“If you don’t know who’s in charge, then the answer is probably nobody’s in charge.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Navy quietly stood down Task Force Climate Change, the decade-long mission to understand and plan for rapid environmental changes around the globe.

But that task force also played a large role in forming the Navy’s Arctic outlook, and it’s unclear now who in the Navy is now responsible for monitoring the rapidly changing Arctic.

Last week, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked former secretary of defense Gen. James Mattis about the end of the task force. He declined to comment on the group specifically, citing a lack of details, but he did warn against ignoring climate change — especially changing conditions in the Arctic.

“We are dealing with open waters that used to be ice fields,” he said, and he called climate change a national security issue. “Why wouldn’t we take out an insurance policy and do prudent steps to make certain the generation that’s coming up is not going to be caught flat-footed by this?” Read more at ArcticToday.