Today we receive a new intelligence report from, let’s see here…the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which includes something new and different than past intelligence reports: climate change issues.

The report, seductively called “Global Trends 2025,” warns that as climate change wrecks havoc all over, it will decrease the influence the United States has across the globe, thus creating (for this country, at least) a destabilizing influence.

Within two decades, the report predicts, already sensitive areas from northern China to sub-Saharan Africa will have to deal with more droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water. At a briefing Tuesday ahead of the report’s release, [chairman of the NIC and deputy director of national intelligence Thomas] Fingar stressed that limited water and agricultural land could ‘add a kind of competition to the international system that we haven’t seen for a very long time.’[msnbc]

These reports (this is the fourth one) are designed to look at long-term about future global politics, but have never included climate change as a factor.  However Fingar has been adamantchange that this is an issue that is going to be extremely important. He says,

The changes in sea level, the changes in temperature, the impact on agriculture, the impact on water availability, the impact that comes from melting in the Arctic and opening up resources and extending growing seasons in some places, and shortening them in others. That is going to happen. All we can begin to do now is prepare to mitigate those impacts.

Kinda scary.  It’s one thing to think that global warming is going to flood our coasts, another to think it’s going to cause problems with nuclear issues.  Oh, did I not mention that?  Yeah, that’s going to happen.

‘Practical problems’ from more severe weather includes ‘63 military installations that are in danger of being flooded by storm surges,’ [Fingar] added. ‘The number of nuclear power plants that are so similarly vulnerable is almost as high.’

Oh, and also, poor countries are going to go crazy when they don’t have enough water or food.  Fun times.  takepart and visit Conservation International’s page on climate change to see what you can do to slow the trend.