By Don Corrigan
It is a serious omission that Environmental Echo is just now getting around to the US government’s new climate report released a few weeks ago.
Bloomberg has had some very helpful background information on this climate report. As Carl’s Climate Letters reports, because of its length the report will probably not be read by many people, but it can still be useful as a tool in adversarial situations because of its unquestionably high quality.
The Bloomberg report: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-06/how-the-trump-white-house-wound-up-releasing-dire-climate-report
Here is just a short excerpt from that report by Bloomberg: (see below)
The Clean Air Council and two Pennsylvanian children sued the U.S. government to try to block any rollback of regulations to address climate change. The complaint, which had already been in the works, cites the recent National Climate Assessment’s heightened confidence that humanity is the primary driver of global warming.
And there is another way this report could have a practical impact. Both Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, and Rick Perry, the Energy secretary, have responded to questions about climate change by saying that the climate is changing, but it’s not clear how much of a role humans are having on it.
Now the U.S. Government’s own report has dismissed that formulation:
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
