Kooky Kent Clizbe: Free-Lance Character Assassin

"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.

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.

...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."--- (NYT, 1-4-10)

Malignant denialism is rapidly descending into farce. DeSmogblog.com (1-11-11) reports that the self-promoting numbskull Kent Clizbe, a blogger who claims he used to work for the CIA, is trying to bribe college professors into providing damaging information about the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.

Clizbe's boasts about his alleged CIA background to give himself credibility, but people who have followed the issue of global warming know that the CIA has said for many years that climate change and global warming are happening. The CIA and the Russian intelligence have even studied global warming together.

More information about the CIA's environmental task force (MEDEA) and Russian-American scientific collaboration is available at the Agency's site because the former Director of the CIA, John Deutch, even gave a speech about MEDEA in 1996. [See DCI Speech at the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, California "The Environment on the Intelligence Agenda" (July 25, 1996).]

MEDEA, stands for "Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis." The Agency provides satellite imagery to scientists so they can study environmental issues such as climate change and global warming.

Associated Content (10-17-06) reports:

[According to CIA chief John Deutch,] Imagery from the earliest intelligence satellites - which were launched long before commercial systems - can show scientists how desert boundaries, vegetation and polar ice have changed over time. These historical images, which have now been declassified, provide valuable indicators of regional and global climate change," Deutch stated in his address.

Later in the speech, Deutch even elaborated the point when mentioning MEDEA's cooperation with Russian intelligence on Artic Ocean environmental data: "This information is critical to our understanding of oceanographic and atmospheric processes, which are, in turn, critical to our ability to predict global climate change."

Today, The Vancouver Sun (1-13-11) has published an article titled "Why the CIA is spying on a changing climate."