NSA Insiders reveal what went wrong.

In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.

January 7, 2014

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Former NSA Senior Executives/Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Input for Your Decisions on NSA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Official Washington – from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to NSA Director Keith Alexander to former Vice President Dick Cheney to former FBI Director Robert Mueller – has been speaking from the same set of NSA talking points acquired recently via a Freedom of Information request. It is an artful list, much of it designed to mislead. Take this one, for example:

– NSA AND ITS PARTNERS MUST MAKE SURE WE CONNECT THE DOTS SO THAT THE NATION IS NEVER ATTACKED AGAIN LIKE I WAS ON 9/11

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, Senator Feinstein showed her hand when she said: “I will do everything I can to prevent this [NSA’s bulk] program from being canceled.” Declaring that 9/11 “can never be allowed to happen in the United States of America again,” Feinstein claimed that intelligence officials did not have enough information to prevent the terrorist attacks.

Mr. President, we trust you are aware that the lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinstein’s next dubious premise – that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 – is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information – much of it hidden until now – that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

The drafting process sparked lively discussion of the relative merits of your Review Group’s recommendations. We have developed very specific comments on those recommendations. We look forward to an opportunity to bring them to your attention.

_________

Introduction

We write you with a sense of urgency looking toward your upcoming decisions regarding the activities of the National Security Agency. We the undersigned (William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe) worked with NSA for a total of 144 years, most of them at senior levels. Our mission required the highest technical skills to keep the country safe from foreign enemies, while protecting the privacy rights of U.S. citizens under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For us, the 21st Century arrived with serious management and technical shortcomings at NSA in meeting the huge challenges posed by the digital and Internet age and the huge problems accompanying the transition from a Cold War footing over 40 years to an increasingly complex world with many asymmetric threats.

NSA management’s reaction in this environment not only opened the door to the attacks of 9/11 but led to violation of what had been the “First Commandment” at NSA; namely, “Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.” Under the circumstances, three of us (Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe) left; Drake had just come on board in hopes of playing a constructive role in addressing the challenges at NSA.

We all share an acute sense of regret for NSA’s demonstrable culpability for what happened on 9/11, and – for those of us working there before the terrorist attacks – a remorse for not having been able to stop them. We tried; but it is hard to escape a nagging regret that, somehow, we should have tried harder.

We were there; we know what happened. And we know how what happened has been successfully covered up – until now. Calamities like this tend to happen again if there is no accountability for what happened before. You need the unvarnished truth. The flood of revelations now in the public domain frees us to address facts and events formerly hidden behind a convenient, cover-up classification regime. We feel bound by the solemn oath we took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to make truths known to you that you may find as unconscionable as we do.

Why do we still care? Because we have consciences; because the oath we took has no expiration date; because we know – as few others do – how critically important it is for our country to have a well functioning, Constitution-abiding National Security Agency; and because we know how that ship can be steered back on course at that important place of work by improving its ability to find terrorists and other criminals in massive amounts of data, while protecting the right to privacy and citizen sovereignty.

Getting in the Door

It comes to us as no surprise that there is strong resistance on the part of the Establishment when it comes to giving us a hearing – a shunning of the very people who know what happened and how to take steps to prevent it from happening again.

Our predicament calls to mind that of our colleague veteran intelligence professionals, who were ignored by Official Washington and an obsequious media, when we knew that fraudulent (not mistaken) intelligence was being used to “justify” the launching of an aggressive war on Iraq 11 years ago. Establishment Washington barred the doors in 2002-2003. Just five years later our own clearances were taken away.

Now, once again the voices of seasoned intelligence professionals are being muted, in favor of a closed group of officials with huge incentive to cover up their failure to keep America safe and their playing fast and loose with the Fourth Amendment.

Mr. President, we have given up hope that your palace guard will let us in. Our chances of reaching you seem far better via this Memorandum, the 28th of its kind issued since early 2003, prepared at the behest of the Steering Group of our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). If this gets past your in-box protectors, we encourage you to pay more heed to it than your predecessor did to VIPS’ warnings in the months before the attack on Iraq.

