A roughly three-foot increase in sea level will threaten 128 coastal military installations in the United States, valued at $100 billion, according to a study from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report, The U.S. Military on the Front Lines of Rising Seas, argues that the growing exposure to storm surge and sea-level rise puts vital infrastructure, training and testing grounds, and housing for thousands of personnel at risk.

Yesterday afternoon President Obama announced a new Presidential Memorandum on climate change and national security. The policy directs 20 federal agencies to consider the national security implications of climate change and establish a working group that will develop a Climate Change and National Security Action Plan for the federal government.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an attempt to get an international group of scientists together to assess what we know about climate change,” says Geoff Dabelko in an interview with the Wilson Center’s Context program. “That is not a quick process.”

Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.

Amid the growing number of reports warning that climate change could threaten national security, another potentially dangerous – but counterintuitive – dimension has been largely ignored. Could efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and lower our vulnerability to climate change inadvertently exacerbate existing conflicts – or create new ones?

The 2009 Copenhagen summit was a watershed moment in the history of climate change negotiations, especially from an Indian perspective. Brazil, South Africa, India, and China – the “BASIC” group – asserted their position, which led to a virtual collapse in talks, ostensibly marking the ascent of the global “south” and relative descent of the “north.”

Even as the climate debate has been paralyzed by politics, the concept of geoengineering has been in the news lately, most notably in October when Russ George dumped 120 tons of iron particles into the Pacific Ocean in a scheme to try and score carbon credits. Earlier this month, the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program hosted an event taking a look at “soft geoengineering” – techniques that might have low or minimal environmental side effects but still address or reverse climate change.