Tuesday, November 07, 2017

As Climate Talks Open, Federal Report Exposes U.S. Credibility Gap

The Trump administration’s push for expanding fossil fuel use is at odds with its own National Climate Assessment.


Members of the U.S. delegation, including Trigg Talley (right), deputy special envoy for climate change, attend the opening of the UN climate conference on Nov. 6, 2017. (Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Click to Enlarge.
As global climate talks resume this week, the U.S. is straddling a climate credibility gap, with the Trump administration's policies on one side of an abyss and what the government's own scientists know with increasing certainty on the other.

The disconnect became more evident last week as the administration published, but then basically shrugged off, a comprehensive report on the state of climate science.

Written by authoritative government and academic experts, then honed by the extreme vetting of a formal National Academies of Science peer review, the latest volume of the National Climate Assessment paints a stern and explicit picture of the risks of climate change.

The report's executive summary pronounced that temperatures have reached the warmest point in human civilization, that our own actions are the cause, and that the worst is yet to come.

It followed with a staccato drum-roll of familiar findings:  "Thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor."

On Monday, the G7 countries—including the U.S.—also affirmed that climate change exacerbates health risks.  

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress remain wedded to an expansion of fossil-fuel energy that the science says is at the root of the problem.

In recent weeks, they have moved to:  repopulate the Environmental Protection Agency's science advisory board with faces friendlier to its pro-industry cause; issue a tax bill that undermines renewable energy and fosters oil, coal and gas; expand drilling and mining from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico; and rejigger the calculations of how much greenhouse gas emissions will cost society.  They sent a stripped down team of bureaucrats to the climate talks without much of an agenda other than to preserve the role of fossil fuels in the decades ahead, which the science warns will lead to crises.

Read more at As Climate Talks Open, Federal Report Exposes U.S. Credibility Gap

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