“Report released by Trump admin: Climate change mostly human-caused”
I don’t know where to put this thread, so move it if it doesn’t belong here. Thanks.
What is that noise? It’s the sound of Republican heads exploding all over Washington. Funny that this report was released while Thump is out of the country.
Can’t wait for Thump’s tweets on the subject.
I am tempted on the one hand to give Trump credit for not suppressing this report, and on similar grounds to give him credit for not driving to my house and whacking my mailbox with a baseball bat. When I’m tempted to praise the president for not actively suppressing science that contradicts his politics, things are bleak indeed.
Odds are good he didn’t know about it. I’ll bet Pruitt didn’t know either.
And would it surprise anyone if Trump quietly orders this to be the last National Climate Assessment and disbands the coalition of government science groups that has been producing it?
They’re doing it everywhere else:
One of the EPA’s Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt’s deputies ordered it removed …
Perhaps no agency under Trump has tried to downplay and undermine climate science more than the EPA. Most recently, political appointees at the EPA instructed two agency scientists and one contractor not to speak as planned at a scientific conference in Rhode Island. The conference marked the culmination of a three-year report on the status of Narragansett Bay, New England’s largest estuary, in which climate change featured prominently.
The EPA also has altered parts of its website containing detailed climate data and scientific information. As part of that overhaul, in April the agency took down pages that had existed for years and contained a wealth of information on the scientific causes of global warming, its consequences and ways for communities to mitigate or adapt. The agency said that it was simply making changes to better reflect the new administration’s priorities and that any pages taken down would be archived …
… Other departments have also removed climate-change documents online: The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, for example, no longer provides access to documents assessing the danger that future warming poses to deserts in the Southwest.
And when U.S. Geological Survey scientists working with international researchers published an article in the journal Nature evaluating how climate change and human population growth would affect where rain-fed agriculture could thrive, the USGS published a news release that omitted the words “climate change” altogether.
I would chalk that up to incompetence.