Here's
the Dire Climate Report the Trump White House Didn't Want You to See
In a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a
blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president's denialism and
pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after
Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume
II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4).
The report warned "Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization."
The report warned "Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization."
The report concluded that "greenhouse gas
emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account" for
planet-threatening warming.
"The decision to release this damning report when families
are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a
brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move
off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate," Wenonah Hauter, executive
director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.
"Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his
annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that
he'll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump
is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are
still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country," Hauter
continued.
"The science is way past in on climate change... We must
prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump."
From deadly wildfires to catastrophic hurricanes and other
extreme weather events, the "impacts of global climate change are already
being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the
future," notes the congressionally mandated report—the first of its kind
released since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
Authored by officials from over a dozen federal agencies, the
report warns that in the absence of aggressive action to quickly slash carbon
emissions, the climate crisis will continue to have increasingly devastating
effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health.
"It is very likely that some impacts, such as the effects
of ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise and coastal development, will be
irreversible for many thousands of years, and others, such as species
extinction, will be permanent," the report warns.
Using the hashtag #ClimateFriday, environmentalists worked to
overcome the Trump administration's attempt to hide the NCA4 amid the chaos of
the holidays by highlighting the report's findings and stressing its dire
implications if ambitious and global climate action is not taken.
"This report makes it clear that climate change is not some
problem in the distant future," Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of
climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a
statement. "It's happening right now in every part of the country."
The Washington Post summarized
the report's key findings with regard to major regions of the U.S.:
Already, western mountain
ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water
supplies below them.
Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida, and the
U.S.'s Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires
are devouring ever larger areas during longer fire seasons.
And the country's
sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has
utterly upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly
thawing permafrost tundras.
The federal report comes as climate activists and progressives
like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing for the
Democratic Party to combat the Trump administration's fossil fuel agenda with
ambitious climate action centered around a Green New Deal.
"It's not enough to think it's 'important.' We must make it
urgent," Ocasio-Cortez wroteon
Twitter. "That's why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and
why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change
policy."
"Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing
irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and
leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we
act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent clean
renewable energy," concluded Hauter of Food & Water Watch.
"This
transition is not only possible, but necessary for the health and prosperity of
people and the planet."