US Government Report on Drastic Impact of Climate Change

A sweeping federal climate change report by scientists from 13 US federal agencies directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. The Report was completed in early 2017 and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years.

The main conclusions of the Report are:

·      Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.

·      Significant advances have been made linking human influence to individual extreme weather events since the last National Climate Assessment was produced in 2014.

·      Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change.

·      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.

·      Worldwide, it is “extremely likely” that more than half of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 can be linked to human influence.

·      Even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.30 degrees Celsius of warming over this century compared with today. The projected actual rise will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius.

·      The average temperature in the US has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years. Every corner of the US has been touched by climate change.

·      It is very likely that the accelerated rate of Arctic warming will have a significant consequence for the US due to accelerating land and sea ice melting that is driving changes in the ocean including sea level rise threatening the coastal communities.

·      The average annual temperature in the US will continue to rise, making recent record-setting years “relatively common” in the near future.

·      Stabilizing the global mean temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius — what scientists have referred to as the guardrail beyond which changes become catastrophic — will require significant reductions in global levels of carbon dioxide.

The authors of the Report are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it. They fear that the Trump administration could change or suppress the report.