Opinion | The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security - T... - 0 views
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Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council
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My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities
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I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations
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Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.
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The bottom line of written testimony was this: “Climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security over the next 20 years.”
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In blocking the submission of the written testimony, the White House trampled not only on the scientific integrity of the assessment but also on the analytic independence of an arm of the intelligence community
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Decades of scientific measurements have established that global temperatures are increasing and ocean waters are acidifying. These changes produce shifts in a vast number of earth system processes: in the atmosphere, ocean, freshwater, soil, ice masses, permafrost and organisms making up the biosphere.
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Some effects are well known, like increased frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts, and rising sea levels. Others are less familiar, like decreasing oceanic oxygen levels and the redistribution of species.
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With these environmental changes we should expect disruptions to global water and food security, reduced economic security and weakened livelihoods, worsened human and animal health, and risks to the global supply chain on which the United States and its partners depend
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Political instability, heightened tensions over resources, climate-linked humanitarian crises and adverse effects to militaries in some places are likely to increase
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I believe that once one accepts that global temperatures are increasing, a fact that only the most ardent climate disbeliever rejects, the case for that fact’s relevance to nation security directly follows.