Trump Team Garbles Climate Science — Science Says

Its members said President Donald Trump and his cabinet have avoided talking about the science of climate change. While temperatures in the country (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) have increased an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, the Southwest and the Northwest, as well as the Northern Great Plains, have seen a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees or more.

“It’s very clear that temperatures in California are increasing the risk of severe drought”, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. “Since 1970, the rate of warming has increased to 0.5°F per decade”.

Translation: As Earth’s climate changes it directly affects sea level rise, greenhouse gas concentrations and land and ocean temperatures. “There are no alternative explanations”.

Via Climate Central: “2016 was the globally averaged hottest year on record, surpassing 2015”.

The Times’ overzealousness is usually met with wailing and pearl-clutching from the scientific establishment and environmental activists.

The 13 government agencies must sign off on the report by Sunday. The Obama administration strongly supported the agreement. The last report was released in 2014. “It is also the most up-to-date one, since the latest IPCC report is now four years old”. It also attempted to paint ecofascists as good Samaritans who had no choice but to “leak” a report to save humanity.

The so-far unreleased 545-page Climate Science Special Report has been approved by the National Academy of Sciences.

In other words, it has passed all the usual tests for scientific integrity.

Significantly, the report underscores a crucial reason why climate inaction is so risky: The rate of warming is accelerating.

There’s no way to know for sure whether the administration would have squelched the final report, preliminary versions of which have been circulating for months. “To report it in any other way is just fake news”.

If that happens, she said, “the author team will then have to decide whether they can make [those changes] or not”. “Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans”, the draft states. In South Florida, which is struggling with both rapid sea-level rise and an increase in flooding, the city of Coral Gables is looking for ways to start saving now for higher stormwater-managements costs.

Less than a week from this announcement, his government’s chief science agency released a report expressing the global warming was real and getting worse every day.

Earlier this week, the newspaper-of-record published a front-page, bombshell report stating that a leaker had sent them a draft report of the National Climate Assessment, an analysis that the contact feared was being suppressed by the Trump administration.

It confirmed the heat resulted from the combined influence of long-term temperature rising and a strong El Nino – a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean with a global impact on weather patterns.

A statement from NOAA says: “NOAA’s updated 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook indicates that an above-normal hurricane season is most likely, with the possibility that the season could be extremely active”. That’s especially true for humid regions in the Eastern United States. But the report says scientists are now able to draw some direct connections with varying degrees of certainty between climate change and such events as heat waves in Europe in 2003 and Australia in 2013.