Baked America
Do you prefer your country rare, or well done? Thanks to the Obama administration’s new report on climate impacts, we get to choose.
SOURCE: U.S. Global Change Research Program
The latest report from the Global Change Research Program tells us a lot about climate science, but it also tells us a lot about a government that is finally managing science for the benefit of its citizens.
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Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
Eight and a half years ago in late 2000, the United States government—under President Clinton—released its first major report concerning the impacts of climate change on the United States. Yesterday under President Obama, the government released its second and greatly updated version.
The years in between were squandered on scientific suppression, misinformation, presidential disdain, and illegal behavior by the Bush administration, which failed to produce a subsequent study as required by law. You can learn more about the full sordid tale here, but in brief, it goes something like this:
Having inherited the Clinton-era report (the so-called “National Assessment”), the Bush administration promptly went about undermining and censoring it, refusing even to reference or cite it in government documents or deliberations. And rather than produce a new and updated study when the time came—they are required every four years under the 1990 U.S. Global Change Research Act—the last administration instead sought to run out the clock. Instead of producing a single, nationally relevant, and publicly oriented study, it began a series of 21 planned “synthesis reports,” treating various aspects of the vast climate problem in technocratic isolation.
The Obama administration’s approach couldn’t be more different. It has rolled out its new report with a full press conference and much fanfare. And rather than releasing a staccato of wonk documents, it has produced a single study in plain language that pulls all the information together and strives to make it relevant to individual communities of the United States and to specific economic sectors—perhaps most notably, transportation and energy.
Interactive Map: The Human Toll of Climate Change
Explore the Science Progress interactive map tracking scientific research on the impacts of climate change on human populations in the United States and around the world.
For those familiar with climate science, the latest findings aren’t much of a shock: Since global warming is already happening everywhere, it is of course already afflicting the United States. We’re seeing rising seas, glacial retreats, more incidents of extreme precipitation, and much else. We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.
Yet we can still control how bad it gets, and how we respond. That’s a key message of the Obama report: Cutting emissions now will surely ease the changes we see later. This, in turn, means that so-called “mitigation” and “adaptation” measures shouldn’t be thought of as contradictory; rather, they’re complementary. The new Obama climate report suggests both that strong action can save us from the worst outcomes, but also that we have to prepare for changes already upon us—changes that can no longer be avoided.
The Obama study’s greatest significance is, inevitably, political. We now have, for the very first time when it actually mattered, a government that is putting its full weight, scientific and otherwise, behind the quest to achieve climate action. And just as the Bush administration ran from dealing with the problem and tried to obscure it, this administration can use its considerable resources to pull global warming down from the atmosphere and into our backyards, communities, and local economies.
It’s about whether the family business will still be viable thirty years from now, and whether the family home will have to be relocated.
For unlike a report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a regionally specific U.S. climate change impacts study like the one just released isn’t just about the science. It’s about whether the family business will still be viable thirty years from now, and whether the family home will have to be relocated. For this reason, it has the potential to reach and motivate the American public around climate change in an unprecedented way.
Expect, then, that the new Obama report will be cited constantly as deliberations continue on the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Expect senators and members of Congress to draw on the report to highlight specific consequences of climate change in their states, and perhaps even to relate personal stories from their constituents, highlighting the future they’re facing and how they’re beginning to grapple with it.
This latest study tells us a lot about climate science—but the bigger story is that we have a government that’s finally managing that science on behalf of its citizens.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
Thanks for your article, and your other writings, Chris. Beyond all of the tremendous negative impacts on nation and world coming due to global carbon contamination and oceanic carbonic acidification and the initiatives for clean energy strategies, what do you think of the coming utility solutions that depend on fossil and nuclear fuels?
Do we have a national definition of “clean energy.” For example, do you consider atomic fission as promoted in the Clean Energy Bank of the proposed ACESA law as “clean.” Do you favor the expansion of the limited fossil fuel, natural gas, for electric services over the coming decades as a solution to carbon contamination? Is there a disconnect between CAP policy, such as silence on nuclear and promotion of “low carbon” initiatives rather than “no carbon” solutions? Do you think we can solve one contamination issue by substituting other contaminants, such as spending hundreds of billions on nuclear or fossil gas electric plants? What are the prospects for economical solar, wind, and conservation measures as we develop these over the next decade while we internalize or suffer the costs of carbon and radionuclide contamination?
June 19th, 2009 at 11:48 am