Update, Oct. 3: The exhaustive report on climate change that contradicts the Trump administration’s stance on global warming has been accepted by the White House, The New York Times reported.
The report calls the findings that humans are to blame for climate change “unambiguous” and adds there is “no convincing alternative explanation.”
“This report has some very powerful, hard-hitting statements that are totally at odds with senior administration folks and at odds with their policies,” Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, told The Times. “It begs the question, where are members of the administration getting their information from? They’re obviously not getting it from their own scientists.”
You can read the exhaustive report here.
Original article:
Contradicting statements by President Donald Trump and his administration, the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers says it is “extremely likely” that humans and their impact on the world are the “dominant cause” of global warming.
NPR obtained the climate report which states that the past 115 years are “the warmest in the history of modern civilization,” with the average global temperature increasing by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the report, the biggest contributors to global warming are greenhouse gases from industry and agriculture.
Earlier this year, the EPA wiped any mention of climate change from its website at the behest of team Trump.
“I think that measuring, with precision, human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told CNBC in March. “So, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
An archived version of the climate change page directly contradicts Pruitt’s statements.
“Recent climate changes, however, cannot be explained by natural causes alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed warming, especially warming since the mid-20th century. Rather, it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that warming,” it read.
Pruitt’s assessment is also inconsistent with the new 600-page report authored by experts from leading scientific agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy, as well as academic scientists.
“This is good, solid climate science,” Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State University, who says he made minor contributions to the report’s conclusions on sea level rise, told NPR. “This has been reviewed so many times in so many ways, and it’s taking what we know from … a couple of centuries of climate science and applying it to the U.S.”
The report was submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, but Trump has yet to appoint anyone to run that office.
