When he was asked last March to name the nation's biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region, U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III gave a response many people didn't expect: climate change.

“People are surprised sometimes,” he said in an interview with the Boston Globe, adding that the disruption caused by rising seas and storms in a slowly but steadily warming world "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.’’

That's exactly the message now being taken across the country by a group called the American Security Project – made up of past high-level members of the military, former U.S. Senators, businesspeople and others – in an effort to urge their fellow citizens to look at the full scope of how climate change will impact the world, beyond the environment, including:

- The rapidly thawing Arctic, and how it will change political and security relationships among nations;
   
- Climate-affected conflict in places like Africa and the Middle East;
    
- Refugee crises stemming from sea level rise in densely populated coastal areas;
    
- The need to protect (or move) critically important installations around the world.

“We’re here to say, don’t let this issue die," the group's CEO Stephen A. Cheney, who retired as a brigadier general after 32 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, told a group of students at the University of Pittsburgh last week.

"There are a myriad of solutions, there really are," he added. "We’re pumping carbon dioxide into the air – how do we stop that, and how do we get it out? That’s the bottom line here."

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