[WSMDiscuss] US gov't issues grave climate warning; Trump administrations tries to bury it amidst consumer blow-out

[Brian K Murphy]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-black-friday/576589/ <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-black-friday/576589/>
> A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday
> 
> In a massive new report, federal scientists contradict President Trump and assert that climate change is an intensifying danger to the United States. Too bad it came out on a holiday.
> 
> Robinson Meyer <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/robinson-meyer/> is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers climate change and technology.
> The Atlantic, Nov 23, 2018
> On Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, the federal government published a massive and dire new report on climate change. The report warns, repeatedly and directly, that climate change could soon imperil the American way of life, transforming every region of the country, imposing frustrating costs on the economy, and harming the health of virtually every citizen.
> 
> Most significantly, the National Climate Assessment <https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/>—which is endorsed by NASA, NOAA, the Department of Defense, and 10 other federal scientific agencies—contradicts nearly every position taken on the issue by President Donald Trump. Where the president has insisted that fighting global warming will harm the economy, the report responds: Climate change, if left unchecked, could eventually cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and kill thousands of Americans <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/high-temperatures-cause-suicide-rates-to-increase/565826/> to boot. Where the president has said that the climate will “probably” “change back,” <https://www.axios.com/reality-check-trump-climate-change-comments-6a07878d-2385-4f07-af5b-cbe408cd737d.html> the report replies: Many consequences of climate change will last for millennia, and some (such as the extinction of plant and animal species) will be permanent.
> 
> The report is a huge achievement for American science. It represents cumulative decades of work from more than 300 authors. Since 2015, scientists from across the U.S. government, state universities, and businesses have read thousands of studies, summarizing and collating them into this document. By law, a National Climate Assessment like this must be published every four years.
> 
> It may seem like a funny report to dump on the public on Black Friday, when most Americans care more about recovering from Thanksgiving dinner than they do about adapting to the grave conclusions of climate science. Indeed, who ordered the report to come out today? 
> 
> It’s a good question with no obvious answer.
> 
> The report is blunt: Climate change is happening now, and humans are causing it. “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities,” declares its first sentence. “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”
> 
> At this point, such an idea might be common wisdom—but this does not make it any less shocking, or less correct. For centuries, humans have lived near the ocean, assuming that the sea will not often move from its fixed location. They have planted wheat at its time, and corn at its time, assuming that the harvest will not often falter. They have delighted in December snow, and looked forward to springtime blossoms, assuming that the seasons will not shift from their course.
> 
> Now, the sea is lifting above its shore, the harvest is faltering, and the seasons arrive and depart in disorder.
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> The report tells this story, laying simple fact on simple fact so as to build a terrible edifice. Since 1901, the United States has warmed 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat waves now arrive earlier in the year and abate later than they did in the 1960s. Mountain snowpack in the West has shrunk dramatically in the past half century. Sixteen of the warmest 17 years on record have occurred since 2000.
> 
> This trend “can only be explained by the effects that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have had on the climate,” the report says. It warns that if humans wish to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming, they must dramatically cut this kind of pollution by 2040. On the other hand, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, then the Earth could warm by as much as 9 degrees by 2100.
> 
> “It shows us that climate change is not a distant issue. It’s not about plants, or animals, or a future generation. It’s about us, living now,” says Katharine Hayhoe <http://katharinehayhoe.com/wp2016/>, an author of the report and an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University.
> 
> The report visits each region of the country, describing the local upheavals wrought by a global transformation. Across the Southeast, massive wildfires—like those seen now in California—could soon become a regular occurrence, smothering Atlanta and other cities in toxic smog, it warns. In New England and the mid-Atlantic, it says, oceanfront barrier islands could erode and narrow. And in the Midwest, it forecasts plunging yields of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice.
> 
> Read: The worst is yet to come for California’s wildfires  <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/californias-deadly-wildfires-worst-yet-come/575590/>
> Its projections of sea-level rise are just as ominous. If carbon pollution continues to rise, a huge swath of the Atlantic coast—from North Carolina to Maine—will see sea-level rise of five feet by 2100. New Orleans, Houston, and the Gulf Coast could also face five feet of rising seas. Even Los Angeles and San Francisco could see the Pacific Ocean rise by three feet.
> 
> Even if humanity were to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, the report forecasts that New Orleans <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/how-humans-sank-new-orleans/552323/> could still see five feet of sea-level rise by 2100.