In one limited sense, we are better off than our colleagues 11 years ago. This time, mainstream media have been unable to ignore the documentary evidence of rank dishonesty on the part of senior NSA and other intelligence officials. This time the media has come to us, seeking our views. This time we can comment rather freely on matters that until now were hidden under TOP SECRET stamps.

On December 26, for example, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy front-page article, quoting NSA’s former Senior Technical Director William Binney (undersigned) and former chief of NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center Edward Loomis (undersigned) warning that NSA is drowning in useless data lacking adequate privacy provisions, to the point where it cannot conduct effective terrorist-related surveillance and analysis.

A recently disclosed internal NSA briefing document corroborates the drowning, with the embarrassing admission, in bureaucratize, that NSA collection has been “outpacing” NSA’s ability to ingest, process, and store data – let alone analyze the take.

54 Now Down to Zero ‘Thwarts’

It is not difficult to connect NSA’s collect-everything approach with one principal finding of the Review Group you appointed to look into NSA programs; namely, that exactly zero terrorist plots have been prevented by NSA’s bulk trawling for telephone call records. One Review Group member, your former Chicago law professor colleague, Geoffrey Stone, has confessed to being “absolutely” surprised at the group’s finding of zero. Clearly, the statements of top NSA officials left Stone wholly unprepared for the truth. More

 

How the NSA Threatens National Security

Our choice isn't between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.

A scene from the McCarthy hearings

Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programscontinue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassifiedadditional information, and the President's Review Group has just released its report and recommendations.

With all this going on, it's easy to become inured to the breadth and depth of the NSA's activities. But through the disclosures, we've learned an enormous amount about the agency's capabilities, how it is failing to protect us, and what we need to do to regain security in the Information Age.

First and foremost, the surveillance state is robust. It is robust politically, legally, and technically. I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data.

Second, the NSA continues to lie about its capabilities. It hides behind tortured interpretations of words like "collect," "incidentally," "target," and "directed." It cloaks programs in multiple code names to obscure their full extent and capabilities. Officials testify that a particular surveillance activity is not done under one particular program or authority, conveniently omitting that it is done under some other program or authority.

Third, U.S. government surveillance is not just about the NSA. The Snowden documents have given us extraordinary details about the NSA's activities, but we now know that the CIA, NRO, FBI, DEA, and local police all engage in ubiquitous surveillance using the same sorts of eavesdropping tools, and that they regularlyshare information with each other.

The NSA's collect-everything mentality is largely a hold-over from the Cold War, when a voyeuristic interest in the Soviet Union was the norm. Still, it is unclear how effective targeted surveillance against "enemy" countries really is. Even when we learn actual secrets, as we did regarding Syria's use of chemical weapons earlier this year, we often can't do anything with the information.

Ubiquitous surveillance should have died with the fall of Communism, but it got a new—and even more dangerous—life with the intelligence community's post-9/11 "never again" terrorism mission. This quixotic goal of preventing something from happening forces us to try to know everything that does happen. This pushes the NSA to eavesdrop on online gaming worlds and on every cell phone in the world. But it's a fool's errand; there are simply too many ways to communicate.

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have beenrepeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide anymeaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.

It's not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it's the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn't between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it's between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.

Fixing this problem is going to be hard. We are long past the point where simple legal interventions can help. The bill in Congress to limit NSA surveillance won't actually do much to limit NSA surveillance. Maybe the NSA will figure out an interpretation of the law that will allow it to do what it wants anyway. Maybe it'll do it another way, using another justification. Maybe the FBI will do it and give it a copy. And when asked, it'll lie about it.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful. We need to openly disclose what surveillance we have been doing, and the known insecurities that make it possible. We need to work toward security, even if other countries like China continue to use the Internet as a giant surveillance platform. We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors—both state and non-state—that work against that goal.

