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.'"

Comments

Climate change is a security threat

[riverat1]

Well, considering that anthropogenic climate change is probably a bigger threat in the long run than terrorism it's good that the CIA is helping.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement. I think it's very important we keep a watch on the climate. After all, the climate has been acting pretty suspicious lately, and has been looking, dare I say it, more swarthy. Plus, I heard that the climate was recently spotted in Yemen.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rei]

Perhaps the CIA is just trying to infiltrate the climate to overthrow it and replace it with a more US-friendly climate.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[spun]

Seeing as how the scientific consensus is that there is a link between CO2 and global warming, YOU are the one who needs to prove there isn't one (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence that there ISN'T a link, as 'a definite link' is what the facts show.)

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rockoon]

Please tell us about this warming threat.

Remember that you implied some sort of danger, so you cannot possibly be talking about sea level rise: IPCC gives lowball of 19cm and highball of 59cm over 100 years, or between 0.19cm/year and 0.59cm/years. Might happen, but its not a threat to human life. Just walk away, folks.

Maybe you are talking about drought? No, rainfall will increase if it gets significantly warmer.

Heat stroke? OK maybe, but offset by less hypothermia.

So tell us, what THREATS are there that are comparable to terrorists?

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[phantomfive]

Yeah, who cares what those rubes at the science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden, the UK, the US, and many others have to say? (every national science academy statement being in agreement, none opposed)

Yes, you are right. I don't care what their opinion is, I want to see the evidence. Scientific opinion is known to be inaccurate, wildly so at times.

Let's be honest here: when a scientific academy 'endorses' global warming, what are they saying? Have they done their own research? Usually not. What they are saying is that they agree with what the IPCC report says, which is reasonable. And frankly, the IPCC report draws no connection between CO2 and world calamity.

I'll repeat that again, because some people have trouble with this concept: the IPCC report draws no connection between CO2 and world calamity. If you've heard of New York being flooded when the glaciers melt, it wasn't based on any real scientific research. It was some weird propaganda that you picked up somewhere.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

I actually disagree with you on your assessment of the risk, there is no really good scientific evidence of a threat from CO2 (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence of a link).

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.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rei]

Remember that you implied some sort of danger, so you cannot possibly be talking about sea level rise: IPCC gives lowball of 19cm and highball of 59cm over 100 years, or between 0.19cm/year and 0.59cm/years. Might happen, but its not a threat to human life. Just walk away, folks.

The next IPCC report will almost certainly have a higher forecast, as the research that's come out since then has shown those numbers to be significant underestimates. Expect a median forecast of about 1m in the next report. And the rate speeds up over time; the equilibrium rise for a 2C warming, historically, appears to be 6-9 meters.

Maybe you are talking about drought? No, rainfall will increase if it gets significantly warmer.

Both flooding *and* drought are forecast to increase (on average) in a warming world. Which you're likely to get depends on where you are; some regions will get both. Yes, you're absolutely right that warmer SSTs = more precipitation. But warmer surface temperatures also mean faster evaporation (dessication of soil, plants, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, etc). It also means less snow pack, meaning river flows will vary more dramatically between seasons (ice keeps many important rivers from drying out during the summer).

Heat stroke? OK maybe, but offset by less hypothermia.

Heat stroke, hypothermia, drought, and sea level rise -- that's all you've got? How about greater range for malaria and dengue-fever carrying mosquitoes? The spread of pine bark beetles? The loss of almost all of the world's coral? The loss of keystone species of calcium carbonate-shelled microorganisms? The complete loss of habitat for arctic sea ice-dependent species? Increased risk of extinction for 20-30% of species studied? More rapid intensification of hurricanes (i.e., less warning)? Increased risk of wildfire? Increased growth of ragweed? Increased spread in seaborne pathogens like V. parahaemolyticus? Increasing risk of drought and flood causing more crop failures (and the consequences of that)? Radical changes in ecosystems, including thousands of species of plants and animals already found by studies to be migrating poleward? Seriously, I could spend all day on this.

It's not that a warmer climate is somehow a "worse" climate; it's a climate that neither life on this planet nor the way we've laid out our non-mobile infrastructure is adapted to.

Humans will adapt, esp. us in the first world who have the resources for it. But this will come at the cost of economic growth; we'll be spending our resources to break even (for a random example, to get water to the increasingly-dry and already water-unsustainable desert southwest). Humans in poorer regions will have a harder time of it, and non-human species will suffer the most. We're basically recreating the PETM.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

I'll repeat that again, because some people have trouble with this concept: the IPCC report draws no connection between CO2 and world calamity. If you've heard of New York being flooded when the glaciers melt, it wasn't based on any real scientific research. It was some weird propaganda that you picked up somewhere.

