On Black Friday, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) released a new climate change report: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. The publication of this report is the result of a presidential initiative by President George H. W. Bush that was codified by Congress as the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which called for “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”
The Act established the USGCRP, a program with 13 contributing federal agencies and departments, and provided that the program shall produce a comprehensive national assessment report to policymakers every 4 years. The new report is the second part of the fourth resulting National Climate Assessment, focusing on impacts, risks, mitigation and adaptation options for the nation. The first part, focusing on the underlying physical science of climate change, was published last year.
Following are the federal agencies and departments that contributed to the report:
- U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
- U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which administratively coordinated the report
- U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
- U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI)
- U.S. State Department (DOS)
- U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Smithsonian Institution
- U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Why was the report released on Black Friday?
Weird story here. The report was initially scheduled to be released between Dec. 10th and 14th during a large scientific conference in Washington, D.C. Instead, officials announced early last week that the report would be released on the afternoon of Black Friday. In a press conference, NOAA officials declined to provide an explanation, saying only, “It’s out earlier than expected … This report has not been altered or revised in any way to reflect political considerations.”
A practice of “dumping” inconvenient news late on a Friday is a well known tactic for minimizing the impact of news. People are known to pay less attention to news over the weekend, and by Monday it’s old news. This has led many to speculate that the Trump Administration, which doesn’t view climate change as a priority but is mandated by law to release the report, chose to release it on Black Friday, perhaps the biggest “Friday news dump” opportunity of all, given the focus of many on shopping and family events surrounding the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Hence, rescuethatfrog.com, which views climate change as a huge priority, has devised the clever strategy of resurrecting the news story on Monday. Cyber Monday even, when perhaps many eyes will be online? Hope it works.
Please help it work by sharing this information with your friends and family!
Links:
- Full report;
- Summary Findings of the report, a 10-minute read;
- Report-In-Brief, a longer but worthwhile read;
- Article in The New York Times
If there’s one most important takeaway from this report, it’s this. The main conclusions and forecasts are essentially the same as the previous 2014 National Climate Assessment, but with the significant addition that climate change effects are readily observable and affecting American lives now. The wildfires in California and flooding events on American coasts are directly attributed to climate change. Far from being a boon to the U.S. economy, the report does not mince words in tracing a direct line from continued fossil fuel use to substantial and intensifying future harms to the U.S. economy, in diverse sectors from farms to fishing to real estate to health care to tourism, starting right now.
“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 … It’s not that we care about a 1-degree increase in global temperature in the abstract … 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.”
–Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, one of the authors of the report and atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University
Even if a person were to distrust the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) findings on climate change, it would seem this report would carry some weight. After all, it represents the consensus findings of hundreds of experts within our own government — people literally tasked with putting “America First.” So, what’s weird is the transparent incongruity between the conclusions of a broad swath of the U.S. government, as represented in this report, and the attitudes of the President, who frequently advocates for “America First,” and many of our other elected representatives.
Case in point:
Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2018
-President Donald Trump, ignorantly confusing weather and climate on Twitter just last Wednesday. Deep thought: Is the president really that ignorant? — hard to believe since he has the opportunity of being advised by hundreds of experts in his own government on the outrageous idiocy of this tweet. Or, does he know better but calculate that he can nevertheless score political points with this tweet because WE are that ignorant?
Counter-point:
“If the United States were to try and achieve the targets in the Paris Agreement, then things will be bad, but we can manage … 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.”
–Dr. Andrew Light, one of the authors of the report and Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute
#rescuethatfrog