Securing the Internet requires both laws and technology. It requires Internet technology that secures data wherever it is and however it travels. It requires broad laws that put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance. It requires additional technology to enforce those laws, and a worldwide enforcement regime to deal with bad actors. It's not easy, and has all the problems that other international issues have: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon non-proliferation; small arms trafficking; human trafficking; money laundering; intellectual property. Global information security and anti-surveillance needs to join those difficult global problems, so we can start making progress. More

 

Water in the Anthropocene - Water Security

Water in the Anthropocene from WelcomeAnthropocene on Vimeo.

 

Waste not, want not

Those last dregs of uneaten chowder may look like rubbish, but in Massachusetts such waste is increasingly seen as an opportunity. From July 2014 all companies and institutions in the state that produce more than 1 tonne a week of organic waste—including food, plants and manure—will be banned from sending the stuff to landfills.

Stopping the rot

Instead, the state’s biggest wasters (ie, big restaurants, universities and manufacturers rather than households) will need to get creative, donating edible food to charities and using the rest as compost or fodder for anaerobic-digestion facilities, which turn organic waste into energy. Massachusetts creates nearly 1.4m tonnes of organic waste each year. This plan aims to divert at least a third of it away from landfills by the end of the decade.

The Massachusetts ban is the most ambitious example of a new trend. Connecticut and Vermont will also enact laws to divert food waste from landfills in 2014. The rationale is plain: in small and densely populated states, landfill capacity is limited and disposal costs are high: $60-90 a tonne in Massachusetts, compared with a national average of about $45. Decomposing food waste also generates methane, a greenhouse gas. But this biogas can be captured and turned into energy through the process of anaerobic digestion, and then be sold into the electricity grid.

The technology of anaerobic digestion has been around for a while. Although the industry has been taking off in Europe—especially in Germany and Sweden—it has been slow to grow in America, where vast stretches of cheap land have long meant that there is plenty of landfill capacity and little incentive to build costly waste-recycling plants. But rising electricity prices, dwindling landfill space and some voluntary recycling goals are encouraging states to embrace the potential of biogas.

To help the industry along, Massachusetts has made millions of dollars in low-interest loans and grants available to build new anaerobic digesters. “We believe this will end up saving money,” says Ken Kimmell, the commissioner of the state’s department of environmental protection.

States are sensibly beginning to see rubbish as a resource, not merely a burden. Yet America creates 35m tonnes of food waste a year. It is good to divert this rubbish from landfills, but it would be better still to stop creating so much of the stuff in the first place. More

Download PDF

 

Beijing in $130bn global assets spree as it builds energy security

CHINESE state-owned oil and gas companies such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) have outlaid more than $130 billion since 2007 to snap up assets across the globe in their ongoing quest for energy security.

Some of their biggest buys include shale assets in western Canada and the US, oilfields in Egypt, Iraq and Africa, stakes in Australian liquefied natural gas joint ventures, and a share in some of the most challenging energy projects in the world: the Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea, the Yamal LNG project in northwest Siberia, and the "presalt" deepwater fields off the coast of Brazil.

Chinese companies accounted for 21 per cent of all oil and gas mergers and acquisitions in the first nine months of 2013, spending $US18.6bn ($20.8bn) out of a total $US90.8bn market, according to data released recently by US oil industry information and advisory firms PLS and Derrick Petroleum Services.

Cumulative figures by PLS/Derrick show that since 2007, CNPC and other state-owned entities such as China Petrochemical (Sinopec), China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Sinochem Group invested $US129bn in oil industry mergers and acquisitions.

Since those figures were released, CNPC has made further investments in Latin America and the Middle East. In November, it agreed to pay $US2.6bn for the Peruvian oil assets of Brazil's state-owned Petrobras, while in the same month its listed arm PetroChina said it would buy 25 per cent of Iraq's West Quran 1 gasfield from ExxonMobil. The deal price was not announced, but analysts estimate the stake could be worth more than $US1bn.

