10-01-11 Why the CIA is spying on a changing climate

Last summer,as torrential rains flooded Pakistan,a veteran intelligence analyst watched closely from his desk at CIA headquarters just outside the capital.For the analyst,who heads the CIA's year-old Center on Climate Change and National Security,the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history was a warning."It has the exact same symptoms you would see for future climate change events,and we're expecting to see more of them," he said later,agreeing to talk only if his name were not revealed,for security reasons."We wanted to know: What are the conditions that lead to a situation like the Pakistan flooding? What are the important things for water flows,food security … radicalization, disease" and displaced people? As intelligence officials assess key components of state stability,they are realizing that the norms they had been operating with — such as predictable river flows and crop yields — are shifting.Yet the U.S. government is ill-prepared to act on climate changes that are coming faster than anticipated and threaten to bring instability to places of U.S. national interest,interviews with several dozen current and former officials and outside experts and a review of two decades' worth of government reports indicate.Climate projections lack crucial detail,they say,and information about how people react to changes — for instance,by migrating — is sparse. Military officials say they don't yet have the intelligence they need in order to prepare for what might come.Rolf Mowatt-Larssen,a 23-year veteran of the CIA who led the Department of Energy's intelligence unit from 2005 to 2008,said the intelligence community simply wasn't set up to deal with a problem such as climate change that wasn't about stealing secrets."I consider what the U.S. government is doing on climate change to be lip service," said Mowatt-Larssen,who is currently a fellow at Harvard University."It's not serious." Just getting to where the intelligence community is now,however,has been a challenge.Back in the 1990s,the CIA opened an environmental center,swapped satellite imagery with Russia and cleared U.S. scientists to access classified information.But when the Bush administration took power,the center was absorbed by another office and work related to the climate was broadly neglected.In 2007,a report by retired high-ranking military officers called attention to the national security implications of climate change,and the National Intelligence Council followed a year later with an assessment on the topic.But some Republicans attacked it as a diversion of resources.And when CIA Director Leon Panetta stood up the climate change center in 2009,conservative lawmakers attempted to block its funding."The CIA's resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves,not polar bears on icebergs," Sen.John Barrasso, R-Wyo.,said at the time.Now,with calls for belt tightening coming from every corner,leadership in Congress has made it clear that the intelligence budget,which soared to $80.1 billion last year,will have to be cut.And after sweeping victories by conservatives in the midterm elections,many political insiders think the community's climate change work will be in jeopardy.Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.