Climate Assessment: No Good News

The Third National Climate Assessment was released by the White House and it contains some alarming news. Officially, the number and strength of extreme weather events have increased over the past 50 years in line with predictions by climate scientists that global warming would perturb and intensify weather patterns. Between 1958 and 2012 the amount of precipitation falling in heavy storms increased by 71% in New England while the West is drying out. Record smashing summer temperatures in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 even increased at night, not allowing the sun baked Earth to release heat to the atmosphere. The US is warmer now since record keeping began.  According to the report's lead author, "There is no equivocation. It is fundamentally the pace of observations of extreme weather that makes it clear it is not natural variability." The national assessment reiterates the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that climate change is reality and "driven primarily by human activity".

Not that these repeated conclusions by scientists will make any difference to the climate denial industry driven by corporate cash. Only the Congressional Record makes global warming a 50-50 proposition, an impressive achievement of propaganda and influence peddling. The national impacts from global warming are numerous and varied, and most carry a hefty price tag. While there are longer growing seasons in the future for the Midwest, the Northwest shellfish industry is suffering now from increased ocean acidification. Flooding events like the ones that just occurred in the South destroy infrastructure that is expensive to replace. Fighting forest fires that are increasing in frequency and size is also very expensive. Healthy forests are critical carbon sinks, but they are loosing their capacity to cope with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. About five million people live only one meter above current high tides which will get higher as ocean levels increase.

While the assessment gives more reasons to reject projects that increase greenhouse gas emissions, the Current Occupant has decided to duck the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline decision until after the mid-term elections. The US State Department gave federal agencies more time to review the proposal before issuing a permit to the pipeline which when fully operational will carry about 830,000 barrels of diluted bitumen per day from Alberta across Nebraska to the pipe's southern leg already approved by the administration and under construction [AP photo]. Recently, a Nebraska district court judge ruled that the state's pipeline siting law violates the state constitution.  The State Department has been widely criticized for issuing a environmental impact statement written by an energy industry contractor that found the pipeline would have no net environmental impact. Clearly that is a ludicrous conclusion which turns environmental assessments on energy projects into rubber-stamp exercises. Conservative Speaker Boner says the project has overwhelming public support because it will create jobs. Maybe some of those jobs will be bitumen spill clean-up projects.