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CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate
MikeChino writes "The CIA has just joined up with climate researchers to re-launch a data-sharing initiative that will use spy satellites and other CIA asets to help scientists figure out what climate change is doing to cloud cover, forests, deserts, and more. The collaboration is an extension of the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis program, which President Bush canceled in 2001, and it will use reconnaissance satellites to track ice floes moving through the Arctic basin, creating data that could be used for ice forecasts." Even though the program is "basically free" in terms of CIA involvement, the Times notes: "Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the CIA opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, 'not spying on sea lions.'"
... should add "Em" to the beginning of his last name. Either he's genuinely too stupid to understand how climate change is a national security issue, or he's grandstanding. I'm having a hard time deciding which. ("Both" is also a possible answer, of course.) I'm sure he was one of those who, during the Bush administration, thought anything the CIA did was just fine and dandy, since "Thou shalt not question the Executive Branch in Time of War(r)(tm)" was pretty much the Republican Eleventh Commandment until January 2009. How quickly things change.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In some sense the climate change issue involves intelligence and security concerns because the purported effects of climate change could become the impetus for future wars, terrorism, and social instability. Should the CIA pour significant resources into this? Perhaps not, but some minimal level of observation and planning is probably a wise investment of agency resources against future potential problems. Nobody, least of all the CIA, likes to be caught flat footed when a crisis suddenly hits; especially if the crisis could have been managed with better early intelligence analysis, response planning, and warnings.
As a resident of Wyoming, Barrasso's stance doesn't surprise me one bit.
Wyoming is heavily dependent on it's energy resources industry. Coal, natural gas, oil. We've got enough oil locked in the green river shale oil deposit to meet the nation's appetite for the next 194 years (at current usage), but getting to it is going to take a lot of time and research, and if public opinion shifts too far away from oil then no one will invest enough to make it a reality.
There's also the issue that things just keep speeding up over time. For example, the Copenhagen's (failed) *goal* was to limit average global temperature rise to "only" 2 degrees celsius. Well, that'd mean "only" about 1 meter of sea level rise over the next hundred years. But the equilibrium sea level rise for a 2C temperature rise, historically, is 6-9 meters. It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we're talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater. 1m is mostly just the everglades.
Present day. Present time.
I've tried to condense the science into a (hopefully) accessible summary, complete with dozens of references to genuine peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the seriousness of the threat posed by CO2.