California and the Brown administration are fighting the anti-science demagoguery coming out of the White House, and now there is deep concern that it is also trying to cover up a federal climate change report. This draft federal report can be found online.
This draft report was obtained by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January and recently published on the New York Times site. Its authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.
The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.
The impacts in California alone are considerable, as the report outlines. Atmospheric rivers that bring extreme precipitation to the West Coast, like the ones last winter that ended California’s drought, are projected to increase in frequency, but will fall more as rain than snow, the report says. That would disrupt California’s highly engineered plumbing system, which relies on the Sierra snowpack to store water for the dry summers. Forest fires have already increased sharply in the West, the report says, and will increase more as the region continues to dry, bringing major ecosystem changes.
A Los Angeles Times editorial raises the issues about climate change risks, which has apparently been leaked by scientists working at the federal level. Their message: anthropogenic climate change is real and happening fast.The changes are already real and the future risks potentially catastrophic. The whole world knows it, and the vast majority of the world is trying to address it. That Trump is not, and that government scientists feel the need to join “deep state” actors in leaking their findings in fear of what the president might do against the nation’s best interests, is damning.
The White House is now reviewing this new report that finds a strong link between climate change and human activity. Scientists are reportedly worried that Trump will suppress this new federal climate report.
Update 8/20/17: Response ~ The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.
Update 10/3/17: The significant scale of human impact on our planet has changed the course of Earth history per a report from the University of Leicester
Update 10/4/17: Sir David Attenborough - Humans are a 'plague on Earth'
Update 12/23/17: Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065 (November 2000)
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