Which is the bigger story-- a report by scientists from 13 federal agencies that the average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years or that scientists fear Trump will suppress the report?The report itself, which concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now, is devastating to the arguments of Climate Change Deniers who dominate the Republican Party and the Trump Regime. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds," the scientists assert, "from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans."
The 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.One government scientist who worked on the report, Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, called the conclusions among “the most comprehensive climate science reports” to be published. Another scientist involved in the process, who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today. The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius.A small difference in global temperatures can make a big difference in the climate: The difference between a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and one of 2 degrees Celsius, for example, could mean longer heat waves, more intense rainstorms and the faster disintegration of coral reefs.Among the more significant of the study’s findings is that it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change. The field known as “attribution science” has advanced rapidly in response to increasing risks from climate change.
So will Scott Pruitt's EPA in particular and the Trump Regime in general change or suppress the report? UN Ambassador Nikki Haley insists the Regime will "accept" the report's findings. "Just because we pulled out of the Paris accord doesn't mean we don't believe in climate protection," she said. "I think we're very aware that we need to do that. What we're saying is we're not going to sell out American businesses to do that." Margaret Hartmann, writing for New York Magazine, wasn't quite so optimistic-- and for good reason.
For those who believe the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is real, President Trump has already made many nightmares a reality. In his first six months, Trump picked a climate-change denier to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, rolled back around two dozen environmental regulations, and announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.So far “climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese” isn’t the official policy of the U.S. government, but many worry that in addition to implementing policies that undo America’s progress on global warming, the Trump administration will take steps to prevent others from accessing facts about the problem. During the transition, the Trump team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy that aimed to root out “climate empiricists” (they later distanced themselves from the document). Then, during Trump’s first 100 days in office, the new administration gradually excised mentioned of climate change from government websites.On Monday, The Guardian published emails between staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show that they were told to use terms like “weather extremes” in their work in place of “climate change.” Think Progress notes that previous administrations have used less politicized terms to open up a dialogue with farmers, but the emails attribute the change to a “shift in perspective within the executive branch.”...“The current situation will provide an acid test of whether the Trump administration is open to hearing the scientific truth about climate change or is so much in the thrall of fossil fuel interests that they are fixated on hiding the reality from the public,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.Earlier this week, the State Department offered a glimmer of hope regarding the administration’s environmental policy when it said the U.S. will participate in upcoming international climate-change negotiations, and remains open to “re-engaging” in the Paris accord. There’s nothing to prevent Trump from renegotiating the country’s carbon-emissions targets and remaining in the agreement, or from releasing the Climate Science Special Report-- but it’s hard to see why he would. In recent days, he’s seemed particularly interested in showing his base he’s up for a challenge, and this presents yet another opportunity to attack the “failing” New York Times.
