US government's grim climate summary draft gets unofficially published

[Jimbo101]

ARS Technica

In 1990, during the presidency of the first George Bush, Congress passed the Global Change Research Act. Along with reorganizing government-funded climate research, the Act stipulates that, every four years, the federal agencies involved provide an update on the state of climate science.

It has been four years, and the next report's draft has been completed and has undergone scientific vetting.

The draft paints a grim picture of how the US is already dealing with a variety of issues related to climate change and how much worse most of those issues will get during the coming decades. And the report places the blame squarely on humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

The Times has placed the draft online, despite the "DO NOT CITE, QUOTE, OR DISTRIBUTE" warning on the top of every page. But really, there's not much here that hasn't already been available to the public—in many ways, the report is just a condensed, US-centric version of the IPCC reports. The process for producing it involved NASA, NOAA, and the DOE organizing a group of scientists to act as lead authors who produced chapters focused on issues like extreme weather and sea level rise. The report even echoes the IPCC's language for describing risk, using "very likely" to mean a 90-percent probability, for example.

The report's conclusions are also in line with those of every other scientific evaluation of climate change:

Thousands of studies conducted by tens of thousands of scientists around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; disappearing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea level; and an increase in atmospheric water vapor. Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate changes.