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Leaked Federal Climate Report Finds Link Between Climate Change, Human Activity (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It 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. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans," a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. "Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change," they wrote. The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it. "The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today," reports The New York Times. "The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius." Given the Trump administration's stance on climate change, some of the scientists who worked on the report are concerned that the report will be suppressed.

2 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Leaked Political hit job masquerading as "scie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The GP is practicing science properly. He's asking perfectly legitimate questions, yet is being attacked for it. Even worse, nobody is providing reasonable answers to his reasonable questions. Global temperatures did start to rise thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution started. This observation does prove wrong the hypothesis that humans are responsible. But instead of doing proper science and reworking this hypothesis that has been proven wrong, we see so-called 'scientists' desperately trying to keep this broken and sinking hypothesis afloat. It's pathetic, and it's not science.

  2. Re:Leaked Political hit job masquerading as "scien by cdsparrow · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    What I don't understand overall is that warming isn't necessarily bad. Higher temps and higher CO2 levels? Better food production. Humans at current population and technology levels can handle getting warmer a lot better that we can handle getting colder.

    And looking down the road at technology mitigating it, pretty sure it's easier to cool the earth on a global scale than it is warming it up.

    Nuclear winter FTW!