Gabbard Removes 'Climate Change' From Intelligence Community's Annual Threat Assessment

At the recent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence open hearing, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) expressed his very bored-looking “surprise” at the fact that the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment report did not include “global climate change” among the major threats analyzed. In response, Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence, said this report was focused “very directly on the threats we deem most critical to the United States and our national security.”

Gabbard expressed that while the intelligence community is aware of environmental factors and how they may impact operations, her team did not include “global climate change” in the immediate threats report.

King claims to be worried about “mass migration, famine, dislocation, [and] political violence,” which he claims are all exacerbated by global climate change. Moreover, King asserts that we can simply “solve” climate change.

All of these claims sound plausible on the surface; natural disasters can increase unrest, if a region becomes uninhabitable or inarable, people may move to escape those hostile conditions. For decades, we have been warned that climate change will increase so-called “threat multipliers.” The good news is, it is not happening, has not happened, and is unlikely to happen. If the modest warming over the past century—as we recover from the actually deadly Little Ice Age—is doing anything at all, data seem to indicate that it is reducing threat multipliers, not increasing them.

On the topic of famine, for example, King and other climate alarmists have cried for years that warming will make crop failures more common and widespread. In fact, global crop yields set records nearly every year due to the combined effects of improved technologies, planting methods, the use of fossil fuel derived fertilizers and diesel farm equipment, and the slight increase in precipitation in major breadbasket regions and carbon dioxide fertilization.

Don't Panic—Antarctica Isn't Melting

With regards to natural disasters, these are not increasing, though it may feel like they are due to the media’s hyper-focus on them. Hurricanes are not more frequent or severe; neither are wildfires or floods. The number of climate or weather-related deaths has decreased massively over the past century, by more than 99 percent, because of improvements to infrastructure, medical technology, and overall wealth.

A natural disaster disrupting supply lines or communications may be a threat that should be planned for, but it is not an immediate national security threat that should be addressed in these annual reports. Nor is a hurricane evidence of climate change.

Most Republicans are scared to death of saying anything that comes off stronger than watered-down gruel when it comes to the climate issue. It is actually much better that Gabbard dismissed the argument altogether, and implied that it does not represent a critical threat to the United States. She is correct on the evidence here, and others in government should take note.

Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org, X: @LinneaLueken) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.

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