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EPA chief says Trump administration may reshape next federal climate report

by JohnCateqkfl Posted on November 30, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Wednesday that the Trump administration may step in to change the way the government drafts its next National Climate Assessment.

The suggestion that politicians might influence a report from more 300 federal scientists at 13 agencies came at an event in Washington, where reporters pressed the agency chief on the authors’ dire projections about devastating climate change.

Speaking at a Washington Post Live event, Wheeler accused former President Barack Obama of telling “the report’s authors to take a look at the worst-case scenario for this report.”

“Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that’s used for the next assessment,” Wheeler said.

It’s an audacious set of statements from the acting EPA administrator, who until last year served as a top coal lobbyist and espouses the industry’s scientifically unsound stance that the link between fossil fuels and climate change remains dubious.

The remarks follow a clear, cynical pattern among those who deny climate science, accusing scientists and researchers of bias.

The announcement is concerning in light of a previous incident of political interference. In 2005, Philip Clooney, a former oil lobbyist working for the George W. Bush administration, was caught altering language in climate science reports to weaken the link between fossil fuels and rising global temperatures.

What Wheeler appeared to suggest Wednesday goes beyond that. He said the administration could take a dangerously optimistic route by developing what the EPA chief called “more realistic projections” incorporating future advancements in “technology and innovation.”

He also said the National Climate Assessment was based on overly pessimistic and outdated models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading United Nations’ research body on global warming.

By contrast, the IPCC warned in October that world governments must halve emissions over the next 12 years to avert catastrophic climate change costing $54 trillion. That cost could, in fact, be on the conservative side, according to a study published in June that found the IPCC relied on economic models that failed to grasp the magnitude of global warming.

Trump, who rejects climate science outright, dismissed the IPCC’s report in October and said he does not believe the results of the latest federal study.

Wheeler put a friendlier face on the administration’s climate change denial after he took over in July following disgraced and scandal-plagued Administrator Scott Pruitt’s resignation. He halted some of the EPA’s antagonism of the press and spoke in dry legalese when deploying the same unscientific industry propaganda Pruitt used to justify his doubt over the causes of climate change. But he is pursuing the same aggressive rollback of climate regulations.

In August, Wheeler proposed dramatically weakening fuel economy standards, clearing the way for vehicles ― the nation’s No. 1 source of climate pollution ― to spew an addition 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2030. Weeks later, he moved to gut a signature Obama-era rule on power plant pollution ― allowing for increased pollution that could cause 1,400 premature deaths per year.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the 13 agencies behind the National Climate Assessment, said no political appointees interfered with the contents of the report. But Wheeler has a history of attempting to change the way the federal government analyzes pollution.

In October, he fired a panel of scientific experts responsible for helping the EPA’s review of air quality standards for particulate matter, an issue that has long dogged the coal industry for which the agency chief previously lobbied.

Later that month, Wheeler said he’d delay a decision on how to move forward on the EPA’s controversial “transparency” rule, a proposal that would bar the agency from using critical epidemiological studies when drafting regulations, until next year.

Wheeler once again punted on difficult questions on Wednesday, despite criticizing the nature of the report.

“I haven’t read the entire report yet, but I’ve gone through it,” he said, adding that he wants to “follow up” on the projection modeling methods.

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EPA chief says Trump administration may reshape next federal climate report

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Our Alarming Food Future, Explained in 7 Charts

by RicardoCorbould Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, President Obama signed a bill into law that will essentially preserve the status quo of US agriculture for the next half-decade. Known as the farm bill, the once-every-five-years legislation (among other things it does) shapes the basic incentive structure for the farmers who specialize in the big commodity crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. This year’s model, like the several before it, provides generous subsidies (mostly through cut-rate insurance) for all-out production of these crops (especially corn and soy); while also slashing already-under-funded program that encourage farmers to protect soil and water.

Read about 7 more scary facts from the National Climate Assessment.

As I put it in a post at the time, the legislation was simply not ready for climate change. How not ready? A just-released, wide-ranging new federal report called the National Climate Assessment has answers. A collaborative project led by 13 federal agencies and five years in the making, the Assessment is available for browsing on a very user-friendly website. Here’s what I gleaned on the challenges to agriculture posed by climate change:

Iowa is hemorrhaging soil. A while back, I wrote about Iowa’s quiet soil crisis. When heavy rains strike bare corn and soy fields in the spring, huge amounts of topsoil wash away. Known as “gully erosion,” this kind of soil loss currently isn’t counted in the US Department of Agriculture’s rosy erosion numbers, which hold that Iowa’s soils are holding steady. But Richard Cruse, an agronomist and the director of Iowa State University’s Iowa Water Center, has found Iowa’s soils are currently disappearing at a rate as much as 16 times faster than the natural regeneration. According to the National Assessment, days of heavy rain have increased steadily in Iowa over the past two decades, and will continue doing so.

