WASHINGTON — Global warming is likely to have a series of destabilizing effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to an assessment released Wednesday by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The report warned that rising temperatures could weaken already fragile regimes around the world and create a new set of national-security challenges for the U.S. over the next two decades.
“Climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure” during that time frame, said Thomas Fingar, the deputy director for National Intelligence, in remarks prepared for a joint congressional hearing. “But the impacts will worsen existing problems — such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions.”
The report represents the U.S. intelligence community’s most comprehensive assessment to date of the long-term security consequences of global warming.
The document was praised by Democrats and environmentalists as a formal acknowledgment by a key part of the government that the threat of rising temperatures is real. But the report was also criticized, particularly by skeptics of global warming and opponents of using U.S. intelligence resources to track something as amorphous as the environment.
“I think it was a pathetic use of intelligence resources,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
The study relied on climate calculations and projections made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
