Climate Change is a National Security Issue … Isn’t It?

Defense One reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency is shutting down a research program that offered classified data to scientists to examine the link between climate change and global security threats

This comes in a few days after President Obama told the graduating class at the Coast Guard Academy that:

President Obama said climate change was a “serious threat to global security” in a commencement address to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Climate change, Obama said, “will impact how our military defends our country. So we need to act, and we need to act now.”

The program, which was known as MEDEA, was “a 1990s-era intelligence program restarted in 2010 under President Obama. The collaboration gave scientists access to intelligence assets like satellite data to study climate change and inform on how its impacts could inflame conflicts.”

MEDEA was “kept largely under wraps and was not largely cited, but scientists quoted in reports about the program say the data was often more high quality than what they could get through other sources.”

In 2012, the CIA:

also shut down its Center on Climate Change and National Security, a group of security specialists who studied existing climate data to game out how changes could impact security threats. That left MEDEA as the agency’s primary climate change program.

Odd way to deal with a “serious threat to global security.”  Sort of like declaring that ISIS is the JayVee.

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