NATO Warns ‘Climate Change’ Could Spark World War III

NATO has issued a stark warning: climate change could ignite World War III by crippling the ability to detect submarines in warming oceans. A new study from the alliance highlights how environmental shifts might escalate global tensions into catastrophic conflict.

The report zeroes in on how rising ocean temperatures disrupt underwater sound travel, making it harder to spot stealthy submarines. As waters grow warmer, changes in acidity, salinity, and temperature throw off the delicate balance that hydrophones—used by ships, planes, and seabed sensors—rely on to track these hidden threats.

Submarines depend on silence to evade detection, slipping past towed arrays, dropped sonar buoys, and fixed seabed lines. NATO’s findings suggest that a climate-altered ocean could cloak these vessels even further, potentially tipping the scales of naval power and sparking a dangerous race for dominance amid an already volatile world.

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Economist.com reports: Higher carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere change all these things. The gas’s mere presence acidifies seawater. Its warming effects alters its temperature, and by melting ice changes the salinity, too. Sources of ambient noise such as winds, waves and whales are all affected. And the changes all differ from place to place.

To work out the consequences for submariners, a team led by Andrea Gilli of the nato Defence College in Rome and Mauro Gilli of eth Zurich used computer modelling to examine how sound travelled through deep water in the past (from 1970 to 1999) and how climate models suggest it will do so in the future (from 2070 to 2099).

The researchers originally published their findings in the Texas National Security Review in 2024. In the North Atlantic, a crucial battleground between Russian subs and nato sub-hunters—as well as in the area between the first and second island chains in the Western Pacific, just to the east of Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines—detection will become harder. In the Bay of Biscay, off the French coast, a sub that could once be detected from 60km away will be spotted only at 20km.

In the Sea of Japan, however, local conditions will make life easier for the hunters. North Korean submarines operating in those waters at a depth of 100m could previously get to within 10km away without detection. In the future, estimate the authors, they could be seen from 45km off.

The hypothetical scenario the study considers is based on a worst-case outcome in which nothing has been done to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; a trajectory most scientists now consider unrealistic. All the same, the trends identified in the paper are noteworthy. In recent years there has been much talk of new detection methods making the oceans more transparent. In fact, argue the authors, the seas might become more opaque.