Climate change report now in hands of Trump administration

WASHINGTON: As President Donald Trump along with much of the rest of Washington takes time off (whether or not the president wants to call it a vacation), a mid-August deadline is quickly approaching for the release of a far-reaching climate change report undertaken by 13 federal agencies.

The conclusions of the assessment, as first reported by The New York Times, are unsurprisingly not in line with the views of Trump and many of his Cabinet officials. The Washington Post obtained a draft of the assessment, called the Climate Science Special Report, as well.

Here’s what you need to know about this major study:

- Its findings on the consequences of climate change are dire, and humans are to blame. Among the top-line conclusions of the report are the determination that it is “extremely likely” that more than half of the rise in temperatures over the past four decades has been caused by human activity. The receding Arctic ice and an increase in the acidification of the oceans is “unparalleled in at least the past 66 million years.” Even if society immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases, the world temperature is still predicted to rise an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit by about 2100. Recent record-setting years of temperature highs will become “relatively common.”

- The conclusions may be shocking, but they are not surprising. Like the assessment reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the federal government’s Climate Science Special Report is a “study of studies” - that is, it is a congressionally mandated overview of developments in climate science over the past four years.

Or as Gizmodo science editor Maddie Stone put it via Twitter: “Reading the leaked nat’l climate assessment. no big surprises, but lots of chilling observations about warming targets we’re likely to pass.”

Scientists said they feared the report would be suppressed, but drafts of it are already public. Unnamed scientists told The Times that “they fear the Trump administration could change or suppress the report.” Indeed, final publication requires the signoff of Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who has said that he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

The Trump administration must decide by Aug 18 whether to release the report. But there was already lots of chatter and reaction to the drafts, which were public as it was being formulated:

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech and one of the lead authors of the report: “Important to point out that this report was already accessible to anyone who cared to read it during public review & comment time. Few did,” she posted on Twitter.

Bob Kopp, another climate scientist at Rutgers: “It’s not clear what the news is in this story; posted draft is public review draft from Dec, and WH review hasn’t yet missed Aug 18 deadline.” — WP-Bloomberg