Hint: it's not Al Qaeda or terrorism or nuclear proliferation. They are only symptoms of the real problem, the primary underlying cause of conflict in the 21st century. Our biggest national security concern: Global Climate Change. I know. Broken record time for me again. But the facts and the experts back me up on this. And if there were any doubters still out there, here's one more sign that global warming is real, that it isn't some figment of brainj addled lefty tree huggers' imaginations and we better start doing something about it, sooner rather than later. And I don't mean baby steps.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice "bridge" has lost about 2,000 square kilometers (about 772 square miles) this year, the ESA said.

A satellite image captured November 26 shows new rifts on the ice shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the strip of ice -- and the islands to which it's connected, the ESA said. [...]

The ice shelf had been stable for most of the past century before it began retreating in the 1990s.

Several ice shelves -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones -- have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.

Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.

Just a coincidence? I don't think so, my friends:

PARIS (AFP) — Earth's climate appears to be changing more quickly and deeply than a benchmark UN report for policymakers predicted, top scientists said ahead of international climate talks starting Monday in Poland. [...]

the IPCC has warned that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century's end.

But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further. [...] "In the last couple of years, Arctic Sea ice is at an all-time low in summer, which has got a lot of people very, very concerned," commented Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Britain's department for environmental affairs and chairman of the IPCC's previous assessment in 2001. [...]

"The most recent IPCC report was prior to ... the measurements of increasing mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, which are disintegrating much faster than IPCC estimates," said climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. [...]

Runaway sea level rises, Hansen said, would put huge coastal cities and agricultural deltas in Bangladesh, Egypt and southern China under water, and create hundreds of millions of refugees. "The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years," said the Global Carbon Project's Pep Canadell, a researcher at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. And in 2008, he said, there has been an "exponential growth" in the atmospheric concentration of methane, another greenhouse gas that is an even more potent driver of global warming than CO2.

One potential source of both gases is frozen tundra in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, where temperatures have risen faster than anywhere else on Earth.

"The amount of carbon that is locked up in permafrost that could be released into the atmosphere is just about on a par with the atmospheric load the world has right now," said Serreze.

These higher concentrations of greenhouse gases come at a time when Earth's two major "carbon sinks" -- forests and especially oceans -- are showing signs of saturation.

I know today is Obama's National Security Day, but what could be more essential to the future national security of our country, and of every other country in the world, than global climate change? Droughts, severe storms, rising sea levels, more disease, more refugees, and likely more wars over diminishing resources like water and food. Those are not insignificant issues in my view.

So I hope Obama appoints a Global Warming Czar or some comparable official with a cabinet level portfolio pronto, because whatever happens in Iraq or Afghanistan over the next decade isn't going to matter half as much to our children and grandchildren as the consequences of continuing to ignore runaway global warming. I'll be dead before the worst consequences hit, but they won't.

And yes, when resources, like water and food, are scarce in places like the Middle East and Southwest Asia, nuclear war and nuclear terrorism becomes a greater probability. Not possibility, probability.

Think on that you Grand Poohbahs of foreign policy. Our greatest national security threat won't be Islamofascism or Russia or China or a failed state in Pakistan. It will be Mother Nature. Count on it. And all the guns and planes and ships and missiles won't save us from the coming collapse of our society which that climate change will bring about if we don't start acting now to deal with the problem.