The previous month, PetroChina agreed to join CNOOC in a consortium led by Royal Dutch Shell and Total that won the right to join Petrobras in developing the Libra field, located in deep water off the Brazilian coast. The field, part of what is known as Brazil's "presalt" oil and gas reserves, potentially can produce up to one million barrels a day.

CNPC made the single biggest international buy of 2013, agreeing in September to spend $US5bn for ConocoPhillips' 8.4 per cent stake in the massive Kashagan project in Kazakhstan's part of the Caspian Sea.

Kashagan, regarded as one of the biggest oil and gas finds of the past 40 years, has so far proved an expensive undertaking for its international investors. After a five-year delay, it finally began producing in September, but a series of leaks from its main gas pipeline forced its shutdown. A decision on resuming production is expected this month.

Earlier last year, CNPC also committed to pay about $US4.2bn for a 20 per cent stake in Italian oil producer Eni's Mozambique offshore gas project known as Area 4, part of the wider Rovuma gasfield.

Last year, CNOOC made what remains the single biggest acquisition by a Chinese company, paying $US15.1bn for 100 per cent of Canadian company Nexen, which has extensive shale and oil sands assets in western Canada and interests in the Gulf of Mexico. The Nexen deal closed in February last year, after approvals by Canadian and US regulators.

Also in February, Sinopec agreed to pay $US1.02bn for half of Chesapeake Energy's Oklahoma shale field known as the Mississippi Lime, while a month earlier Sinochem said it would buy a 40 per cent stake in Pioneer Natural Resources' Wolfcamp shale field in Texas for $US1.7bn.

In August, Sinopec agreed to buy 33 per cent of US producer Apache's oil and gas assets in Egypt for $US3.1bn.

The $US130bn cumulative figure since 2007 does not include the value of oil purchase agreements and investments that CNPC struck during 2013 with Russian state-owned companies Gazprom and Rosneft, and with the privately owned Russian gas producer Novatek.

In June, Rosneft agreed to supply CNPC with oil worth up to $US270bn over a 25-year term from 2018. The deal includes a $US70bn prepayment to Rosneft. In October, the two companies agreed to work on a joint venture that would develop oil and gas reserves in eastern Siberia.

CNPC and Gazprom struck a deal in September covering gas supplies to China. The final terms have yet to be decided.

In June, CNPC agreed to join Novatek and France's Total in the Yamal LNG development in Siberia, committing to a 20 per cent stake. The value was not disclosed but is estimated to be $US800 million-plus. In October, CNPC followed up by signing a 15-year deal with Novatek to take 3 million tonnes a year of LNG. Yamal is expected to begin production at the end of 2016.

Novatek plans to ship the gas to China via the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the top of Russia in Arctic waters. The route, which is shorter than the conventional journey from Europe, is open for about six months a year, and requires special ice-proof tankers and icebreaker support.

China, the world's biggest energy consumer, imports about 10.5 million barrels of oil a day, or about 60 per cent of its crude oil requirement. While much of that comes from the Middle East, part of China's quest for a diversified energy supply involves bringing in more oil and gas via pipelines from Central Asia, Russia and Myanmar, and more LNG from Australia, Russia, Canada and the US. More

 

 

New Realities: Energy Security in the 2010s and Implications for the U.S. Military

Revolutionary changes among energy producers and dramatically altered patterns of energy consumption across the planet are having profound implications for American national security in general and the U.S. Army specifically.

Panel Discussion on the Military Implications of Energy Security

For example, the reduced saliency of Africa and the Middle East as energy sources for the United States and many of its key allies will alter Washington’s calculations of its vital interests, which will subsequently affect where and how the U.S. Army is wielded as a tool of national policy in the defense of those interests. Meanwhile, burgeoning fossil fuel demand in China, India, and elsewhere may both increase regional and global security competition over energy resources while simultaneously worsening human-induced global climate change and bringing increased risk of humanitarian crises, all of which may compel the United States to utilize military force in defense of vital as well as important interests overseas. For the U.S. Army during a period of contraction and reduced budgetary authority, these strategic factors will force it to give Soldiers and leaders the capability to manage energy status, resources, and performance; to significantly reduce its energy footprint; and to provide flexibility and resiliency by developing alternatives and adaptable capabilities. At the same time, whether in garrison or deployed, the “new realities” of the global energy market will compel the Army to strengthen the capacity to insulate itself from disruption of its energy supply chains, whether in electricity or fuels.

