CIA Stops Sharing Climate Change Info With Scientists

In a recent speech, President Obama proclaimed that climate change “constitutes a serious threat to global security (and), an immediate risk to our national security,” and warned that it actually could exacerbate other menaces, such as terrorism and political instability.

“Severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram,” Obama said. “It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”

But even as the White House is affirming its focus, the CIA reportedly is ending a key program that shared the agency’s climate change data — some of it gathered by surveillance satellites and other clandestine sources.

Investigative magazine Mother Jones broke the story last week that the intelligence agency is shutting down the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis program. MEDEA allowed a select group of scientists access to classified information about climate change. Mother Jones said that the data included not only satellite observations, but also ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by U.S. Navy submarines.

The CIA began gathering climate data for global security purposes during the Cold War, when it tracked the effect of climate change on Soviet grain harvests. According to one document mentioning MEDEA on the CIA website, the program was created in the early 1990s, in part through the efforts of then-U.S. Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), as part of an effort to share intelligence related to environmental problems. It included about 60 scientists with security clearances. The researchers found, among other things, that “found that historical imagery from our early satellite systems could provide a more accurate picture of climate change over time.”

In a 1996 speech, then-CIA director John Deutch said that MEDEA  ”will give scientists an ongoing record of changes in the earth that will improve their understanding of environmental processes. More importantly, it will greatly enhance their ability to provide strategic warning of potentially catastrophic threats to the health and welfare of our citizens.”

In the early 2000s, MEDEA was shut down by President George W. Bush, who initially took the position, contrary to the great majority of climate scientists, that it was unclear whether human activity was driving global warming. (He eventually changed his view.)  The program was revived in 2010 by Obama.

The New York Times reported in 2010 that the shared CIA data reportedly included a trove of images of Arctic sea ice, which enabled scientists to distinguish summer melts from longer-term climate trends.

University of Washington scientist Norbert Untersteiner, one of the scientists given access to the CIA’s climate data, told The New York Times that the intelligence data was “really useful.”

Though Republicans in Congress for long have criticized the use of intelligence resources to study climate change, the reasons for shuttling down MEDEA remain murky.

Read more at Discovery News