By Peter Huessy, Senior Fellow, NIDS

1. CIA Opens Center on Climate Change and National Security

September 25, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency is launching The Center on Climate Change and National Security as the focal point for its work on the subject. The Center is a small unit led by senior specialists from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology.

Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources. The Center will provide support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues. That is something the CIA has done for years. “Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security. The CIA is well positioned to deliver that intelligence,” said Director Leon Panetta.

The Center will assume responsibility for coordinating with Intelligence Community partners on the review and declassification of imagery and other data that could be of use to scientists in their own climate-related research. This effort draws on imagery and other information that is collected in any event, assisting the US scientific community without a large commitment of resources.

The new Center does more than bring together in a single place expertise on an important national security topic—the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic, and social stability overseas. It will also be aggressive in outreach to academics and think tanks working the issue. The goal is a powerful asset recognized throughout our government, and beyond, for its knowledge and insight.

2. THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

For instance, The United Nations climate change panel “admitted that the melting Himalayas prediction was not based on science but on a 1999 media interview given by one scientist,” Charen observed.  “They said they regretted the error. Now, a study in nature, based on satellite imagery, has shown that some melting of lower altitude glaciers is taking place but that higher glaciers have been adding ice.”

3. PELOSI; 1995 HSCI HEARING; GLTB HIRING AND MEASURING ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES BY DIVERTING SATELLITES, TERRORIST AND COLD WAR THREATS ARE OVER.....

4. Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.

Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.

The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.

A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.

Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.

Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be defended and undersea resources that are already the focus of international competition.

Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in the past year. “These issues now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security strategy, she said.

The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year.

It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts around the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation and the weakening of national governments.

The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies.

“The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may significantly tax U.S. military transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.

The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how major power relations could be strained by a changing climate.

“We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.

“Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And that will involve human lives.”

5. ERIC ECKHOLM LOSING GROUND 1979 World Watch

Book: The Consequences of a Failed Energy Policy

The single most important reason for poverty, migration and related flooding and deforestation is the lack of affordable and plentiful energy

US policy on Kyoto has been to dramatically increase prices of energy making fuel unaffordable in third world countries unless significantly subsidized by the governments. Congressman Fred Richmond, Egypt 1976 Speech, Food, Fuel and Population

6. During the era of Global Cooling and the Coming Ice Age, (1973-79); fuel use was primarily dung and wood; resulting loss of soil fertility and massive water erosion, forced massive migration into the urban centers of the third world; this was when fuel was $1.80 barrel in 1970 and then $3.29 in 1983, from $35 in 1980, then $13 in 1997. There is a consistent line between low oil prices and high economic growth, reduction in poverty. Implementing the restrictions on energy production, not climate change, will trigger the effects so worrisome to the global warming mafia.

7. As recently as 2010, a global warming bill called for enhanced oil and gas development, nuclear power plant construction and clean coal technology subsidies while taxing oil and gas industry an additional $3.7 billion. (Graham, Kerry, Lieberman). Today, EPA is closing down coal power plants and refineries, the administration is opposing clean coal technology, the Sierra Club is calling for beyond natural gas as they once called for beyond coal, and nuclear power has 2 plant permits in the past half century. Kyoto is nothing more than a battering ram to fleece American consumers and enrich a cadre of global warming enthusiasts, their Wall Street and Corporate partners and give enormous power to both the US Government and OPEC.

There has also been a shift from saving our planet to stop buying oil, the revenue from which ends up in the pockets of terrorists. “Some of the money goes to Al Qaeda, goes to Hezbollah...." Senator John Kerry, 2010 in introducing the legislation.

8. Climate Change and National Security is a must-read for undergraduates, graduate students, and research professionals alike. This book provides a careful guide to how climate change will affect specific countries and geographical regions. Unlike so many works that lose credibility by either exaggerating or downplaying the issue, the authors in this volume present the issues with military efficiency in a manner that can serve as a guide to practical action. If you read just one book on climate change this year, this should be it." -- Richard B. Andres, professor of national security strategy, National War College and Energy and Environment Security Policy Chair, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (even our military are misleading themselves!)

Climate Change and National Security: A Country-Level Analysis by Daniel Moran (Editor) Daniel Moran is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is coeditor of Energy Security and Global Politics: The Militarization of Resource Management.

Peter Huessy, Comments and Notes:

Energy poverty, mass migration, urbanization are key environmental challenges long identified with population growth, low energy production, corrupt and top-heavy socialist governments, and lack of free markets and infrastructure needed for sound business environment.

They are occurring not due to climate change but primarily from geostrategic facts of life: A 7 billion population grafted upon terrible socialist governments, lack of free enterprise and effective infrastructure. The resulting humanitarian crises do often require the US of the US military, primarily the Navy rescue craft and the USAF airlift command. Whether the demand for such help will increase or decrease is a function of the four factors I mentioned above and the extent to which hurricanes and other storms displace people.

The Arctic is becoming increasingly accessible and this requires more US Coast Guard capabilities as well as a revamped US Navy irrespective of climate change. The most serious issue are claims to the gas and oil resources within the Arctic fueled by aggressive Russian policies; but these conflicts are also in the South China Sea which is claimed in its entirety by the PRC due to the gas and oil resources there, That involves Naval and USAF capabilities but is not driven by climate change but PRC aggression.

The LOST may indeed give us a say at the table where the rules of oil and gas exploration are determined; it of course gives us simply a front row seat to being outvoted by the rest of the Treaty signatories.

Look at the Landsat photos of Haiti and the Dominican Republic--the disparity is not due to global warming or climate changes but primarily energy and wood poverty:

The global warming and Kyoto enthusiasts are making far worse the factors that contribute to mass migration, desertification, erosion, and rural poverty in the third world than any global warming factors. Same as when Silent Spring led to the ban on DDT. Millions of children have died as a result of malaria.

The military implications are serious from the spread of socialism, bankrupt crony government, lack of infrastructure investment and lack of affordable energy, all with the resultant mass unemployment and social instability in many US allies--Egypt, Pakistan. What is behind this push to see climate change everywhere is a nearly $20 billion worldwide industry of research and scare stories. LOST is part of that, as is Green energy. It is a very well crafted shake down of the US taxpayer.

In 2006 CNA convened a Military Advisory Board (MAB) of eleven retired three-star and four-star admirals and generals to assess the impact of global climate change on key matters of national security, and to lay the groundwork for mounting responses to the threats found.

In April 2007, CNA released the MAB's landmark report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, that articulates the concept of climate change acting as a “threat multiplier” for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world and identifies key challenges that must be planned for now if they are to be met effectively in the future.

The report includes several formal findings:

• Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America's national security.
• Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.
• Projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world.
• Climate change, national security and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges.

The report also made several specific recommendations:

• The national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defense strategies.

• The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.
• The U.S. should commit to global partnerships that help less developed nations build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts.
• The Department of Defense should enhance its operational capability by accelerating the adoption of improved business processes and innovative technologies that result in improved U.S. combat power through energy efficiency.
• DoD should conduct an assessment of the impact on U.S. military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and other possible climate change impacts over the next 30 to 40 years.