CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate 417
MikeChino writes "The CIA has just joined up with climate researchers to re-launch a data-sharing initiative that will use spy satellites and other CIA asets to help scientists figure out what climate change is doing to cloud cover, forests, deserts, and more. The collaboration is an extension of the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis program, which President Bush canceled in 2001, and it will use reconnaissance satellites to track ice floes moving through the Arctic basin, creating data that could be used for ice forecasts." Even though the program is "basically free" in terms of CIA involvement, the Times notes: "Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the CIA opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, 'not spying on sea lions.'"
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... should add "Em" to the beginning of his last name. Either he's genuinely too stupid to understand how climate change is a national security issue, or he's grandstanding. I'm having a hard time deciding which. ("Both" is also a possible answer, of course.) I'm sure he was one of those who, during the Bush administration, thought anything the CIA did was just fine and dandy, since "Thou shalt not question the Executive Branch in Time of War(r)(tm)" was pretty much the Republican Eleventh Commandment until January 2009. How quickly things change.
The CIA Should Be Involved (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming .. (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest mistake we make about climate change is to think of it as a short term issue. Its not. You can't look at the climate over a year or a decade and make statements about global climate change.
So yeah it is a security issue, but on the scale of the next 50 or 100 years. I don't think it is appropriate for the CIA to work on issues over that time scale.
Having said that, the CIA apparently has remote sensing assets which can contribute to the long term picture of global climate. Using data from those assets in other domains is appropriate.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Interesting)
As a resident of Wyoming, Barrasso's stance doesn't surprise me one bit.
Wyoming is heavily dependent on it's energy resources industry. Coal, natural gas, oil. We've got enough oil locked in the green river shale oil deposit to meet the nation's appetite for the next 194 years (at current usage), but getting to it is going to take a lot of time and research, and if public opinion shifts too far away from oil then no one will invest enough to make it a reality.
Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming .. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also the issue that things just keep speeding up over time. For example, the Copenhagen's (failed) *goal* was to limit average global temperature rise to "only" 2 degrees celsius. Well, that'd mean "only" about 1 meter of sea level rise over the next hundred years. But the equilibrium sea level rise for a 2C temperature rise, historically, is 6-9 meters. It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we're talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater. 1m is mostly just the everglades.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:5, Interesting)
I've tried to condense [dumbscientist.com] the science into a (hopefully) accessible summary, complete with dozens of references to genuine peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the seriousness of the threat posed by CO2.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Interesting)
1) CO2 level are drastically increasing because of human activity (now seem to be 25% to 50% greater than their historical levels)
2) The earth's temperature is warmer than it has been in the past
3) Computer models can show no other way to account for the warming trend between 1965 and 2000 other than CO2.
4) Feedbacks in the environmental system could make things significantly worse, although they might not.
This is something logical we can work with. This is how you do science, not by deferring to consensus of people who might be smarter than you.
No one disagrees with point 1. Point 2 is fairly well accepted, although the trend in the past is in no way indicative of the trend going forward, which is why you had to go to point three, to establish that it will continue into the future if we continue to release CO2.
Point 3, while technically true, is extremely shaky. I don't think many people realize that the entire link from CO2 to the warming is based on computer models not being able to think of any other explanation. That point alone is suspect when you consider that from the time the study you linked to was published until now, the temperatures have not continued to rise as those models predicted would happen. What this means is that there are other factors affecting global temperature, that are unknown, that are at least as big as CO2 (otherwise they would have continued to rise).
Ignoring that, if you look into more detail about how CO2 and the computer models work, there seems to be a rough consensus that doubling CO2 will increase the earth's temperature by
Whether you believe the computers to be accurate or not depends on who you are: the people who wrote the summary of the IPCC report believed them to be accurate enough, whereas the full IPCC report doesn't actually make that claim. Of course most news agencies read the summary, not the full report (I can't say I blame them, it's thousands of pages long).
As for the fourth point, even on your web page you admit it is nothing more than a worry.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Interesting)
It is nearly 30 years since I last read a paper like that, that time in quantitive Econometrics, and they were all wrong too. Climate Science seems like a social science, not hard science. You have a huge bunch of guys, living in Alice's Wonderland, using what is said in other papers as data and evidence.
Sorry, it is not. This paper is evidence of one thing only, that the mesh used in the (DOE) PCM is far too course ( The resolution of the atmosphere is T42, or roughly 2.8 x 2.8 degree;, with 18 levels in the vertical. Resolution in the ocean is roughly
The discussion of the simulations tell us little since we do not have accurate experimental data for much of the period. Linearity is moot since it depends on the model equations, which, are somewhere else,
The equations an mathematical set up of the model
The computer code to implement the model. See some of the nonsense from CRU.
If this is the best answer to Can CO2 cause run-away warming? God help us.
Our great leaders (Score:3, Interesting)
This guy was elected as a United States Senator.
We are so fucked.
I guess he doesn't realize that the all branches of the United States Military, well-known liberals that they are, have been taking the effects of global warming into their planning since at least 2001. So have many multinational corporations that are involved in the collection and distribution of natural resources. They are all working from the assumption that global warming is real and will have a measurable effect on their respective missions going forward. And brother, the Department of Defense has some heavy scientific talent working for them. They're not going to put their long-term success in the hands of some mechanical engineer from Hillsdale College who believes fossils were put there by God 6000 years ago to fool us all.
Companies like Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland don't like to advertise the fact, but global climate change is part of their modeling, even as they hire people to gin up "research" to deny it. Fortunately for them, it's not very expensive to hire people to do denier research, drawing from the pool of people who can't rate jobs in real institutions. These corporations are doing their best to protect their short-term bottom line, so they don't want any environmental regulations in place, but their long-term bets are on global warming happening. They're not stupid enough to ignore the real scientists.
Re:Climate change is a security threat (Score:3, Interesting)
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
I ask this as a curious outsider, not an adversary: what are the criteria for considering a station to be "bad"? Some would certainly be obvious, like an average temperature jump of 10 degrees overnight, but I'm having trouble imagining a winnowing process that adequately controls for selection bias.
Any takers?