![]() ![]() The climate crisis might still feel remote, the New York Times mused, but as Americans feel the difficulties of unusual weather combined with shortages of oil, perhaps this might unlock some change? The paper reported that both energy and climate experts shared the hope “that the current crisis is severe enough and close enough to home to encourage the interest and planning required to deal with these long-range issues before the problems get too much worse”.Īnd yet, if anything, debate about climate change in the last third of the 20th century would be characterised as much by delay as concern, not least because of something the political analysts at the CIA seem to have missed: fightback from the fossil fuel industries. By this point, February 1977, the problem of burning fossil fuels was seen more through the lens of the domestic oil crisis rather than overseas famine. There was no large public outcry, nor did anyone seem to be trying to generate one.Īlthough initially prepared as a classified working paper, the report ended up in the New York Times a few years later. Still, the report’s authors had a point: climate change wasn’t getting the attention it could have, and there was a lack of urgency in discussions. A few months before the CIA report was issued, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had addressed the UN under a banner of applying science to “the problems that science has helped to create”, including his worry that the poorest nations were now threatened with “the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world”. It had been in newspapers and on television, and was even mentioned in a speech by US president Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Some scientists had been talking about the issue for a while. This claim that no one was paying attention was not entirely fair. Photograph: Paolo KOCH/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat, “and premier Nikita Khrushchev was quietly deposed”.įloods in Benares, India, circa 1970. “The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognised it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather. They knew that the so-called “ little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 13, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes. But the direction in which the thermometer was travelling wasn’t their immediate concern it was the political impact. The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). I n August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”.
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