News flash: Pentagon hires futurists to figure out future

After I saw this item on BoingBoing, I couldn’t hold back:

The Pentagon issued a secret report to Bush warning him that catastrophic climate changes in the next 15 years are a bigger threat than terrorism, and will lead to massive riots and nuclear war.

Actually, this is bogus, so I sent Mark Frauenfelder a note (which I’ve made HTML-friendly here):

Mark, I saw your item about the Office of Net Assessment report today. A few things become clear if you read the original Fortune article in which the report was mentioned.
First, the Pentagon is a building, so it didn’t issue the report itself. The report you cite was commissioned by Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Andy Marshall is the director of ONA; see this article for background.
Marshall’s job, which he’s had since about 1973, is to think of radical scenarios and assess which ones the Department of Defense should be preparing for. This has a long tradition, dating back at least to the Navy’s “Plan Orange” for fighting Japan in the 30s. . In the more immediate past, this forward thinking has led to a renewed focus on ballistic missile defense and a variety of interesting ARPA projects (including the recent “Metabolic Dominance” project, which personally I think is very cool).
Radical scenarios, and potential consequences thereof, is exactly what they got with this report: ONA hired Peter Schwartz (who is famous for helping Royal Dutch Shell prepare for an oil market where prices *dropped* instead of monotonically increasing) and his Global Business Network firm (see here for more on GBN). GBN’s mission was to prepare a menu of *possibilities*, which, if you read the Fortune story, is exactly what they did.
I haven’t read the report, but some of the scenarios that Forbes cites as possibilities from the report (water wars between Canada joining the US in an alliance, à la Fred Pohl’s “Foodies” in JEM) are familiar to futurists and sci-fi readers. The more interesting question is whether Marshall’s influence, coupled with the clear scientific evidence that there are tipping points at which dramatic climate changes happen *quickly*, will prompt any changes in US policy. (for one example, see this NOAA page).
Unfortunately, the interesting aspects of this project have been buried under an avalanche of bogosity, like the Guardian article that breathlessly labeled the *speculative* “secret report” as an official Pentagon *prediction*. It’s not.

Update: the report itself is available from Greenpeace. Interesting reading.