Climate change can have a variety of impacts on National security. The availability of projections of the future changes that will occur in different regions of the world will allow preparations to take place to mitigate the political, environmental, societal, and National security-related consequences.
For example, climate-related regional water and food shortages in other countries must be anticipated because they can lead to political instabilities that affect U.S. National security. Or, climate change in the U.S. can affect energy use and our dependence on foreign energy sources, can impact our economy, can increase our vulnerability to outbreaks of new infectious diseases, and can increase the affect on our infrastructure of extreme events such as hurricanes.
STAR, in collaboration with NCAR, uses computer models to predict global and regional climate change on time scales of seasons to decades, to meet the regionally specific and stakeholder-specific needs for information about climate-change scenarios.