Climate and securityCIA-commissioned climate change report outlines perils for U.S. national security

U.S. national security leaders believe that the accelerating pace of climate change will place severe  strains on U.S. military and intelligence agencies in coming years. The reason, according the National Research Council, the U.S. top scientific research body: climate changes will trigger increasingly disruptive developments around the world.

A National Research Council release reports that the council, in a report released Friday, concludes that a combination seemingly 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.

The study was commissioned by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

The New York Times reports that the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said that Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future. “This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” Steinbruner, a leading authority on national security, told the Times. “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 that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-changing gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments  — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”

The Times notes that the study was released ten days late. The authors had been scheduled to brief senior intelligence officials on their findings on the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.

The report says that climate-induced crises could lead to internal instability and international conflict, and could force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance and, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic, or other interests.

The Pentagon has already taken major steps to plan for, prepare, and adapt to climate change and has spent billions of dollars to make ships, aircraft, and vehicles more fuel-efficient.

These efforts notwithstanding, the 206-page study argues that the United States is ill-prepared to assess and prepare for the catastrophes that a