These were just some of the key conclusions reached during a conference on “New Realities: Energy Security in the 2010s and Implications for the U.S. Military,” organized by the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, and hosted by the Defense Education Forum, Reserve Officers Association (ROA). The conference was held on November 19-20, 2013, in Washington, DC, at the ROA’s Minuteman Memorial Building on Capitol Hill. Funding for this conference was provided by generous support from the U.S. Army War College Foundation. Participants included representatives from the U.S. military, government, private industry, Congress, and academia principally from the United States, with a number from European nations. A virtual audience component to the conference accompanied it via a live web feed, and during the event itself, live Tweets were broadcasted via @SSInow.

The academic engagement component of the event included presentations by professors and researchers from the Atlantic Council, Rice University’s Baker Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Case Western Reserve University, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Jacobs University (Bremen), the Eurasia Group, Hampshire College, Idaho National Laboratory, the Middle East Institute, the National Defense University, the National Science Foundation, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of St. Andrews, as well as audience participation by a number of U.S. Army War College Senior Fellows.

The New Realities conference was divided into three themes focusing on changes among global energy market suppliers, evolving forms of consumption, and what the implications of these trends represent for the U.S. military. The event was comprised of a total of seven panels with 22 presenters and two keynote lunch speakers—the Honorable Sharon Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Operational Energy Plans and Programs); and the Honorable Katherine Hammack, Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installations, Energy & Environment).

The first four panels focused on current trends in production and consumption and the impact of these trends on the strategic environment. The last three panels addressed the implications of the broad, strategic trends for the U.S. military generally and the Army specifically. Key takeaways included the following:

• The unconventional fossil fuels revolution sweeping across North America and spreading to other continents is the most fundamentally transformative event – in terms of society, economics, and ultimately politics – of the last several decades.
• Europe has two opposite fears about Russian energy behavior primarily focused on natural gas; the first is Russia will continue and intensify the pattern of energy supply manipulation for political purposes as seen in the previous decade; the second fear is that Russia will pursue incompetent policies at home that reduce its ability to supply gas to Europe.
• Criminal organizations and guerillas in Latin America are not viewed as the major challenge to the oil industry. Rather, the inability of governments to equitably distribute rents from the energy industry while simultaneously protecting the environment and public health will undermine confidence in those governments.
• Energy production is shifting from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere which will have geopolitical implications and will further strengthen U.S. energy security independence and national power. This is an outcome of advances in fracking, deep sea drilling, and other technologies.
• Renewable energies (RE) offer many potential advantages including reducing exposure to price vulnerability, creating greater interdependence for regions, prolonging the stability of hydrocarbon exporters, and reducing nations’ vulnerability to energy being used as a ‘weapon’ against them in international relations. However, for the immediate future Middle East oil will continue to control oil pricing as long as the world’s industrial infrastructure remains oil-based.
• The ubiquity of computer and information technology systems throughout the energy industry is growing, as computerization increasingly dominates energy industry processes from exploration through production and distribution. This increases the vulnerability of cyber technologies supporting U.S. Army missions.
• Increasing American energy independence and a projected decline in African energy production are likely to fundamentally alter U.S. interests in Africa. On the one hand, the United States is likely to have less at stake in Africa if it imports less in terms of energy resources from Africa. On the other hand though, reduced energy production may mean increased economic, social, and political instability across the continent, potentially resulting in humanitarian and other crises that may compel U.S. involvement.
• As a key strategic partner of India and as an emerging energy supplier with a number of proven bilateral mechanisms for energy cooperation already in place, the United States is well positioned to forge even closer civil and military ties to enhance mutual energy security.
• Much more energy is wasted due to inefficiencies in energy generation, transmission, and distribution than is normally imagined. Some Russian natural gas facilities can flare (burn off) up to a third of their gas during the generation process. A number of industrial processes and efficiency technologies offer great potential for energy resource conservation and storage, but this will require less developed energy producers to become more comfortable inviting in Western industry, capital, and technology.
• The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines seek to conduct energy-informed operations, which balance energy capabilities and employment to achieve the greatest net operational benefit. At the same time, the military must maintain balance in terms of the protection, resilience, and sustainability of its forces in the field.
• Ultimately an enterprise approach to energy security will be required for U.S. national and coalition defense needs. This will further the development of both strategic and operational energy concepts, plans and programs, and doctrines, which is vital given the increasing energy requirements of the technologically advanced forces being fielded over the coming decades.

