.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists
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A satellite image of the East Siberian Sea from 1999-2008. This image has been degraded to
hide the satellite’s true capabilities.
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By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 4, 2010
The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to
use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy
satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden
complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from
natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical
forests.
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Intelligence Images of Polar Ice
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The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down
and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have
scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in
an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends,
and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the
scientific analysis.
The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a
professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice
and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.
Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, “have no way to send out 500
people” across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains,
adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice
forecasts.
“That will be very important economically and logistically,” Dr.
Untersteiner said, arguing that Arctic thaws will open new fisheries
and sea lanes for shipping and spur the hunt for undersea oil and gas
worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The monitoring program has little or no impact on regular intelligence
gathering, federal officials said, but instead releases secret information
already collected or takes advantage of opportunities to record
environmental data when classified sensors are otherwise idle or
passing over wilderness.
Secrecy cloaks the monitoring effort, as well as the nation’s
intelligence work, because the United States wants to keep foes and
potential enemies in the dark about the abilities of its spy satellites
and other sensors. The images that the scientific group has had
declassified, for instance, have had their sharpness reduced to hide
the abilities of the reconnaissance satellites.
Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for
environmental monitoring. In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a
small unit to assess the security implications of climate change,
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency
should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”
Now, with the intelligence world under fire after the attempted
airliner bombing on Christmas Day, and with the monitoring program
becoming more widely known, such criticism seems likely to grow.
A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,
defended the scientific monitoring as exploiting the intelligence field
quite adroitly.
Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and
a member of the monitoring team, said the program was “basically
free.”
“People who don’t know details are the ones who are complaining,”
Dr. Cicerone said.
About 60 scientists — mainly from academia but including some from
industry and federal agencies — run the effort’s scientific side. All
have secret clearances. They obtain guidance from the National
Academy of Sciences, an elite body that advises the federal
government.
Dr. Cicerone said the monitoring effort offered an opportunity to
gather environmental data that would otherwise be impossible to
obtain, and to do so with the kind of regularity that can reveal the
dynamics of environmental change.
“It’s probably silly to think it will last 50 years,” he said of the
program in an interview. “On the other hand, there’s the potential for
these collections to go on for a long time.”
The C.I.A. runs the program and arranges for the scientists to draw on
federal surveillance equipment, including highly classified satellites of
the National Reconnaissance Office.
Officials said the effort to restart the program originated on Capitol
Hill in 2008 after former Vice President Al Gore argued for its
importance with Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California,
who was then a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee; she
became its chairwoman in early 2009.
The Obama administration has said little about the effort publicly but
has backed it internally, officials said. In November, the scientists met
with Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director.
“Director Panetta believes it is crucial to examine the potential
national security implications of phenomena such as desertification,
rising sea levels and population shifts,” Paula Weiss, an agency
spokeswoman, said.
The program resurrects a scientific group that from 1992 to 2001
advised the federal government on environmental surveillance.
Known as Medea, for Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental
Analysis, the group sought to discover if intelligence archives and
assets could shed light on issues of environmental stewardship.
It is unclear why Medea died in the early days of the Bush
administration, but President George W. Bush developed a reputation
for opposing many kinds of environmental initiatives. Officials said
the new body was taking on the same mandate and activities, as well
as the name.
“I’m extremely pleased with what’s been happening,” said Michael B.
McElroy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a senior
member of the group. “It’s really firstrate.”
Among the program’s first responsibilities has been to assess earlier
Medea projects to see which, if any, produced valuable information
and might be restarted or expanded.
Dr. Untersteiner of the University of Washington said that in June the
government posted some imagery results from that assessment on the
Web sites of the United States Geological Survey in an area known as
the Global Fiducials Library, which advertises itself as an archive of
intelligence images from scientifically important sites.
Among other things, the online library displays years of ice imagery
from six sites inside the Arctic Circle, including the Fram Strait, the
main route for icebergs moving from the Arctic basin into the North
Atlantic.
Scientists consider the Arctic highly sensitive to global warming and
are particularly interested in closely monitoring its changes as possible
harbingers.
In July, the National Research Council of the National Academy of
Sciences released a report that praised the monitoring.
“There are no other data available that show the melting and freezing
processes,” the report said. “Their release will have a major impact on
understanding effects of climate change.”
Dr. Untersteiner said the federal government had already adopted one
of the report’s recommendations — have reconnaissance satellites
follow particular ice floes as they drift through the Arctic basin rather
than just monitoring static sites.
For this summer, Dr. Untersteiner said he had asked that the
intelligence agencies start the process sooner, “so we still see the snow
cover, maybe in early May.”
Such research, Dr. Untersteiner said, promised to promote
understanding of the fundamental forces at work in global climate
change, including the endless whorls and gyres of polar ice.
“We still have a problem with ice mechanics,” he said. “But the
dynamics are very revealing.”
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