Stopping the next ISIS; flawed crime reporting system; record year for gun deaths, and more

FBI moves to fix critical flaw in its crime reporting system (Mark Greenblatt, Mark Fahey, Bernice Yeung and Emily Harris, Reveal)
In response to a Newsy, Reveal and ProPublica investigation, the bureau is expected to change reporting rules and require police to disclose cases.

The grim future of urban warfare (Darran Anderson, The Atlantic)
New technologies are making war even more horrific.

Guns killed more people than car crashes in 2017 (German Lopez, Vox)
Suicides drove an increase in gun deaths from 2016 to 2017.

Global warming is setting fire to American leadership (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
One of the side effects of climate change will be the end of U.S. hegemony.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said, “I don’t believe” climate change is real. Guess what? The global environment doesn’t care. The condition of the planet will be determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, not by Trump’s tweets, denials, bluster, or relentlessly head-in-the-sand approach to a rapidly warming planet. Trump will no longer be with us by the time the worst effects are realized, of course; it is future generations who will suffer the consequences.
And make no mistake: Those consequences are going to significant. As reported over Thanksgiving weekend, the latest U.S. government “National Climate Assessment” report makes it abundantly clear that rising average temperatures are going to have far-reaching and damaging effects. The report was a collaborative effort by 13 federal agencies, and it offers a sobering portrait of our likely future. Storms will be more intense and dangerous. Agricultural productivity will decline. Certain diseases and pests will be more numerous and bothersome, and heat-related deaths will increase significantly. Trump may not believe it, but what he does or does not believe is irrelevant, except as it affects what we do (or don’t do) today and thus how serious the problem is down the road.
The direct consequences of climate change will be harmful enough—even if we respond to them more energetically than we have to date—but I believe it will also have profound effects on U.S. foreign policy. Some of the consequences have already been catalogued—including in a landmark U.S. Defense Department study in 2015—but the long-term impact could be even more far-reaching. To be deliberately provocative: Climate change could do more to limit America’s global ambitions than all the books, articles, op-eds, and other advocacy undertaken by apostles of restraint.
Why? Because adapting to a warmer planet is going to be really expensive.
….
My point, in short, is that the costs of adapting to climate change are going to put enormous pressure on an already squeezed federal budget, and at a time when the U.S. population is getting older, health care costs are rising, and tax cuts have become the norm. My question, therefore, is simple: Where’s the money going to come from?
If this scenario is even partially true, then maintaining a defense budget and a national security establishment that dwarfs those of all other states is going to be increasingly difficult if not politically impossible. Persuading the American people to fund wars of choice, to protect distant allies of questionable strategic value, or even to wage far-flung counterterrorism operations is going to be a hard sell. The foreign-policy “Blob” may continue to resist a strategy of restraint, but fiscal realities may gradually impose one on it anyway.
The good news, such as it is, is that climate change will affect a lot of other countries even more than it affects the United States, and many of them are even less prepared to deal with the consequences. So America’s relative position may not be affected all that much. But that “good news” isn’t really positive, because climate change is also likely to exacerbate civil and regional conflicts and is virtually certain to trigger complex humanitarian crises, refugee flows, and other forms of global disorder.
In other words, the global agenda is going to get messier, even as the resources available for addressing that agenda grow sparser. And this dilemma will only get worse the longer the United States defers action, the more fossil fuels (especially coal) that mankind burns, and the more rapid and extensive the changes become. Like the president, I’ll be safely dead and buried by the time all this hits the fan, and I hope future generations forgive us as they wrestle with the consequences. But they’ll have every reason not to.

As climate change bites in America’s Midwest, farmers are desperate to ring the alarm (Chris McGreal, Guardian)
‘The changes have become more radical’: farmers are spending more time and money trying to grow crops in new climates