Sergei Karaganov: "The World Around Russia: 2017"

Permafrost Institute of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Rusia

Kent Clizbe, a clueless goofball who boasts on the Internet that he is an ex-CIA caseworker, is emailing college professors and promising a multi-million-dollar bounty to professors who denounce the Nobel-winning climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for scientific fraud. So far, ex-CIA caseworker Kent Clizbe has not managed to recruit a single scholar. Perhaps the college professors mistakenly believed that Clizbe's risible email originated in Nigeria.

Kooky Kent's promoters at a blog called The Canada Free Press evidently imagine that they can damage Dr. Mann's reputation by making gullible people think that since an ex-CIA agent is hot on the trail of Dr. Mann, that global warming must be a hoax.

In fact, as I have noted in previous posts, the CIA has been researching global warming for many years. America's reputable scientific organizations, the CIA, the Pentagon, and even the Vatican are concerned about how to meet the challenges of global warming. Luckily, we have great climate scientists like Dr. Michael Mann to help us understand climate change; we don't have to depend on the likes of Kooky Kent Clizbe.

Sometimes, the CIA and the Russian State Security (FSB) have even collaborated in research on global warming, according to the former DCI John Deutch.

According to Dr. Deutch (1996):

[T]he Intelligence Community has unique assets, including satellites, sensors, and remote sensing expertise that can contribute a wealth of information on the environment to the scientific community. We also have mechanisms in place to share that information with outside experts.

Kooky Kent Clizbe may have access to a butterfly net and the blogosphere, but he is not a climate scientist with a security clearance who has access to data collected by satellites, sensors, and remote sensing expertise.

In 2007, the Russian scholar Sergei Karaganov edited a collection of articles that addressed the issue of climate change in Russia. The study was prepared at the request of the Russian State Security (FSB).

Russia expert Paul Goble, who has worked for the CIA and other government agencies, has posted an interesting article about Karaganov's study. Goble's article, which is titled "Global Warming Threatens Russian Oil Exports, FSB Study Warns" (6-20-07), reports:

A new study, prepared at the request of the Russian security agencies, concludes that global warming is likely to make it impossible for Moscow to continue to export oil and gas at current rates and thus over the next decade or more will undermine the foundations of Russia’s economic recovery and international standing.

Entitled “The World Around Russia: 2017” and edited by Sergei Karaganov, one of Moscow’s most influential political commentators, this study includes articles by scholars from the Academy of Sciences as well as other experts on climate change, economics, and other issues (http://news.mail.ru/society/1330715/).

Its conclusions are stark: Russia, the newly published book argues, faces a variety of threats from global warming, ranging from the possible influx of immigrants from countries becoming too hot to the loss of access to its oil and gas fields as a result of the melting of the permafrost in many petroleum-rich regions of the Russian north.

And its authors suggest, neither Moscow nor the international community has the ability to prevent this from happening over the next generation or more, even if one or both were to take all the steps that Russian and Western environmental experts now advocate. [See the full text.]