> 
> Andrew Light <https://www.wri.org/profile/andrew-light>, another author of the report and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, said that although the report cannot make policy recommendations, it might be read as an endorsement of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
> 
> “If the United States were to try and achieve the targets in the Paris Agreement, then things will be bad, but we can manage,” he said. “But if we don’t meet them, then we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of lives every year that are at risk because of climate change. And hundreds of billions of dollars.”
> 
> If you think the Friday after Thanksgiving seems like an odd day to publish such a major report, you’re right. The assessment was originally scheduled to be released in December at a large scientific conference in Washington, D.C. <https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2018/> But earlier this week, officials announced that the report would come out two weeks early, on the afternoon of Black Friday. When politically inconvenient news is published in the final hours of a workweek, politicos call it a “Friday news dump <http://politicaldictionary.com/words/friday-news-dump/>.” Publishing a dire climate report in the final hours of Black Friday might be the biggest Friday news dump of them all.
> 
> So who ordered such a dump? During a press conference on Friday, the report’s directors in the government repeatedly declined to say. “It’s out earlier than expected,” said Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA. “This report has not been altered or revised in any way to reflect political considerations.”
> 
> Read: The global rightward shift on climate change <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/a-global-rightward-shift-on-climate-change/568684/>
> Yet the change in scheduling took the report’s authors by surprise. John Bruno, an author of the report and a coral biologist at the University of North Carolina, told me that he only learned last Friday that the report would be released today. “There was no explanation or justification,” he said. “The [assessment] leadership implied the timing was being dictated by another entity, but did not say who that was.”
> 
> Hayhoe told me she only learned on Tuesday that the report would be released on Friday. At the time, she was preparing three pies for a family Thanksgiving. She put the pies aside and picked up her laptop  to submit any final revisions to the document.
> 
> The White House did not respond directly when asked who had ordered such a change. It also did not respond directly when asked if the report would lead President Trump to reconsider his beliefs.
> 
> But a White House spokeswoman did send me a lengthy statement saying that “the United States leads the world in providing affordable, abundant, and secure energy to our citizens, while also leading the world in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.” (This is only true if you start counting in 2005, when U.S. emissions peaked <https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-us-carbon-emissions-have-fallen-14-since-2005>.) The spokeswoman said this new assessment was based on the “most-extreme scenario,” and promised any future report would have a “more transparent and data-driven process.”
> 
> Not that Hayhoe ever had high expectations about President Trump’s reaction to the report. “It wasn’t the hope that the federal government would look at it and go, ‘Oh my goodness! I see the light,’” she told me.
> 
> Rather, she said, she hoped the report would inform the public: “This isn’t information that’s only for the federal government. This is information that every city needs, every state needs, increasingly every business needs, and every homeowner needs. This is information that every human needs.”
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> “It’s not that we care about a 1-degree increase in global temperature in the abstract,” she said. “We care about water, we care about food, we care about the economy—and every single one of those things is being affected by climate change today.”
> 
> Robinson Meyer <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/robinson-meyer/> is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers climate change and technology. 
> 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/23/major-trump-administration-climate-report-says-damages-are-intensifying-across-country/ <https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/23/major-trump-administration-climate-report-says-damages-are-intensifying-across-country/>
> Major Trump administration climate report says damage is ‘intensifying across the country’
> 
> From deadly wildfires to debilitating hurricanes: White House releases major climate report
> 

> Chris Mooney <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/chris-mooney/>  - The Washington Post  2018/11/23
> The Trump administration released on Nov. 23 a long-awaited report outlining that climate change impacts "are intensifying across the country.” 
> 
> The federal government on Friday released a long-awaited report <https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/> with an unmistakable message: The effects of climate change, including deadly wildfires, increasingly debilitating hurricanes and heat waves, are already battering the United States, and the danger of more such catastrophes is worsening.
> 
> The report’s authors, who represent numerous federal agencies, say they are more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans' health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources. And while it avoids policy recommendations, the report’s sense of urgency and alarm stands in stark contrast to the lack of any apparent plan from President Trump to tackle the problems, which, according to the government he runs, are increasingly dire.
> 
> The congressionally mandated document — the first of its kind issued during the Trump administration — details how climate-fueled disasters and other types of worrisome changes are becoming more commonplace throughout the country and how much worse they could become in the absence of efforts to combat global warming.
