• Early-season snowfall for Hatcher Pass, Alaska
• Winter is coming: Earth approaching 'mini ice age' in 15 years, solar cycle study suggests

This is not a drill

While the focus is currently on Europe, an 'immigration crisis' has 'coincidentally' been brewing in the US. Decades of abuse by the US government and US corporations in their 'backyard' have brought ever-growing numbers of 'migrants' (or 'refugees', if you consider that parts of northern Mexico are effectively in a state of civil war) northwards, resulting in steel wire border fences, over-stretched security and social services, and a buffoon running for the White House on an anti-immigration platform.

These synchronous developments lead me to wonder whether something beyond geopolitical concerns may be taxing minds at the top of the food chain: mass migrations resulting from abrupt climate shift. A 2004 report commissioned by decades-long Pentagon foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall provided the following future scenario to the Bush administration...

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

"Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," concludes the Pentagon analysis. "Once again, warfare would define human life." [...]

By 2020, "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated. [...]

Randall [co-author] told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. "This is depressing stuff," he said. "It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat."

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. "We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he said. [...]

Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

An increasingly common scene: vehicles abandoned on a highway in Chicago in 2011

While the liberal British Observer assumed the report's authors had the 'official' climate change scenario in mind (man-made CO₂ increase warming the planet and gradually producing dire consequences in 50 or 100 years' time), it's fairly clear that the authors were thinking of something else entirely: a rather sudden onset of extreme weather and planetary upheaval, including - or culminating in - a return to glacial conditions in much of the inhabited world, which is apparently what happened 8,200 years ago.

Note also the reference to "mass migration of populations". While what's happening now as a result of NATO's wars is bad, and may well end up being comparable to migrations in Europe during WW2, mass migration on a much larger scale may be around the corner.

What if, with one eye on the climate chaos to come, those 'Secret Government' types "across the pond in the US who feel like they're in a lab running all sorts of experiments on the rats" - as Putin aptly described them last year - are taking advantage of the 'resource war' they created in the Middle East to effect some sort of drill in which they test control methods, responses in the population and system capacities to sudden migrations of really large numbers of people caused by 'mother nature', who appears to be mirroring the planetary chaos created by psychopaths in positions of power?