Deliverables from the conference will consist of a compendium of the papers presented, a YouTube archive of the presentations, and a series of executive summaries for use by policymakers and other decisionmakers. More

 

 

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays

 

The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency

How will climate change affect the future of the planet? Scientists predict it will be nothing short of a nightmare.

I haven’t returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a set of perfectly serious scientists—not the majority of all climate scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers—who suggest that it isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic. Some of them even think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They fear that we may be at—and over—a climate change precipice hair-raisingly quickly.

Mind you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let’s spend a little time, as I’ve done, with what might be called scientists at the edge and hear just what they have to say.

“We’ve Never Been Here as a Species”

“We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of twenty-five years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of years. At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers.… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”

For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean. That would heat those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the earth’s atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in determining the weather of our planet.

McPherson, who maintains the blog Nature Bats Last, added, “We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”

While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our future, he’s far from the only scientist expressing such concerns. Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for forty years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears. “The fall-off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,” Wadhams told a reporter. According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018. (US Navy researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier—by 2016.)

British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests that if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return,” and “catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant planetary emergency.”

According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

The day after Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the amount of methane being emitted in the United States both from oil and agricultural operations could be 50 percent greater than previous estimates and 1.5 times higher than estimates of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists think it’s an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic Methane study, pointed out to me that “the Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet.” In that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95 percent of all species were wiped out.

Also known as “the Great Dying,” it was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years.

We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference being that ours is human-caused, isn’t going to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.

It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed possible—even in the course of just the next few decades.

The Sleeping Giant Stirs

According to a NASA research report, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”: “Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils. In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.”

NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic permafrost—and its stored carbon—may not be as permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle. He told NASA, “Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures—as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”

He fears the potential results should a full-scale permafrost melt take place. As he points out, “Changes in climate may trigger transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes, potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require adaptations by people and ecosystems.”

The recent NASA study highlights the discovery of active and growing methane vents up to 150 kilometers across. A scientist on a research ship in the area described this as a bubbling as far as the eye can see in which the seawater looks like a vast pool of seltzer. Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, in fact, scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents only thirty centimeters across had grown a kilometer wide, a 3,333 percent increase and an example of the non-linear rapidity with which parts of the planet are responding to climate disruption. More

 

 

Eurocopter in worldwide safety alert on 'Clutha crash' helicopter

Helicopter maker Eurocopter has issued a worldwide safety alert to operators of its EC 135 model - the type that crashed in Glasgow last month.

The EC 135 is used by many police forces and ambulance services in the UK

The firm said a problem with the low fuel level warning system had been discovered in a number of aircraft.

There is no suggestion it is linked to the Clutha bar crash in Glasgow on 29 November, in which 10 people died.

Air accident investigators have already said the Police Scotland aircraft did not run out of fuel.

Bond Air Services, which operated the police helicopter, grounded its fleet of 38 EC 135s last week.

The move came after an air ambulance, one of its 22 aircraft leased in the UK, was found to have a fuel indicator problem. Tests found others also had the same fault.

'Red warning'

A spokesman for Eurocopter said tests by Bond and two other EC 135 operators in Europe found possible similar supply-tank fuel gauging errors that overestimated the fuel on board.

