WASHINGTON — Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on U.S. military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.
The group, the National Research Council, said in a study commissioned by the CIA and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public-health systems.
Superstorm Sandy provided a taste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John Steinbruner, said.
“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”
Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other gases scientists believe alter the climate into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen.
The study was released 10 days late: Its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.
Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.
The Defense Department already has taken steps to plan for and adapt to climate change and has spent billions of dollars to make ships, aircraft and vehicles more fuelefficient. Nonetheless, the 206-page study warns that the U.S. government is ill-prepared to assess and prepare for the weather events scientists think a heated planet will produce.
“It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events — including single events, conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence in particular locations, and events affecting globally integrated systems that provide for human wellbeing — will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global system to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response,” the report states.
In other words, states could fail; large populations subjected to famine, flood or disease could migrate across international borders; and national and international agencies might not have the resources to cope.
The report cites the simultaneous heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010 as disparate but linked climate-related events that taxed those societies.
The 18-month study is not the first such report from government agencies or research organizations to draw a direct link between climate change and national security concerns, nor will it be the last. The National Intelligence Council produced a classified national intelligence estimate on climate change in 2008 and has issued several unclassified reports since then. The Pentagon and the White House also have highlighted the role of climate change in humanitarian crises and security threats.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 11/11/2012