Joint Hearing of the Intelligence Community Management Subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming - National Security Implications of Global Climate Change
Statement
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
I come here today with a number of questions and reservations on the recent National Intelligence Assessment on global climate change. Our nation and its intelligence community are facing many serious threats at a time when we are short analysts to assist in finding weapons of mass destruction, terrorist activities, I am concerned -- and terrorist activities around the globe, I am concerned that projects like this on climate change and the NIA amount to a dangerous diversion of intelligence resources.
I don't say that lightly. I don't make climate change a light issue. The question is not is it appropriate for us to be concerned about possible climate change and its impacts. Of course not. That is a great concern. Is it appropriate to ask hypothetical questions to the State Department, to the CIA, and others on what will happen if X occurs? All of that is reasonable. We continue to do it. And I would expect on a bipartisan basis, we continue to ask those questions so that we can plan and so that we know that the community is doing its planning.
What I am concerned about is clearly the CIA and other intelligence agencies do not and should not have the resources of climatologists. I believe that that's probably our greatest threat. I hope today we will look at this in terms of what it is. It is a study of if in fact there is drought, if in fact there is famine, if in fact a number of things occur. It is not a study of will they occur? On that, the science is not settled, although the science is unsettling.
Certainly, for all of us who remember a quote -- we earlier had quotes -- but a quote that goes this way: "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are." That quote, of course, I have to give credit to Vice President Al Gore. I could go on and give the quotes on Mr. Hansen, Dr. Hansen who now is a leading advocate on climate change, and some would say an alarmist, when in fact he was also an author of the nuclear winter we were going to receive as of 1971. He was wrong then or he's wrong now.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be concerned about the effects of putting carbon-based fuels into our climate. We should be concerned for a number of reasons. First of all, we don't know the effects. Second of all, the effects we do know include pollution that adversely affects life around the world. Lastly, we know that these are limited resources. In America today, with $135 oil, mostly due to our lack of willingness to produce domestically, we fully understand why our cost is so high and yet we'd like to have it lower.
So I would like to join all of the people on the dais here, I believe, in saying that we have to find alternatives that help drive down the cost of oil, reduce the use of hydrocarbons, and continue the study by serious climate-based professors -- none of whom, by definition, would normally be in the CIA -- in order to find out the real question of when will these events occur if they will occur and how we can stop them.
Lastly, Mr. Chairman, I think the most important thing for us to remember here today is not seven years ago, not 17 years ago, not 27 years ago, but in 1971 when we began looking at climate and the production of -- then it was dust and other particulates -- but clearly, the effect of burning oil, natural gas, coal. We sounded an alarm. That was at a time in which an answer was open to us, an answer that in my district produces 2,200 megawatts of power, and that was clean-burning nuclear. Today in California, we are prohibited from doing any nuclear, zero emissions.
We continued to have an argument throughout that entire period, while taking away the solution that the French and the European Union and others have sought, which is while we don't know the effects of burning carbon-based in some areas, we do in others, knowing that, in fact, it is not good to burn coal and others from a particulate standpoint if we can avoid it, knowing that there are over a billion people without electricity around the world.
Not this committee but this Congress should dedicate itself to quickly freeing up the prohibition on nuclear so that in fact we can get off carbon-based electricity in this country, dramatically reducing our carbon footprint, something we can do today. We can do it in a matter of five or six years. It will do more by far than other things that we are looking at, at the present time, or any other thing we're looking at, at the present time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Let me ask a question in a little bit the abstract, but not too much. If I was to say that there are ominous signs, that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, and that these changes have portend a drastic decline in food reduction where serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon and perhaps in only ten years from now, the regions of decline that feel the greatest impact would be the wheat production of Canada and Russia.
But additionally, areas on the margin and only marginally self- sufficient -- tropical areas in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Africa, where growing seasons depend on rains brought by the monsoon, would you say that was, at least in part, essentially what we painted for you with this global climate change as a potential that you had to deal with in your analysis? Dr. Fingar, I mean, I know that's not the exact words of any of the studies, but isn't that essentially what we painted for you is that global climate change to begin in as little as 10 years, going out to 2030, would have these kinds of effects in many of the areas I named?
DR. FINGAR: The -- I guess three comments. One is we took, as a starting point, a set of projections. We took the midrange projections which --
REP. ISSA: Now, I appreciate -- I appreciate that on the study, Doctor.
DR. FINGAR: -- not as extreme as was done there. But that our starting point was a set of projections and scenarios about how climate change would affect the physical and the biological world.
REP. ISSA: No, I appreciate that but as you said, you're not a climatologist.
You don't have them on staff; you had to reach out to even to get what the projections were. What I read you was, as far as I can tell, it was similar to what you're dealing with as the hypothetical -- change beginning in as little as ten years, droughts, marginal areas not being able to meet food demands, true? Or false?
DR. FINGAR: What I'm having difficulty with is the word hypothetical --
REP. ISSA: Well, let's -- let me be less hypothetical. You were between your undergraduate and graduate years in 1975; I think you were Ph.D. candidate when that was written. That was written based on global cooling. The projections for global cooling, Newsweek science, full page, 1975, were that those things would occur -- that marginal areas, areas having less technology, less able to cope with, such as Indochina then -- the Soviet Union, Canada, based on their wheat because wheat harvests don't do very well as it warmed in that case. And certainly, the areas along the equator -- if they stop getting the rain that came with monsoons -- that that would adversely affect and lead to instability.
Now, your study today, based on the opposite, or the studies you accepted based on the opposite, have the same effect. My point here today is the problems of 1975, based on global cooling and the problems here based on global warming appear to be the same problems. Wouldn't you agree that in fact, if you have a change of seven or eight degrees and a change in how much water falls where, marginal areas, up or down, were going to be affected and affected fairly dramatically? Isn't that true?
DR. FINGAR: I can't argue that it isn't true --
REP. ISSA: Okay, well then following up -- no because I have very limited time and I just want to get to just one single point in this -- I appreciate what the intelligence community brings to us. For purposes, this is a committee on global climate change mixed with a committee on intelligence. For purposes of intelligence, no matter what we give you in hypotheticals, a rise of seven degrees, a fall of seven degrees, inability to grow crops in India because they burn cow dung and the sky doesn't allow enough sun to get in.
Whatever the hypothetical we give you, isn't it true that you are prepared and that one thing that we can count on is that you will give us some analysis of what will happen if, but in fact, you cannot really feed accurately within your resources of any of the intelligence agencies, the input of whether the temperature is going to go up or down, whether the temperature is going to cause or not cause a drought -- what you can do is deal with any hypothetical we give you as to global climate change and come back to us and say yes, if you cut off the water in X country or if this country has a crop failure, we can give you an analysis of the impact to America's security and the stability of those countries. Isn't that essentially what we're -- the relationship that we should have with your agency?
DR. FINGAR: Yes, that is -- that is correct.
REP. ISSA: Okay.
DR. FINGAR: If question is posed as a what would be the implications of make up the hypothetical or pick the scientific study, what would change would be sort of confidence level -- about whether it was purely hypothetical or was it grounded in real world experience and the quality, as judged by those able to do so, of the underlying science.
REP. ISSA: Right and Doctor, I hated to make it as painful as it was, but it is very important -- I appreciate the chair's indulgence -- it is very important, I appreciate that you and the agency that all of the agencies of the intelligence community are very good at giving us these hypotheticals and not qualified, per se, to look into climate change, but rather given a set of scenarios that might occur, giving us a reasonable projection. And as you said, very importantly Mr. Chairman, that we delve into a deeper, that the very mitigations we have to analyze whether those mitigations have side effects.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source