> 
> Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year <https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/california-snow/?utm_term=.cbf201cc81bf>, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida and the United States' Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever-larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country’s sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.
> 
> The National Climate Assessment’s publication marks the government’s fourth comprehensive look at climate-change impacts on the United States since 2000. The last came in 2014. Produced by 13 federal departments and agencies and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program <https://www.globalchange.gov/>, the report stretches well over 1,000 pages and draws more definitive, and in some cases more startling, conclusions than earlier versions.
> 
> The authors argue that global warming “is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.” And they conclude that humans must act aggressively to adapt to current impacts and mitigate future catastrophes “to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”
> 
> “The impacts we’ve seen the last 15 years have continued to get stronger, and that will only continue,” said Gary Yohe, a professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the report. “We have wasted 15 years of response time. If we waste another five years of response time, the story gets worse. The longer you wait, the faster you have to respond and the more expensive it will be.”
> 
> That urgency is at odds with the stance of the Trump administration, which has rolled back several Obama-era environmental regulations and incentivized the production of fossil fuels. Trump also has said he plans to withdraw the nation from the Paris climate accord and questioned the science of climate change just last month, saying on CBS’s “60 Minutes <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-says-climate-change-not-a-hoax-but-questions-if-its-manmade/>” that “I don’t know that it’s man-made” and that the warming trend “could very well go back.”
> 
> [Who’s in and who’s out of the Paris agreement, by total greenhouse-gas emissions <https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/paris-climate-agreement-withdrawal/?utm_term=.162de212fd79>]
> 
> Furthermore, as the Northeast faced a cold spell this week, Trump tweeted <https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1065400254151954432>, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” This shows a misunderstanding that climate scientists have repeatedly tried to correct — a confusion between daily weather fluctuations and long-term climate trends.
> 
> The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s report. However, the administration last year downplayed a separate government report <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/03/trump-administration-releases-report-finds-no-convincing-alternative-explanation-for-climate-change/?utm_term=.d8a196fdd5b2> calling human activity the dominant driver of global warming, saying in a statement that “the climate has changed and is always changing.”
> 
> Given that history, some of the hundreds of scientists and federal officials who spent months working on the detailed document were frustrated, but not surprised, that the administration chose to release it on the day after Thanksgiving — typically one of the slowest news days of the year. Several people involved in the report said its release originally had been planned for early December, but after a behind-the-scenes debate in recent weeks about when to make it public, administration officials settled on Black Friday.
> 
> Several federal experts who participated in a media call after the release of the report on Friday were repeatedly asked about the timing of its release on a day when the country’s attention is likely elsewhere.
> 
> For the most part, they demurred, saying that in part the report was finished early and that they wanted to make sure it was out ahead of both an American Geophysical Union gathering next month, as well as a major international climate conference in Poland around the same time. Rather, they implored reporters to focus instead on the contents of the report, which they said had not been tinkered with by administration officials.
> 
> “This report has not been altered or revised in any way because of political considerations,” Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told reporters. She said the decision on when to release it had been made during the past week, but added, “It’s not as significant as the content of what’s in the report.”
> 
> Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said the report shows how climate change will affect all Americans.
> 
> “No matter how hard they try, the Trump administration can’t bury the effects of climate change in a Black Friday news dump – effects their own federal government scientists have uncovered," he said in a statement. "The president says outrageous things like climate change is a hoax engineered by the Chinese and raking forests will prevent catastrophic wildfires, but serious consequences like collapsing coastal housing prices and trillions of dollars in stranded fossil fuel assets await us if we don’t act.”
> 
> That report is striking in its clear statement that climate change is not only already affecting the U.S., but that the effects are getting worse.
> 
> “This report draws a direct connection between the warming atmosphere and the resulting changes that affect Americans' lives, communities, and livelihoods, now and in the future,” the document reads, concluding that “the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising.”
> 
> The report finds that the continental United States already is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 100 years ago, surrounded by seas that are on average nine inches higher and being racked by far worse heat waves than the nation experienced only 50 years ago.
> 
> But those figures offer only the prelude to even more potentially severe impacts. The report suggests that by 2050, the country could see as much as 2.3 additional degrees of warming in the continental United States. By that same year, in a high-end global-warming scenario, coral reefs in Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific territories could be bleaching every single year — conditions in which their survival would be in severe doubt. A record-warm year like 2016 would become routine.
