Agencies Warn Global Warming Can Increase Terrorism

WASHINGTON — Global warming is likely to increase illegal immigration, create humanitarian disasters, and destabilize precarious governments and could add to terrorism, all of which could threaten U.S. national security, according to an assessment by American intelligence agencies.“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by climate change] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Tom Fingar, who testified before a joint House committee hearing yesterday, said.Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southeast Asia are most vulnerable to warming-related drought, flooding, extreme weather, and hunger. The intelligence assessment warns of a global spillover of those troubles: increased migration and water-related disputes, he said in prepared remarks.Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems such as poverty, disease, migration, and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Mr. Fingar told the committee.But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself.”“The operative word there is ‘may,’ we don’t know,” Mr. Fingar said.The national intelligence assessment on the national security implications of global climate change through 2030 is one of a series of periodic intelligence reports that offer the consensus judgment of top analysts at all 16 American spy agencies on major foreign policy, security, and global economic issues. Congress requested the report last year. The assessment is classified “confidential.”It predicts that America and most of its allies will have the means to cope with climate change economically. Unspecified “regional partners” could face severe problems.Mr. Fingar said that the quality of the analysis is hampered by the fact that climate data tend not to focus on specific countries but on broad global changes.Africa is among the most vulnerable regions, the report states. An expected increase in droughts there could cut agricultural yields of rain-dependent crops by up to half in the next 12 years.Parts of southern and eastern Asia’s food crops are vulnerable both to droughts and floods, with rice and grain crops potentially facing up to a 10% decline by 2025.

Agencies Warn Global Warming Can Increase Terrorism

Agencies Warn Global Warming Can Increase Terrorism

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