Ben Ciccati

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Last April, Congress directed the National Intelligence Council to issue the first ever National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on climate change. Expected to be completed in May, the NIE is a comprehensive analysis of national security threats prepared in concert by all 16 branches of the federal intelligence and military establishment. How much if any of the report will be released to the public is unknown.

Though Congressional Republicans opposed it, the commissioning of the NIE was supported by prominent members of the military and intelligence communities, including high-level officials appointed by President Bush. In a letter leaked to the Washington Post, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wrote that it was “entirely appropriate for the National Intelligence Council [NIC] to prepare an assessment on the geopolitical and security implications of global climate change.”

The climate NIE is the most visible evidence of growing concern in the defense and intelligence communities about global warming’s consequences to international stability. “It’s very clear, especially when you start looking at future projections, that climate change is going to have serious national security implications,” said Sharon Burke, a veteran of two decades in Washington working on national security issues. In November, the Center for New American Security, a Washington-based think tank where Burke is now a senior fellow on energy policy, joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies in publishing The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. This, to date, is the most comprehensive study of climate change and American regional security interests.

Its panel of contributors, including a former CIA director, found that, “left unaddressed, climate change may come to represent as great or a greater foreign policy and national security problem” than the war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy security, and current economic instability. The catalog of security implications cited by The Age of Consequences and other recent studies is too long to recite, but chief concerns include massive population migrations and resulting political destabilization, permanent loss of arable land, and multiple, concurrent wars over resources, particularly water.

Though a majority of Americans believe climate change is a pressing problem, there has been little movement in Washington toward policies that would limit and then reduce fossil fuel emissions. This inaction is intensifying fear among scientists that the window of opportunity to mitigate climate change is closing. “What is worrying many of us today is that not only is the evidence of climate change mounting, but the indications of the severity of the impact of climate change are mounting as well,” said Oran Young, a professor at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UCSB.

Young hopes that if climate change comes increasingly to be framed as a threat to American security, it will galvanize the political will to make the long-term investments necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions. “There are a lot of people who think that the only way we’re going to make changes of the magnitude required to address this problem is to cast it as a security issue. When you talk about major changes in behavior in allocations in the budget, it’s easier to accomplish if it’s [perceived as] a matter of national security.”

Scientists and policy officials who share Young’s view hope that the NIE will prod Washington into action. “The NIE will be a locus for attention,” said Geoffrey Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It will be a tool for people who are interested in this issue on Capital Hill, and it will be a peg for the press to do further investigation of the issue.”

To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, there is a general consensus that emissions will have to be held steady in the next decade, and then reduced by 60 to 80 percent by the middle of the century. This will require laws and treaties regulating greenhouse gas production. While the Bush administration has refused to consider such measures, all three presidential candidates are sponsors of a Senate bill that would mandate a carbon cap for businesses, with the goal of an 80 percent reduction. Perhaps surprisingly, a recent assessment of the candidates’ stated positions on climate change, by New Scientist, found John McCain most closely aligned with the wishes of concerned scientists and policy officials.

You can talk about the problem, but once you get to the solution … You can nibble around the edges, but if you’re getting at real solutions, they’re not the kinds of things that get you elected,” said Sharon Burke.

Nevertheless, all three candidates have tended to present a more optimistic picture of climate change than the one held by most climate scientists. They have discussed it primarily as an opportunity — an opportunity to transform energy consumption in ways that provide net benefits to Americans, including job creation, environmental benignity, enhancement of America’s image abroad, and petroleum independence. Those may be real benefits of a substantive effort to mitigate the greenhouse effect, but they provide only a portion of the larger picture. “You can talk about the problem, but once you get to the solution … You can nibble around the edges, but if you’re getting at real solutions, they’re not the kinds of things that get you elected,” said Sharon Burke. “You’re talking about hard choices, trade-offs, and unavoidable consequences, and the public understanding is not there yet.”

So how will public understanding get to the point where expensive policy measures to address climate change can be enacted? According to Young, it may take a “shocking event or series of events to mobilize serious policy response. Even with a new [presidential] administration, we’re probably still going to need some sort of fairly dramatic wake-up call.” This analysis is generating anxiety among scientists, who worry that the window of opportunity to significantly mitigate climate change is closing. In December, NASA climate scientist James Hansen announced that he now believes that the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can hold before pushing past the “tipping point” is 350 parts per million. The current level is 385 ppm. Hansen and other scientists fear a critical threshold in which melting sea ice and Arctic tundra create feedback loops that will boost the rate of change exponentially.

If we have not yet progressed past a carbon threshold, it will probably not be much longer until we do — five to 10 years are commonly cited figures. With luck, the link between climate change and national security —embodied for now in the NIE —will help point the way to major policy movement to reduce greenhouse gases. As former CIA director James Woolsey writes in The Age of Consequences, “Waiting for absolute confirmation of the threat — for a climatological 9/11 — may push us past a tipping point from which there is no recovery.”

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