Intelligence on the Climate Crisis

Morning newspapers will report Thursday on a new study by U.S. intelligence agencies linking the Climate Crisis and its potential to lead to armed conflict. The Los Angeles Times: "Global warming is likely to have a series of destabilizing effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to an assessment released Wednesday by U.S. intelligence agencies. Rising temperatures could weaken already fragile regimes around the world and create a new set of national security challenges for the United States over the next two decades, the report warns.

The report represents the U.S. intelligence community's most comprehensive assessment to date of the long-term security consequences of global warming. It also marks a reluctant foray into a politically charged topic. Democrats and environmental activists praised the assessment, calling it formal acknowledgment by a key part of the government that the threat of rising temperatures is real."

The AFP story is more specific: "Climate change will have sweeping consequences for US national security by 2030 aggravating global poverty and destabilizing fragile countries, a US intelligence report said Wednesday. "We judge global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years," Thomas Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis, told US lawmakers.

Fingar testified to the House of Representatives that in some countries, global warming and its impacts could affect stability and spark regional conflicts such as over access to water as it grows more scarce. He presented the findings of 16 US intelligence agencies gathered in a National Intelligence Assessment, based primarily on research done by the United Nations inter-governmental panel on climate change."

Though their story on this report opens with a false choice, it at least got the attention of the Wall Street Journal: One of the biggest conundrums facing lawmakers is that solutions to global warming often hurt another of their top priorities: ensuring the availability of affordable energy, for example. But on Wednesday, as the U.S. intelligence agencies weighed in, they heard about the cost of doing nothing: It may incubate terrorism and civil conflict.

Concluding that climate change will have wide-ranging impacts on U.S. security in the coming decades, a classified report complicates an already tangled debate by providing urgent new reasons to address the problem of global warming at a time when American voters are anxious about $4-a-gallon gas."

However, the reasons aren't really new, and this isn't the first time that a defense-oriented study commissioned by the Pentagon or other U.S. government agencies has recognized large-scale problems likely to be caused by a growing Climate Crisis. But this time, with Americans focused on energy issues, perhaps this one will make an impression.