Maverick's World

Op MEDEA or why I watch documentaries!

I watched a very nice documentary last night. And it took my breath away.

For a long time now I have been looking at the scientific side of the Global Climate Change awareness campaign and I have wondered how so many senior people were stating things as facts. I was always astounded by the scale of the data the awareness campaign was bringing out into the public domain.

I was not alone in this, many other physicists had similar reservations about the awareness material. Most of us would say things like "it is an interesting model" or "would be nice to see the raw data" or "I wonder what couplings were used to model so and so effects".

A few examples of this

1. An awareness campaign was launched to show how the arctic ice cap has changed over the last century. When I saw this I was stunned. I kept asking myself - "Wow!! how long have they been collecting this data?"
2. There was a set of discussions about deep ocean currents which depend sensitively on temperature profiles inside the ocean. I saw those discussions and asked myself - "Gee, it is would be horribly expensive to take those measurements, Has NOAA or some planetary science lab been measuring that stuff for decades now?"
3.  There was a YouTube video last year which spoke about patterns of high altitude jet streams and how those were changing. Specifically how a southern hemisphere jet stream was crossing the equator - which it was claimed was happening for the first time ever. And again I found myself asking - "how on earth do you know it has never happened before?"

Turns out "they" knew and "they" told the scientists.

Specifically - in the late 80s the CIA opened up its massive vault of MASINT and SATINT to 70 odd high ranking scientists.  The effort were pushed by then Sen. Al Gore who felt that these measurement held the key to finding signatures of global climate change.

As the CIA had been repeatedly photographing the polar icecap, the Navy had been measuring the thermocline, deep ocean currents, and it had hydrophones to detect sounds in the ocean, the Air Force had data on high altitude winds, the seismology people had geophones to catch nuclear tests and so on... they were able to put a database of unimaginable size before scientists who had never had access to such information.

The result was the first ever model of Global Climate Change. It appears that the scientists were able to create a way of capturing icecap melting, precipitation shifts in extreme weather events etc... This was way back in the early 90s.

When Al Gore became VP,  the scientists asked if he could open a door to the Russian IC and see if they were willing to be a part of this program to understand global climate change. Then DCIA Robert Gates supported the venture. The result was a one of a kind intelligence collaboration between the DST CIA and the GRU's physical intelligence branch.

Russian and American scientists worked together and an incredibly coherent picture of climate change effects was built. The model predicted among other things - a steady rise in flooding due to high water content cyclonic events, droughts and ensuing migrations in Africa, shifts in the weather patterns and "freak" events.

The exact model was far from settled but there was a lot of constructive debate and nations worked together. The data was secret but the analysis was public. Most ICs (like India) knew what was going on and the analysis was a major influence on national policymaking.

When Bush Jr came into power, the toxic masculinity of the GOP took over - it was all about "drill baby drill", a brutal decade of pointless wars followed. Putin seized power in Moscow and he was also in the pocket of RUs vast ONG lobby, so MEDEA was shut down.

After Obama came to power, he reinstated that effort and asked it to deliver a list of specific national security risks from Global Climate Change. This created a fountainhead of information - a kind of a socket that the national security policy machinery is permanently plugged into. As the Nat-Sec paper mill cranks out position papers (that vital commodity on which all real decisions are made), it uses information from this MEDEA inspired factual database.

In 2015 the group disbanded as its work was done.

The movie has taught me two things

1) Always trust my instincts - if something looks odd or unsupported - something is actually amiss and

2) There is a LOT MORE HARD DATA supporting climate change than even I had believed. Also the data has been COLLECTED BY COMPLETELY NEUTRAL and UNCONNECTED IC OBSERVERS in at least TWO SEPARATE COUNTRIES over SEVERAL DECADES before Climate Change became a fashionable media topic.  

That latter part is HUGE. WAY WAY BIGGER than what Trump thinks is the size of his "Hands".*

If you can - watch the documentary - it is worth the time.

* Given how intimately the Nat Sec paper mill and the MEDEA data sockets are connected, I suspect Trump and the GOP will not be able to use the position paper mechanism at all. This will gravely impair their ability to make sound national security policies (but that is a discussion for another post).

posted by maverick @ 5:40 AM