Okay, something we can agree on. The estimates at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting placed an estimate of ~1.2 meters of sea level rise by 2100, though it varies around the globe due to factors like the gravitational attraction of the glaciers that are melting. People who quote estimates of ~20 meters are simply calculating the volume of the glaciers as a whole, which is absurd because even our most pessimistic estimates don't allow glaciers to completely melt in less than ~500 years.

But even a 1.2 meter increase in sea level would bring substantial economic hardship. For example, a storm surge in New York up to a level that would now be considered "once in 100 years" would happen every ~5 years.

While this doesn't sound as melodramatic, it's a real threat, and it's not the only one. I worry that the most damaging impact of abrupt climate change will be unpredictable changes in precipitation patterns. If a substantial fraction of the world's farmlands experience droughts because water is falling in areas that are currently deserts, serious disruptions of the global food supply could result.

If people are willing to kill for territory and nationalism now, imagine how much more aggressive starving people will be. This is what worries me. Not the immediate effects of climate change, but their secondary effects on international relations.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[joocemann]

I have an alternative question.... how serious is the threat of terrorism?

The chances of you dying from heart disease is way higher. The chances of you dying from eating a peanut is higher.

But, I can throw around numbers and give ignorant analysis too.

AGW will produce a 4 degree net increase (no source cited) --- but will yield a 15 degree local increase in the middle east. This will drive the terrists from their homes and they will have no choice but to end up on the freedomland. God bless it. And then since they will be here, the terrism goes up 100 fold! OH NOES!

Also, the warm temperatures inspire Obama to relax enough to let it slip that he's a muslim... and then, not only that, but that he's a terrist! Then the hussein obama nukes us all!
OH NOES!

Go eat some peanuts.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature.

Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

I'm going to ignore the rabid conspiracy theories you're presenting. As a scientist who sees a lot of evidence that our CO2 emissions are changing the climate, you'd probably just dismiss me as lying scum with a political agenda anyway.

But just in case someone else reads this, greenhouse warming models predict cooling and contraction of the stratosphere. The cooling is predicted to be strongest between altitudes of 40 and 50km.

The quick explanation is that greenhouse warming shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a lower altitude. As a result, the surface warms but the stratosphere cools. In fact, I consider this good evidence for the link between CO2 and increasing global temperatures. No other single cause warms the Earth from the surface like a greenhouse gas. (For example, an increase in solar illumination wouldn't have this effect.)

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[mevets]

Mod parent up. Do you know how much money oil companies have had to pay to break up this global warming conspiracy. Thanks to their tireless efforts we can now see what a charade it all is.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rei]

Ah, I see you've been hitting the full "Amateur Denier Circuit". One by one!

1) oppressing scientists who disagree with them

By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.

2) ignoring data that doesn't suit their agenda (such as ignoring 75% of the temperature recording stations in Russia)

Your "science" in this case comes from a Russian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation -- the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis. As with most amateurs, they don't know what the heck they're talking about (and failed to get several papers past peer review because of it).

Contrary to what most amateur deniers believe, the MET office's dataset is NOT simply an average of the readings of all land stations. Why? Because of precisely something that the deniers criticize the surface stations for -- they're not all good! In fact, some of them are run-down pieces of junk. Deniers love to post pictures of these, naively assuming that they're all just averaged in.

The process of building up a climate dataset from such sources has a number of steps. First off, you need to figure out just how closely temperatures are correlated over various distances. I.e., if you're in a heat wave in NYC, you're probably also in a heat wave in Philadelphia, but not necessarily in Los Angeles. Secondly, for each datapoint, you analyze that region with its correlation factor and look for discontinuities in your station record. You also look in abrupt changes in station readings to detect faults or changes in the station's surrounding that affect its accuracy or introduce various biases. Bad stations are either eliminated or detrended. Most importantly, this is all done in an automated manner.

After all of this, you do numerous studies to make sure that you're eliminating such errors properly. For example, one approach involves keeping a reference network of closely monitored stations in ideal conditions and comparing the results you get on the reference network to those you get on the broader network. Another involves comparing the results from windy days to those of calm days to see whether the data is being contaminated by the urban heat island effect (which varies with wind). And so forth.

