We’re Speeding Toward a Climate Change Catastrophe...and That Makes 2016 the Most Important Election Year in a Generation

Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apocalyptic language, “if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.”

As it happens, I think Rubio is right. But not for the reasons that he cites: we’re not a “great nation in decline” because Obama has “deliberately weakened America.” Rather, the next U.S. election matters because a subset of the problems we’re facing today are genuinely global in scope and transgenerational in their consequences. (A few could even be categorized as “existential risks” that threaten humanity with total annihilation.)

For example, the threat of nuclear terrorism is, if anything, rising, according to experts like Joe Cirincione. Most people aren’t aware of just how great this threat is. As the Harvard scholar Graham Allison wrote back in 2004, a nuclear bomb destroying a major U.S. city before 2014 is “more likely than not.” Similarly, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Robert Gallucci, noted in 2005 that “it is more likely than not that al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates will detonate a nuclear weapon in a US city within the next five to ten years.”

These are not anomalous probability estimates. They represent the opinions of many of the most knowledgeable experts about the issue of nuclear terrorism. Indeed, a survey of 85 national security experts in 2005 found that “60 percent of the respondents assessed the odds of a nuclear attack within 10 years at between 10 and 50 percent, with an average of 29.2 percent.” Nearly 80 percent of those polled said the attack would come from a terrorist organization. Fortunately, an act of nuclear terrorism has not yet occurred. But, as was the case during the Cold War, we may have luck more than anything else to thank for this outcome.

Today, though, the situation may be even worse than it was in the shadow of 9/11. Not only do we have al-Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, to worry about, but the U.S.-led preemptive invasion of Iraq has fueled the rise of the largest and best-funded terrorist organization in human history: the Islamic State. While this group was initially focused on building a robust caliphate in Syria and Iraq, it has recently turned its attention to plotting attacks in other countries, including the U.S.

In fact, an issue of the Islamic State’s online propaganda magazine, Dabiq, openly fantasizes about acquiring a nuclear weapon from Pakistan, which has a history of nuclear malfeasance, and smuggling it into the U.S. via the “porous borders” of Central America. Given their sizable resources and apocalyptic ideology, according to which an Armageddon-like battle in northern Syria is just around the corner, the Islamic State was a primary focus of the recent nuclear summit held in Washington, D.C., involving leaders from around the globe.

The point is that, as Obama correctly noted years earlier, if even a single nuclear bomb were to be detonated somewhere in the world, the consequences “would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.” Nuclear terrorism thus constitutes a grave and potentially growing threat, and this fact makes the 2016 election especially important.

But nuclear terrorism probably isn’t the most significant risk that the 45th president of the United States will have to confront. Rather, this title goes to the ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change — a phenomenon that threatens not just the future prosperity of the U.S., but the survival of the entire global village. The fact is that climate change will result in a range of catastrophic consequences, including extreme heat waves, the spread of infectious disease, megadroughts, coastal flooding, desertification, food supply disruptions, widespread biodiveristy loss (e.g., the sixth mass extinction), mass migrations, social unrest and political instability — to name just a few.

And multiple high-ranking U.S. officials have affirmed a causal connection between climate change and terrorism. For example, John Brennan, the current Director of the CIA, recently stated that “the impact of climate change” is one of the “deeper causes of this rising instability” in countries like Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Yemen and Libya.

Similarly, Chuck Hagel, the former secretary of defense, describes climate change as a “threat multiplier” that “has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today — from infectious disease to terrorism.” And the Department of Defense notes in a 2015 report that “Global climate change will aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries.”

Consider some recent data that underline the fact that climate change is a “clear and present danger.” As of this writing, the hottest month on record was last February. It completely “obliterated” the previous “all-time global temperature record” set by — take a guess — January 2016. And January 2016 beat the previous records set by October, November and December 2015. Similarly, the hottest 16 years on record have all occurred since 2000, with only a single exception (1998). The current record-holder is 2015, followed by 2014, 2010 and 2013, but it appears that 2016 could be even hotter than 2015.