"The first analysis shows that the indication of the fuel quantity in the supply tanks could be overestimated," the company said in a statement.

"All crews should be aware that in the worst case a red warning "Low Fuel" could appear without any amber FUEL Caution before."

Eurocopter said it was issuing a safety notice to remind all EC 135 operators to follow the safety procedures already in place and outlined in the flight manual, regardless of the aircraft's fuel quantity indication.

The company said it would "update its Safety Information Notice as needed" with investigations continuing.

Bond Aviation said in a statement on Monday that the results of the tests on the rest of its helicopters were validated by Eurocopter, and appropriate repairs were made before returning the aircraft to service.

The discovery of the fault in Bond's fleet came 12 days after one of its EC 135s leased to Police Scotland crashed into the Clutha pub in Glasgow killing three crew members and seven people inside the pub.

The helicopter was only minutes away from returning to its base when it dropped vertically onto the roof of the bar.

A preliminary report from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch found no major engine or gearbox problems with the police helicopter.

It also found that the aircraft had sufficient fuel when it crashed at 22:25 on 29 November. More

 

More than 100 organisations call on ministers from key developed countries to act on climate change 'loss and damage'

In total, 120 organisations from around the world, including the Cayman Institute the joined the call, which shows the depth of support for this issue, joint call to action on loss and damage.

We wanted to give you a quick update and let you know that:

• You can now see the full list of organisations who signed the call (attached).
• The call was presented to journalists yesterday afternoon during a joint press conference where we also highlighted the key countries who are blocking progress to achieving a loss and damage mechanism (US, Japan, Canada, Norway, EU, Australia).
• The press conference was fairly well attended and colleagues were able to do a number of interviews afterwards. We will share any media coverage as/when it becomes available.
• You can find a photo of the banner we presented at the press conference attached.
• We also personally handed over the call from 120 organisations to the six key delegations mentioned above.
• Please continue to help us drive interest in this issue – in particular, if your communications colleagues can continue to help us by posting the joint call on websites and engaging on social media. The banner photo has been retweeted a number of times already.
• Further updates will follow as the loss and damage issue unfolds over the course of the week.

Best wishes,

 

CARE/WWF/ActionAid

 

The Elders debate ethical leadership

The Elders debate ethical leadership (part 1)

"To be bold; to have the courage of your convictions; and to think long-term, not short-term or for political expedience; those are characteristics common to good leaders." Gro Harlem Brundtland

The Elders partner with Al Jazeera's South2North programme for a public debate on ethical leadership.

 

Our Perpetual Ocean

This is an animation of ocean surface currents from June 2005 to December 2007 from NASA satellites. Watch how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of miles at speeds greater than four miles per hour (six kilometers per hour); how coastal currents like the Agulhas in the Southern Hemisphere move equatorial waters toward Earth's poles; and how thousands of other ocean currents are confined to particular regions and form slow-moving, circular pools called eddies. Credit: NASA/SVS
› Download video
› Download still

The swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured in this scientific visualization created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"There is also a 20-minute long tour, which shows these global surface currents in more detail," says Horace Mitchell, the lead of the visualization studio. "We also released a three-minute version on our NASA Visualization Explorer iPad app."

Both the 20-minute and 3-minute versions are available in high definition here: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3827

The visualization covers the period June 2005 to December 2007 and is based on a synthesis of a numerical model with observational data, created by a NASA project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, or ECCO for short. ECCO is a joint project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. ECCO uses advanced mathematical tools to combine observations with the MIT numerical ocean model to obtain realistic descriptions of how ocean circulation evolves over time.

These model-data syntheses are among the largest computations of their kind ever undertaken. They are made possible by high-end computing resources provided by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

ECCO model-data syntheses are being used to quantify the ocean's role in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications.

