In a previous post, New C.I.A.-Commissioned Report on Climate Change Stresses to Civilization, we were given a window into dangers created by human-induced climate change. Now we learn that President Obama has axed that program. Why study the ultimate existential threat to industrial civilization when you can just build more weapons to fight the social instability and wars brought on by abrupt, chaotic and extreme weather patterns. This mindset would be in keeping with the American ruling establishment’s practice of treating the symptoms rather than the root cause – ignoring the fact that we, aka industrial ‘civilized’ humans, are the destabilizing force of the biosphere and the primary cause behind climatic disasters to civilization. We’ve pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that it has now gained an intractable foothold as a driving force behind possible runaway climate change.

Excerpt…

CURWOOD:…One of the more startling scientific reports presented at Doha — based, so far, on preliminary data – suggests that emissions from the melting Arctic are heading for a tipping point that could lead to runaway warming...

CURWOOD: Now we understand that the CIA has shut down its center for climate change and security – why did they have the center in the first place, do you think?

ROMM: Well, there has been increasing awareness in the intelligence community and the Pentagon that global warming and climate change was going to have an impact on US national security interests. Whether it is military bases that are seeing sea level rise or countries that are subject to worse droughts and famines, so, you know, I think many countries around the world had come to the view that climate change was going to have a big impact on security.

CURWOOD: Why shut this unit down now?

ROMM: Apparently the unit didn’t have much support when Panetta left and General Petraeus took over at the CIA. Petraeus was very focused on terrorism, and there’s a lot of congressional Republicans, who, you know, deny climate science and therefore attack any action by the federal government to study climate change and its impacts.

CURWOOD: Some suggest that the CIA shutting down its Center for Climate Change and Security is a budget matter. What’s your analysis?

ROMM: Well, I think that everyone knows that budgets are under duress. We have this fiscal cliff, in all likelihood, discretionary spending, even for intelligence, is going to be cut. Some were saying that the CIA was trying to make nice with Congressional Republicans and not continue this center that kind of annoyed them.

I hope that’s not the case, because, this is a matter of pretty basic science and it would be a shame if our intelligence organization, whose job is to sift through the facts and be completely separate from ideological spin, it would be a shame if they were getting pressured to not look at science and facts…

ROMM: Closing the center was absolutely a mistake. If the intelligence apparatus in this country with its $75 billion dollar budget can’t have a small center to study one of the gravest threats facing the world, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs…

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That’s a pretty sad state of affairs. The weapons of mass destruction have been in plain site all along…

Listen to the real reasons…

…Our national security has been reduced, in large part, to energy security which has led us to militarizing our access to oil through establishing a military presence across the oil-bearing regions of the world and instigating armed conflict in Iraq and sustaining it in Afghanistan…