Things must be getting desperate these days for the well-oiled dirty energy crowd.  After it’s failed campaign to vilify the world’s top climate scientists over a few stolen emails (see our superb video on the truth about that), the global warming deniers had to eat crow when President Obama pulled a rabbit out of his hat in Copenhagen and got the world’s top carbon emitters to agree to a serious effort to reduce CO2 pollution.  

Down but not out, Big Oil and its cronies now have latched onto the bungled Christmas airplane bombing attempt as evidence that the intelligence community is spending way too much time “spying on icebergs instead of terrorists.”  That’s according to a press release put out last week by the Exxon-funded National Center for Public Policy Research.  NCPPR has the temerity to slam the Obama administration for “tasking some of our nation’s most elite intelligence-gathering agencies to divert their resources to environmental scientists researching global warming.” 

Of course, the “fair and (un)balanced” folks at Fox News are echoing the criticism of the fossil fuel-funded corporate front groups, which prefer to ignore the security threat posed by global warming. Fox & Friends last week trotted out Deneen Borelli, with NCPPR’s National Black Leadership Network and who is married to NCPPR’s Tom Borelli (both former Philip Morris execs).  Deneen immediately trashed the  Central Intelligence Agency’s climate change investigation, calling it “totally outrageous” and “ridiculous.”

Some people are really worked up over the fact that the CIA has opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security. But wait a minute here. If the CIA’s so crazy, then the Department of Defense must be completely off its rocker, something that Media Matters astutely reported in a very insightful blog about how seriously our military forces take global warming. Indeed, the DoD has identified climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’, as does the State Department.

Not to be left out, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are all worried about dramatic upheavals around the world as climate change dries up rivers, melts glaciers and forces huge population displacements around the planet. Increasing numbers of disaffected, desperate people surely will beef up the legions of Al Qaeda recruits.  Even the National Intelligence Council believes that “global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years“.

This all adds up to the fact that “security hawks” know full well that failing to assess and address the consequences of global climate change would be an inexcusable abdication of the government’s responsibility to safeguard America’s national security. 

But of course this is absurdly illogical to the Obama bashers at Fox News who seem to be at odds with their fearless leader. You see, back in 2007 Rupert Murdoch gathered his employees at a global news conference to explain that climate change presents “clear, catastrophic threats,” vowing that he would make his worldwide media empire carbon neutral by 2010.

Well, here we are, and Mr. Murdoch’s empire hasn’t quite gotten the message (check out this video). As this story in Rolling Stone points out, Mr. Murdoch’s media empire is at the head of the pack of climate change deniers, boosting the likes of global warming bashers Sean Hannity who spew venom at anyone proposing to tackle the greatest threat to humanity.

As for me, I say to the CIA, go forth and use those spy satellites to check out the rapidly declining glaciers and layers of thinning ice at the earth’s poles. Deploy your spooks and spend our country’s secret treasure to help figure out how we can stop the earth’s temperature from continuing its inexorable record rise.  

Here’s hoping the CIA can help stop us from turning the planet into Dante’s inferno.  Even if Fox and its friends would just as soon fiddle while the world burns.