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

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I thank you for being here to provide testimony and I just want to add my thanks to all the people behind putting together this work. The estimates are a fabulous help to us and I appreciate all the good work that goes into it.

And I just want to point out that in -- all of your estimates are based, more often than not, on judgments -- your judgments are based on certain uncertainties and that's kind of the nature of the business that you're in. And also I think it needs to be pointed out that when you label something a certain confidence level, that's an accumulation of everything, that there's parts of your work that have higher confidence ratings than others, as I understand it, from my position on the intelligence committee. So I think that needs to be pointed out in the beginning.

But I, too, had concerns about the IPCC's findings and wanted to know whether or not these are things that we could take to the proverbial bank. I met with a group of scientists from one of the universities in my district, University of California-Davis, an agricultural institution, and all the scientists I met with, they just kind of shrugged. They said, well, you know, of course this is good stuff. You just have to remember it's a consensus report so this is kind of like the lowest common denominator. They were already at the point where this was accepted.

And I also want to point out that the private sector is -- certainly in my district is interested in this type of work. I represent an area that the main crop -- the agricultural district, the main crop is wine grape for wine production, and every winery and every vineyard operation in my district on their own is out trying to figure out how to reduce their carbon footprint. They know it's good for business; they know it's good for their survival. And they look at things like the increase in temperature and already, the warming in California, the increased temperatures in California are already responsible for the introduction of -- they claim two new pests per month and this has an impact on the business.

And the private sector is going out there, they're installing solar panels, they're burning different types of fuel, different types of farming practice. They're investing a lot of money out-of-pocket because they know that this is important. And a lot of it's based on data that has been made available, and it seems to me that we should be looking at how to make all of the data available so everybody, governments -- not only local governments and state governments here, but governments around the world, we can work in conjunction with them to deal with what would be devastating geopolitical problems if this comes about.

And I guess I'd like to hear from you, Dr. Fingar, regarding the making public declassifying this information so we can have the benefit of working across agencies, working across governments, working globally to deal with this.

DR. FINGAR: Let me respond to three points that you made. One is the intelligence community is used to working with uncertainty, working with partial information. That's what we do all the time; that's why we exist. If we had all of the information, you wouldn't need to hire us. So we're used to trying to piece together a 1,000- piece puzzle when we have 15 pieces and somebody lost the box cover. Dealing with the uncertainties around the IPCC report, okay, that's what we know, in quotes, as a starting point. So we would take that and work with it. So in that respect, what we did here is what we normally do, on a different kind of subject and difficulty to go back at the sources of the information.

The peer review character is important to this. It is a peer -- the IPCC report is peer-reviewed. We buy pharmaceuticals, farmers apply fertilizer, all on the basis of sort of peer-reviewed scientific papers of one kind or another. It's not just another hypothesis that the classification of the NIA is one that -- there are several reasons here was not a nick decision. The decision to have it as classified with the National Intelligence Board, which are the heads of the 16 agencies meeting together, chaired by the Director of National Intelligence. And part of it is we're reluctant to have our input to decision-making become a part of the debate. We believe decision- makers need the change to work it.

The issues, the problems, that are identified in our assessment here are such that if they're going to be tackled, there is going to be extensive engagement by the United States, many components of the United States, with other governments with international agencies. And our experience and our judgment is that we would complicate and make that much more difficult if we sort of identify who are the winners who stand to benefit if nothing happens, which governments we consider to be too incompetent to manage the problem. Do we direct money to the most competent or the most incompetent? Where there are the most people affected or likely to have the shortest term -- there are many, many sort of policy decisions that seem to me could be informed by this report. But stigmatizing in some way the potential partners by the judgments that we make about them strikes us as the wrong way to go about it.

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