WASHINGTON - The military officer charged with monitoring North Korea at a time when the rogue nation is threatening to unleash missile attacks worldwide has used a Senate hearing to double down on his claim that it is global warming that is the real danger.

Navy Adm. Samuel Locklear III originally caused a stir just weeks ago when in a speech to scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities in Cambridge, Mass., he said the climate change factor should be the focus of American concern.

At today’s hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee he defended his assessment that global warming is the greatest threat to security in that part of the world.

According to the Boston Globe, Locklear said earlier, “significant upheaval related to the warming planet… is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen ...that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

At today’s hearing, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., challenged him, and the admiral doubled down.

Locklear said 70 percent of the world’s expected growth will be in East and South Asia and it “will be moving along the coastal centers” it serves as a possible form of regional destabilizing via population displacement because of rising oceans.

But Inhofe pointed out that scientists disagree with the notion that the climate is changing. He furthermore said that such a belief is one that is held by “environmentalist extremists” who “do not believe in” having a large military.

He said he “cannot recall a time where the world was more dangerous” and Barack Obama’s military cuts are naive and put the U.S. forces “at risk.”

The idea of anthropological climate change has been the focus of many studies and reports in recent years. In 2007, WND reported that a study released by the Danish National Space Center suggested that “the sun still appears to be the main agent in global climate change” rather than by man.

Furthermore, last week WND reported that the scientific journal Science published a report showing dramatic increases in global temperature in the 20th century. While it was touted as a major study, it has now come under scrutiny after scientists involved “quietly admitted that surging temperatures can’t be supported by their data.”

Inhofe himself has been a leading voice challenging the vast assumptions on anthropological climate change. On a related topic, in 2012 Inhofe spoke to WND, saying that “green extremists” are jeopardizing America’s defense by devoting scarce resources to alternative energy, rather than defense development.

Locklear is the chief of the U.S. Pacific Command.

Read more

See this fact checking analysis on the claims being made about severe weather related to warming (which stopped 15 to 17 years ago). (NCA_DAleo_04-12-13.doc)