> 
> Key crops, including corn, wheat and soybeans, would see declining yields as temperatures rise during the growing season. The city of Phoenix, which experienced about 80 days per year over 100 degrees around the turn of the century, could see between 120 and 150 such days per year by the end of the century, depending on the pace of emissions.
> 
> [As temperatures keep trending up, ‘heat belt’ cities maneuver to stay livable <https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/as-temperatures-keep-trending-up-heat-belt-cities-maneuver-to-stay-livable/2018/08/29/3c7ef2f2-ab15-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html?utm_term=.929a6ce17fa2>]
> 
> And those who face the most suffering? Society’s most vulnerable, including “lower-income and other marginalized communities,” researchers found.
> 
> In another major step, the authors of the new report have begun to put dollar signs next to projected climate damage, specifically within the United States.
> 
> In a worst-case climate-change scenario, the document finds, labor-related losses by the year 2090 as a result of extreme heat — the sort that makes it difficult to work outdoors or seriously lowers productivity — could amount to an estimated $155 billion annually. Deaths from temperature extremes could take an economic toll of $141 billion per year in the same year, while coastal property damage could total $118 billion yearly, researchers found.
> 
> Of course, mitigating climate change would also mitigate this damage, by as much as 58 percent in the case of high-temperature related deaths, the report finds.
> 
> The categorical tone of the new assessments reflects scientists' growing confidence in the ability to detect the role of a changing climate in individual extreme events, such as heat waves and droughts. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated computer simulations now allow them to project future changes in highly specific regions of the country.
> 
> For many Americans, however, no simulations are necessary. The effects of climate change are already playing out daily.
> 
> “We don’t debate who caused it. You go outside, the streets are flooded. What are you going to do about it? It’s our reality nowadays,” said Susanne Torriente, who also reviewed the report. She is chief resilience officer for Miami Beach, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt to rising sea levels. “We need to use this best available data so we can start making decisions to start investing in our future. … It shouldn’t be that complicated or that partisan.”
> 
> The report is being released at the same time as another major federal climate study that, in contrast, reaches a more positive conclusion — at least with respect to what can be done about climate change.
> 
> The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report <https://carbon2018.globalchange.gov/>, which examines all of North America (not just the United States), finds that over a decade, greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels declined by 1 percent per year. The result is that while North America emitted 24 percent of the world’s emissions in 2004, that was down to 17 percent in 2013. This occurred in part thanks to improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, the growth of renewable energy and the swapping of coal-burning for natural gas.
> 
> “For the globe, we’re still going up, but regionally, there have been these changes in how humans have been acting that have caused our emissions to go down,” said Ted Schuur, a Northern Arizona University expert on permafrost carbon who contributed to the report, the follow-up to an initial effort released in 2007.
> 
> The report concludes that it appears possible to for economies to grow — at least in the United States, Mexico and Canada — without increasing overall emissions of greenhouse gases. That would be an important signal for the ability of the world to slow climate change over the course of the century. However, it does not mean any lessening of climate-change impacts within the United States. As long as global emissions continue, the risk of impacts here continue, because carbon dioxide circulates around the globe.
> 
> The release of the National Climate Assessment comes on the heels of other recent global warnings, most notably a report <https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say/?utm_term=.228f1ff0ac66> by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finding that the world would have to make unprecedented changes in the next decade to remain below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of total warming above preindustrial levels.
> 
> The last time a U.S. National Climate Assessment was published, in 2014, Obama administration officials took the document seriously, with top policymakers heralding its release and embracing its findings.
> 
> “These tailored findings help translate scientific insights into practical, usable knowledge that can help decision-makers and citizens anticipate and prepare for specific climate-change impacts,” White House science adviser John Holdren and NOAA head Kathryn Sullivan wrote <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/05/06/what-climate-change-means-regions-across-america> at the time.
> 
> On the other side of the country from Washington, at least one well-known atmospheric scientist this week was wrestling not with the contents of a climate report but with the changing view from his window.
> 
> “Normally, I can see San Francisco Bay from my home,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “Today and for the past few days, I could not see the bay for all the smoke from the Paradise fire. Fires that approach the size of the Paradise fire are most common in the hot dry years — the kind of years that we are likely to see many more of.”
> 
> “We are trained to be skeptical and resist jumping to quick conclusions,” he said. “But looking at the smoke, I could not help but think: ‘This is climate change. This is what climate change looks like.’ ”
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