Directly contradicting the Trump administration position on climate change, 13 federal agencies released an extensive scientific report that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has occurred since 1901, creating the warmest period in human history.
Over the past 115 years, global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), leading to record breaking weather events and temperature extremes. According to the report, the global, long-term warming trend is “unambiguous” and there is “no convincing alternative explanation” that anything other than humans are to blame because of the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, and the forests we destroy.
Surprisingly, the report was approved for release by the White House. However, the findings come as the Trump administration is defending its climate change policies on several fronts.
Public drafts of the report have circulated for months, making it politically perilous to tinker with the findings. So, with editing a high-risk affair and the report required by Congress, the administration may have just decided to downplay it, said John Holdren, who ran the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama.
"It would do more harm to block this report than to let it out," Holdren, now a Harvard University environmental policy professor, said in an interview. "They’re letting it out on a Friday afternoon, which is pretty much the standard approach for letting out something that you don’t want to get a lot of attention."
The government is required to produce the national assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being affected on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.
The first document, called the Climate Science Special Report, is a finalized report, having been peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences and vetted by experts across government agencies.
The climate of the United States is strongly connected to the
changing global climate. The short statements listed below highlight past, current,
and projected climate changes for the United States and the globe:
