Global Climate Change, a Matter of National Security? The CIA has funded a study on the risks that global warming will impose, it either directly or indirectly, to the national security of the United States. The results of this study point out various consequences of global climate change that will be or are already potential threats against this country.
The very fact that the Central Intelligence Agency has funded such research already indicates the seriousness with which the issue of global climate change begins to be seen.
The report made by the team of Michael McElroy, Professor of environmental studies at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and D. James Baker, former administrator of the NOAA (the national American Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), points to a new reason to worry about the effects of climate change: the country’s most affected national security.
Over the next decade, according to the report, climate change could have far-reaching effects on agricultural food production, water availability, energy supply, critical infrastructure and economic security.
During the last century, a common trend in many countries has been the development of portions of territory, with the concentration of enough people in relatively small areas. That has led to edify and build infrastructures in accordance with environmental circumstances that are believed to be permanent for a very long time. McElroy says..
If weather patterns change suddenly and in a notorious way, may appear very large problems. Bridges may be in the wrong place, or the levees are not high enough.
The problem goes far beyond the damage to infrastructure, and enters the field of international conflict. In the regions of the globe where global warming generate persistent droughts can trigger disputes over access to water and agricultural fields, resulting in riots.
Some of these disputes can be between border Nations and eliminate degenerate into wars, with all that this implies. The phenomenon of refugees of climate change may worsen dramatically, making close to the hardest hit countries to receive waves of immigration, legal or illegal.
The research carried out by the team of McElroy and Baker has been driven in part by the activity of both in Medea, a group of scientists involved in examining declassified national security of US Government data in order to take advantage of them for scientific research.
In recent years, the Group has worked with authorities of the United States and even Russia, to declassify data on climatic conditions in the Arctic, and thousands of images taken by spy satellites. These images have been used by scientists to study the changes in the Arctic ice, among other things.