A Major New U.S. Report Affirms: Climate Change Is Getting Worse

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 4, 2017 at 11:01:49 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Major New U.S. Report Affirms: Climate Change Is Getting Worse
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> A Major New U.S. Report Affirms: Climate Change Is Getting Worse
> The National Climate Assessment arrives as President Trump is dismantling the most sweeping U.S. climate policy.
> By ROBINSON MEYER
> Nov 3 2017
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/a-major-new-us-report-affirms-climate-change-is-getting-worse/544952/>
>
> Climate change is real. It’s caused by greenhouse-gas pollution released by human industrial activity. Its 
> consequences can already be felt across every region and coastline of the United States—and, unless we stop emitting 
> greenhouse gases soon, those consequences will almost certainly get worse.
>
>
> Those are the headline findings of the Climate Science Special Report, a sweeping and more than 800-page examination 
> of the evidence. The report was published Friday by four agencies of the U.S. government and academics from across 
> the country.
>
> Their conclusions form the first volume of the new National Climate Assessment, a report on the science and impacts 
> of global warming that Congress requires agencies to complete every four years. A draft version of the second volume, 
> on the human impacts of climate change, was also released Friday.
>
> “This is the most comprehensive assessment of climate science currently available in the world, and it reaffirms what 
> we’ve already known,” said Robert Kopp, one of the lead authors of the report and a professor of climate science at 
> Rutgers University. “If we want to do something like stay under 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the window to do that 
> is closing in the next couple decades.”
>
> The two-degree limit is a rough target used by the United Nations to signal the point where dangerous climate change 
> could begin. The report finds that the world can only continue to emit carbon for roughly another 23 years at current 
> levels before it will have a more than two-thirds chance of going over the limit.
>
> The Climate Science Special Report comes at an auspicious time in the history of global warming and the United 
> States. The report’s conclusions do not deviate wildly from the last 20 years of consensus in climate science. They 
> do not shock anyone who follows the field. And they don’t break new ground: The authors have synthesized the best 
> available papers; they have not conducted new research for this report.  
>
> But simply by affirming the science of climate change, the authors—and the interagency bureaucrats who shepherded the 
> writing of the document—provide a contrast to the actions and statements of political figures in the Trump 
> administration. Scott Pruitt, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, has cast doubt on the idea, 
> fundamental to climate science, that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere significantly controls Earth’s 
> climate.
>
> President Trump and Pruitt have dismantled the aggressive policies advanced by President Barack Obama meant to reduce 
> U.S. carbon pollution. In October, Pruitt repealed the Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced greenhouse-gas 
> emissions from the power sector. In June, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement—and, with it, 
> pulled back from Obama’s decision to apply the full force of the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus to reducing carbon 
> pollution worldwide.
>
> The assessment is a scientific achievement by itself. The last major synthesis of climate science, as a field, was 
> published in 2013 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Much has changed over those four years, 
> including significant updates to how the field understands the interaction between global warming and hurricane 
> strength.
>
> It is also the end result of a colossal amount of work. The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Global-Change 
> Research Program both convened expert panels to comb through the report line by line and subject it to meticulous 
> comment and approval. During the writing process, scientists from four federal agencies—including NASA, the National 
> Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency—contributed 
> significant writing and expertise. They were joined by researchers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and 11 
> academic institutions, including Columbia University, Texas Tech University, and the Naval Postgraduate School. It is 
> not an overstatement to say that a vast swath of the profession of American climate science played a hand in this 
> report.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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