Climate change intelligence, continued

Kent's Imperative has a new post up, continuing the discussion on climate intelligence. This specific discussion started with Michael Tanji's post, leading to my response. Then Kent's Imperative (KI) jumped in, I responded, raised the issue again recently, and KI responded most recently. I think that with KI's latest post, we find common ground.

Essentially, KI argues that, with limited resources, priority goes to intelligence supporting the warfighter. It's hard to disagree with that. KI also mentions Google's 20% rule, where Google employees theoretically get 20% of their paid time to focus on their own projects. In the intelligence business, this could translate to the strategic intelligence that customers don't know they need/want yet, and therefore won't ask for. The problem with that, I suppose, is that you have no guarantee that anybody will read your '20% time' reports - then again, you can only lead a horse to water, you can't force it to drink.

I'm going to make at least one more climate intelligence post relatively soon, once I get around to reading this paper on the correlation between climate change and conflict frequency in China.