In short, the elimination of a large number of stations is *part of the process*. But what you need to know is that it's done in a fully automated manner that has been subjected to extensive peer-review.

blatantly alter data to show the outcome they desire (such as the one scientist who's email showed that he added X amount to the recorded temperatures to show an upward trend)

You're referring to this:

"From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray."

First off, check the date. You're arguing about something that's a *decade old*. Secondly, "Mike's nature trick" and "the decline" are about a dendrochronological anomaly in which the data series after 1961 deviated from the instrumental record. The

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rei]

And where did I present a conspiracy theory?

The notion that the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists are lying for some nefarious reason sure fits the definition.

Also, isn't the vast majority of official temperatures all distributed by the same group in the UK that was proven to have manipulated the data?

Re, "manipulated": See my other reply, below. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred, and if you knew anything about the process in which the dataset was assembled rather than listening to Russian economic thinktanks, you'd know that.

Re, datasets: No. The CRU's is just one of the three most widely used datasets. NASA's and NOAA's are the other two. And there are a number of lesser-used datasets. And they're all assembled in different ways, and often from different data sources.

There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.

Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.

But hey, why bother actually truly looking at the facts

I can tell you ascribe to that philosophy to a tee.

Go read a peer-reviewed paper. For once. Follow it with a few thousand more. Then come back here and talk.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Nefarious Wheel]

Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement

I certainly don't, and I can be as paranoid as anybody. For years I've enjoyed the amount of geographical information you can get from their World Factbook on their public web site. It includes such things as a country's crops and other products. If they keep historical data behind that (I can't imagine them throwing any of it away) you have the ability to mine economic indicators over time for trends.

However you judge the organisation, they do have a rather large database of facts. It's a lot of data, and with data you can do science.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

OK, what you have done is linked to a modern estimate (if by modern you mean 2006) made by two people. You tried to do this to show consensus.

The paper itself combines multiple estimates from different independent scientists. If you don't want to read the article, the summary says: However, a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value is about 2.9C with a 95% probability that the value is less than 4.5C.

You'll get similar results from examining models used in the ensemble of Meehl 2004. Sorry that I don't have time to make all this explicit. As you can tell, I'm swamped with pseudoscientists and I simply can't give everyone a crash course in climate physics.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

Incidentally, 5.76 degrees F is a rather large range. Don't you think they could cut it down at all?

We're trying to, as fast as we possibly can. But note that this is a 95% confidence interval, not a 1-sigma error bar.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[ArcherB]

Well, considering that anthropogenic climate change is probably a bigger threat in the long run than terrorism it's good that the CIA is helping.

I know. Maybe the CIA can help spin... explain how anthropogenic global warming is causing the worldwide Arctic blasts right now that are causing the coldest winter in decades worldwide, I'm glad the CIA is getting involved to help push the political agenda along. Nothing says "increase government power" like a worldwide spy agency. I wonder if we can get the KGB's assistance.

Funny how in the summer, it's anthropogenic global warming, but in the winter, it becomes anthropogenic climate change.

Seriously, as long as the data is honestly looked it at and made public and not "influenced" by any political factors, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I don't like the idea of my tax dollars going to twist the facts in order to push political agenda.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

Or maybe you could step back and realize that no GCM predicts monotonic warming, that there's a difference between local weather and the global climate, and that reading crackpot websites isn't a substitute for a graduate education in climate physics?

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

He was just trying to help you understand how climate models work. I'll repeat: global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble (see chapter 8) with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. For example, here are individual realizations of a climate model. Notice that the short-term fluctuations are severe and unpredictable, but the long term trend is robust and predictable.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[khayman80]

This paper is evidence of one thing only, that the mesh used in the (DOE) PCM is far too course ( The resolution of the atmosphere is T42, or roughly 2.8 x 2.8 degree;, with 18 levels in the vertical. Resolution in the ocean is roughly .75 x .75 degree down to a .5 x.5; in the equatorial Tropics, with 32 levels.)

The effect of decreasing the resolution of the models has been extensively studied. It provides a modest increase in model "skill" but runs enormously slower. They've chosen instead to run at a course resolution but create an ensemble of many runs which actually works better than decreasing the resolution.

What is missing from all this pseudo-science is fact: The equations an mathematical set up of the model

Notice in the first sentence of the first paragraph of section 2 that they used the DOE PCM described in Washington et al (2000).

The computer code to implement the model. See some of the nonsense from CRU.

Some of the GCMs have publicly available code, which is indexed here.

