The analysis found that in the near future global climate change will increase the incidence of poverty, disease, hunger, and water-related disputes, and that these in turn will generate ever growing populations of migrants, illegal aliens, and political and economic refugees. Water and food shortages are projected to become tremendous issues for parts of Asia and Latin America, with a great potential for causing conflict or even destabilizing governments. Furthermore, the assessment projected that such weakened governments will increase the frequency of civil wars, fundamentalist extremism, and reactionary authoritarianism; and, finally, it projects that the United States will be more and more frequently drawn into these situations.

As I outline in section 3.2.2 and reiterate throughout the book, I advocate transferring responsibility for global security to the global body that has the authority to intervene in such situations: the United Nations. The United States is not the appropriate entity for administering the massive long-term security stabilization and infrastructure development projects which will be required to cope with the scale of this growing problem. However I think it is very important to recognize the very real implications which climate change is having and will increasingly have in the future on the security of our world. A self-aware society considers the long-term probabilities and then plans for those eventualities to mitigate potentially disastrous circumstances. In the meantime, the United States must be willing to make economic sacrifices in order to become a signatory to, and implementer of, the various biosphere-related accords and protocols, something our government has resisted. If we are to be a self-aware society we must move quickly to mitigate not only the security implications but the causes of global climate change themselves, by updating our industries, our laws, our global order, and our culture of consciousness.