Climate Change Update: Trump Administration Tries to Hide the Damaging Truth
In a flagrant attempt to limit attention to its grim findings, the Trump Administration chose the Thanksgiving holiday to release the latest official report confirming that human-induced climate change is behind the increasing damage from extreme weather events.
The 4th National Climate Assessment was officially released the day after Thanksgiving, when most government offices are closed and many media outlets are on skeleton staffs due to the holiday. Report co-author Andrew Light, an international policy expert at the World Resources Institute, called the timing of its release “a transparent attempt by the Trump Administration to bury this report and continue the campaign of not only denying but suppressing the best of climate science.”
This report was written by independent scientists and officials with 13 federal agencies, compiling and evaluating the best and most current data available. (This research was prepared prior to the past few months’ surge in severe hurricanes and flooding in the eastern United States and the severe droughts and historic wildfires in California.) As noted in the Associated Press story on its release, “The report often clashes with the president’s past statements and tweets on the legitimacy of climate change science, how much of it is caused by humans, how cyclical it is and what’s causing increases in recent wildfires.”
Report co-author Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University said, “We are seeing the things we said would be happening, happen now in real life. For a climate scientist, it is almost surreal.” Co-author Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist from the University of Illinois, added “We’re going to continue to see severe weather events get stronger and more intense.”
League of Conservation Voters (LCV) vice president Sara Chieffo commented, “Just two days ago Trump asked, ‘whatever happened to global warming?’ — but his own government’s experts are warning us about the all too real threats of climate change. Trump can continue to deny science and attempt to bury the National Climate Assessment by releasing it on a holiday weekend, but there is no hiding the fact that communities across the country are facing the devastating impacts of climate change firsthand.”
Speaking of the report’s findings, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) president Rhea Suh said, “From the floods that swamp our coastlines to the droughts that bake our crops, from the fires on the mountains to the coral dying at sea, America is telling us every way it can that it’s time to cut the fossil fuel pollution that’s driving global climate change—before it’s too late.”
NRDC senior scientist Kim Knowlton, a co-convening lead author of the human health chapter of the previous National Climate Assessment, called the risks of climate change vast but at least in part avoidable: “The risks to our health and well-being are clear, and the solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change are at our fingertips. Now is the time to act on climate.”
Up next, Chemours Agrees to Clean Up GenX >>
To get news like this in your inbox every Monday, please sign up for our Conservation Insider Bulletin newsletter!
