ryssdal, “Climate change, I think, from my perspective, from this radar site, [is] another challenge that we have to build into the calculus. It’s right on our doorstep, and there’s no more time to think about it.” Mose tells Ryssdal that, owing to permafrost thaw, the radar’s foundation is getting weaker and might force the radar to have to move. Two episodes and thousands of miles to the southwest later, Ryssdal talks to Colonel Drew Morgan, commander of the US Army Garrison Kwajalein Atoll, where, in January 2024, a series of 30ft tall waves destroyed the radome of the Atoll’s missile test site. As Lieutenant Colonel Casey Rumfelt, director of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense test site, tells Ryssdal, it is “the only long-range land impact site the United States has,” meaning it is the only place to verify the functionality and effectiveness of US missile technology. The resilience of Kwajalein drives the resilience of the military’s missile capability. Maintaining that resilience will be increasingly challenging as sea levels are rising four times faster in the Pacific than anywhere else in the world.
So how is the DoD planning to handle this and other related threats? Ryssdal heads back to Washington, DC. to experience a war game, during which he meets CCS advisory board member Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, US Navy (Ret). Ryssdal asks McGinn whether he thinks the United States and its military are ready for the changing future, to which McGinn offers some sobering thoughts: “We’re not as ready as we need to be.…We need to really, really make some tough decisions about where our capabilities for infrastructure, military infrastructure, as well as private sector infrastructure are.”
The podcast’s last episode homes in on how challenging it will be to increase that overall readiness. Ryssdal talks to Dr. Page Fortna, a former CCS Fellow and professor at Columbia University, who argues that the threat climate change poses will “change every little thing about the military,” from bomb-sniffing dogs that can’t find explosives as easily in hot weather to the installations that might need to be moved inland away from rising sea levels. She argues that “the security establishment is not thinking through well enough…what the future will look like under unmitigated climate change, or alternatively, a green future in which we’ve had a massive shift away from a fossil fuel economy. What’s coming is really, really different from what we’ve had before.”
Listen to the full climate and national security season of the How We Survive podcast here.