My friend Siobahn Gorman over at the Wall Street Journal covered the new National Intelligence Assessment on Global Climate Change today. Here's the article.

In summarizing the NIA for Congress, Tom Fingar, the head of the National Intelligence Council who spoke here at New America a few weeks ago, said global climate change is a very real national security challenge. Here's his summary graf:

We judge global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years. Although the United States will be less affected and is better equipped than most nations to deal with climate change, and may even see a benefit owing to increases in agriculture productivity, infrastructure repair and replacement will be costly. We judge that the most significant impact for the United States will be indirect and result from climate-driven effects on many other countries and their potential to seriously affect US national security interests.

All in all, I think the statement by Fingar is solid first look at the issue by an Intelligence Community that is trying hard to get a handle on a powerful geopolitical force that requires untraditional collection and analysis.

Is there anything new here? Not really. The findings are relatively safe and avoid looking at non-linear climate change dynamics. For an organization that challenged the White House line on Iran and now is taking on climate change, simply getting a consensus assessment is a significant accomplishment.

Of course not looking at non-linear dynamics is a major oversight. The big threat out there is the potential for the shut down of the Gulf Stream, a scenario which a 2003, DoD-sponsored report considered a major strategic concern, even if the likelihood was lower than linear warming.

Jay Gullege, a climate scientist at the Pew Centers for Global Climate Change recently noted, a) non-linear shocks are precisely how climate changes (even if overall change is measured in mean global temperature) and b) the best scientific models have been consistently under-estimating the scale and pace of the change, year after year.

My final thought on the report is that the Assessment is still trapped in an analytical box left over from the Cold War. The NIC, as Tom Fingar said in his talk here at New America a few weeks ago, can only look at specific, well defined questions, like "what are the national security implications of climate change." That's because intelligence assessments and estimates fundamentally asks how a given issue will impact the status quo. That status quo is built up of existing interests, but those interests, like oil and gas supplies, are part of the strategic dysfunction out there.

I believe that climate change combined with the urbanization of China and the economic rise of India, however, demands a major change in the status quo; a major U.S. strategic adaptation, and a shift in our national interests. What Tom Fingar confirmed today is that the consideration of grand strategic alternatives will not emerge even from our most elite intelligence professionals. Grand strategy is an inherently political act, which, ironically, must seek to transcend politics if we have any hope to sustain strategic focus for more than four or eight years.

That's what gets me up in the morning.