In the particular model-data synthesis used for this visualization, only the larger, ocean basin-wide scales have been adjusted to fit observations. Smaller-scale ocean currents are free to evolve on their own according to the computer model's equations. Due to the limited resolution of this particular model, only the larger eddies are represented, and tend to look more 'perfect' than they are in real life. Despite these model limitations, the visualization offers a realistic study in both the order and the chaos of the circulating waters that populate Earth's ocean.

Data used by the ECCO project include: sea surface height from NASA's Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite altimeters; gravity from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission; surface wind stress from NASA's QuikScat mission; sea surface temperature from the NASA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS; sea ice concentration and velocity data from passive microwave radiometers; and temperature and salinity profiles from shipborne casts, moorings and the international Argo ocean observation system. More

 

Experts say nuclear power needed to slow warming

Some of the world's top climate scientists say wind and solar energy won't be enough to head off extreme global warming, and they're asking environmentalists to support the development of safer nuclear power as one way to cut fossil fuel pollution.

Traveling Wave Reactor

Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change.

Environmentalists agree that global warming is a threat to ecosystems and humans, but many oppose nuclear power and believe that new forms of renewable energy will be able to power the world within the next few decades.

That isn't realistic, the letter said.

"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, and "with the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology" that has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases.

The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Hansen began publishing research on the threat of global warming more than 30 years ago, and his testimony before Congress in 1988 helped launch a mainstream discussion. Last February he was arrested in front of the White House at a climate protest that included the head of the Sierra Club and other activists. Caldeira was a contributor to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Emanuel is known for his research on possible links between climate change and hurricanes, and Wigley has also been doing climate research for more than 30 years.

Emanuel said the signers aren't opposed to renewable energy sources but want environmentalists to understand that "realistically, they cannot on their own solve the world's energy problems."

The vast majority of climate scientists say they're now virtually certain that pollution from fossil fuels has increased global temperatures over the last 60 years. They say emissions need to be sharply reduced to prevent more extreme damage in the future.

In 2011 worldwide carbon dioxide emissions jumped 3 percent, because of a large increase by China, the No. 1 carbon polluting country. The U.S. is No. 2 in carbon emissions.

Hansen, who's now at Columbia University, said it's not enough for environmentalists to simply oppose fossil fuels and promote renewable energy.

"They're cheating themselves if they keep believing this fiction that all we need" is renewable energy such as wind and solar, Hansen told the AP.

The joint letter says, "The time has come for those who take the threat of global warming seriously to embrace the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems" as part of efforts to build a new global energy supply.

Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor who studies energy issues, said nuclear power is "very divisive" within the environmental movement. But he added that the letter could help educate the public about the difficult choices that climate change presents.

One major environmental advocacy organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, warned that "nuclear power is no panacea for our climate woes."

Risk of catastrophe is only one drawback of nuclear power, NRDC President Frances Beinecke said in a statement. Waste storage and security of nuclear material are also important issues, he said.

"The better path is to clean up our power plants and invest in efficiency and renewable energy."

The scientists acknowledge that there are risks to using nuclear power, but say those are far smaller than the risk posed by extreme climate change.

"We understand that today's nuclear plants are far from perfect." More

 

 

Amira Willighagen on Holland's Got Tallent

I watched this video for the first time a few moments ago and I was so overwhelmed by the talent this your lady has that there were tears streaming down my face. Her voice is amazing, just so incredibly talented.

You may well question why this video is on a climate chenge blog. However, I think to myself of all the wonderful talented young people that I have met in just the last year in training courses and workshops that I have attended, or the young lady of twelve that I watched last night giving a speech on political representation for young people in her hometown. She was an incredible speaker,

And I, like James Hansen, former director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies and author of Storms of my Grandchildren, who retired rather than be censored, have children and dammit, I want this world preserved for them. If the corporations cannot conduct business ethically and with Corporate Social Responsability, then they shall go down in history as murderers, and they shall go down.

And then I realize that we are destroying their world. Through burning fossil fuel, polluting the atmosphere and destroying the environment.

Let us all work to preserve this planet in an almost pristine state for these youngsters, who I would say are a lot smarter and talented than we are, They are the future so let us give them a chance.