Re:Climate change is a security threat

[Rising Ape]

Now we have governments offering billions to people who prove climate change - do you really think any of them are going to provide evidence to their masters that it's not real?

Do you really think the government want it to be true? They've as much reason as anyone to hope it's not, as the measures to deal with it will be politically unpopular. Furthermore, the Bush administration would have been *very* interested in anti-AGW results, given their fossil fuel links - in fact they pretty much told researchers not to talk about their results showing AGW. Nevertheless, the results showing that climate change was happening kept coming out, despite being against the government line.

If it's real, what does any scientist have to gain from it? Killing us all?

How about money from fossil fuel interests? And if you really have to ask what fossil fuel companies have to gain by denying climate change, then there's no hope for you. It's not going to kill us all (and nobody's said it will) - the doom-mongers are the ones saying that doing anything at all to stop it will destroy civilisation. Speaking of which...

If it was just a scientific issue, then I wouldn't give a rats ass if people are lying or not. However, since the way to "fix" it involved destroying the industrialized world

Good job nobody's proposed destroying the industrialized world then isn't it? Well, nobody anyone's going to listen to. It'll just cost money, resulting in slightly lower economic growth than otherwise (though probably still an overall benefit if you consider costs of adapting to climate change avoided).

I don't know, sea lions can be trouble

[magsol]

"...Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, 'not spying on sea lions.'"

I sincerely doubt the CIA is going to put terrorism intelligence-gathering on the back burner in order to free up resources for this initiative. I also wouldn't be surprised if this Senator was one of the many who called for heads of the CRU scientists; and now he's quashing an attempt to make this research more transparent (not that there was really anything over which to call for the heads of the CRU scientists, unless you were part of a conspiracy circle).

"Shouldn't be spying on sea lions"

[Arancaytar]

What, so now freaking sea lions have more privacy rights than we do?

Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... 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.

Cue the conspiracy theory nut-jobs...

[Jawn98685]

...in three, two, one..
"Oh my god! The CIA is in cahoots with Al Gore to advance their socialist, commie, enviro-facist agenda!"

Industrial behavior has climatic effects, so...

[soup_laser]

tracking climatic effects should show industrial behavior. Tracking industrial behavior of foreign countries sounds like the business of the CIA to me.

The CIA Should Be Involved

[CodeBuster]

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.

Important to note

[Anonymous Coward]

That they aren't going to take a single new additional picture. This just allows the scientists to look at pictures after they have already been taken. This is getting an additional bang for our buck. We have already paid for these pictures, getting another use from them is a great thing.

Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming ..

[Rei]

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.

Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming ..

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Countries worldwide are lining up to fight water wars; some current civil wars, such as Darfur, can be traced directly to scarcity of water. Canada is making territorial claims to the Northwest Passage which a number of other countries dispute -- nobody cared before the ice started melting, but now it's a different story. This is the reality right now, not in 50 or 100 years; how is keeping track of it not part of the CIA's job?

Re:Bullshit

[khayman80]

Did you read the DRAFT paper you cited.

That's because it's the publically accessible version. Here's the version you want if you're on campus. Citation: Annan, J. D., and J. C. Hargreaves (2006), Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06704, doi:10.1029/2005GL025259.

I've already discussed the lag between temperature and CO2. Aside from your conspiracy theories, the only other thing you say is that model parameterizations in general can't be used to learn about the universe. What a weird attitude coming from someone who's using technology created with the help of computer models!

Re:Deniers

[hairyfeet]

This is actually an easy argument to solve, and why I personally don't trust the AGW'ers ATM. Show us the CODE! Give us ALL the raw data, every last scrap, and let us see the code behind the models. As much as I can't stand RMS I have to agree with him when it comes to something this important: We just can't trust "black box computing" and without the code it can be manipulated to say anything you want. Considering it will cost billions and make a lot of scammers (Goldman Sachs and the whole "carbon credit" bullshit) an assload of cash I want to see the code.

I may not have the skills to read the daw data, but one of the nice things I learned from the FLOSS movement is their are plenty of really smart folks out there that can read the code if it is made available. And frankly I would trust the Comp Sci geeks a LOT more than all the political BS we have seen from BOTH camps in this debate. Want us to believe you? Show us the code!

Re:Deniers

[riverat1]

The vast majority of data and model codes are available if you care to look for them. The GISS has links on their web site to all of theirs including the Model E General Circulation Model (GCM, aka Global Climate Model) code. That's one of the GCM's used in the latest IPCC report. NOAA has lots of data available including raw station data. Knock yourself out.