National Climate Assessment

But dry spells are on the rise, too. In spring 2013, Iowa experienced its wettest spring ever, with storms that washed away titanic amounts of topsoil. The previous summer, it underwent its most severe drought in generations. Such extremes can be expected to continue. This map shows the predicted increase in the maximum number of consecutive dry days, comparing the 1971-2000 period to projections for 2070-2090. The worst-hit regions will be in the west—more on that below—but key corn-growing states like Illinois and Indiana take their lumps, too.

National Climate Assessment

Crop yields will decline. All the carbon we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere over the past century and a half has so far probably helped crop yields—plants need freely available carbon dioxide, after all. But as the climate warms, that effect gets increasingly drowned out by heat stress, drought, and flood. And now, the Midwest is expected to see sharply higher average temperatures as well as days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. This chart compares the region’s average temps in the 1971-2000 period to those expected between 2041 and 2070.

And higher temperatures correlate to reduced crop yields—as this chart, comparing yields and maximum temperature data in Illinois and Indiana between 1980 to 2007, shows.

National Climate Assessment

California, our vegetable basket, will be strapped for irrigation water. California is locked in a severe drought. I recently noted that farmers in the state’s main growing region, the Central Valley, are responding by rapidly drawing down underground water stores to keep their crops irrigated. The main driver: Farmers count on snow melt from the Sierra Nevada mountains to supplies the state’s vast irrigation networks—and this year, the snows barely came. According to the report, as the weather warms up, they—and other farms in the Southwest—can expect much less snow going forward.

National Climate Assessment

And even if they can get enough water, heat stress and other climate effects will likely knock down yields of some crops. Different crops respond to higher temperatures in different ways. This chart projects yields for Central Valley crops under two scenarios—one in which greenhouse gas emissions continue rising, the other if we manage to reduce emissions. Crucially, these projections are based on the assumption that “adequate water supplies (soil moisture)” will be maintained—a precarious assumption.

National Climate Assessment

Wine grapes, nuts, and other perennial California crops will be hard-hit. In order to thrive, crops like fruit and nuts need a certain number of chilling hours each winter—that is, periods when temperatures range between 32°F and 50°F. Bad news: A warming climate means fewer cold snaps. The maps below show changes in chilling hours in the Central Valley in 1950, 2000, and a prediction for 2050 if current trends hold (the greener, the more chilling hours):

National Climate Assessment

Overall, the report states, “the number of chilling hours is projected to decline by 30 percent to 60 percent by 2050 and by up to 80% by 2100.” Worse, the “area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest-quality wines is projected to decline by more than 50 percent by late this century.” It’s enough to make you want to uncork a bottle, while you still have a chance.

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Our Alarming Food Future, Explained in 7 Charts

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7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

by AlfredoBML Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The new National Climate Assessment, being launched today by the Obama administration, is a landmark document.

It is a landmark because unlike the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is written in plain language that ordinary mortals can understand. (“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.” “Data show that natural factors like the sun and volcanoes cannot have caused the warming observed over the past 50 years.”)

It is a landmark because unlike past National Assessments, this report is not being buried or ignored. Rather, President Obama is using it to launch a very impressive communications campaign aimed directly at Americans via one of their most trusted scientific sources, TV meteorologists.

But most of all, it is a landmark because it shows, unequivocally, that we simply do not live in the same America any more, thanks to climate change. It is a different place, a different country. Here are some of the most striking examples of how:

1. America is much hotter than it was before. According to the assessment, the 2000s were the hottest decade on record for the United States, and 2012 was quite simply the hottest year ever (for the contiguous US).

2. That translates into extreme heat where you live. Of course, nobody feels temperature as a national average: We feel it in a particular place. And indeed, we’ve felt it. The National Climate Assessment makes clear that extreme heat waves are striking more than before, and climate change is involved. Take Texas’ extreme heat in the summer of 2011, the “hottest and driest summer on record” for the state, with temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees for 40 straight days! “The human contribution to climate change approximately doubled the probability that the heat was record-breaking,” notes the assessment.

Oh, and if we continue to mess around, it gets a lot, lot worse: By 2100, a “once-in-20-year extreme heat day” will occur “every two or three years over most of the nation.”

Projected decline in water stored in snow across the Southwest National Climate Assessment.

3. America is parched. According to the assessment, the Western drought of recent years “represents the driest conditions in 800 years.” Some of the worst consequences were in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and 2012, where the total cost to agriculture amounted to $10 billion. The rate of loss of water in these states was “double the long-term average,” reports the assessment. And of course, future trends augur more of the same, or worse, with the Southwest to be particularly hard hit. As seen in the image at right, projected “snow water equivalent,” or water held in snowpack, will decline dramatically across this area over the course of the century.

4. But when it rains, the floods can be devastating. At the same time, climate change is also exacerbating extreme rainfall, because on a warmer planet, the air can hold more water vapor. Sure enough, the United States has seen record rains and floods of late, including, most dramatically, a June 2008 Iowa flooding event that “exceeded the once-in-500-year flood level by more than 5 feet,” according to the assessment.

More generally, reports the document, the “amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average” since 1991. Staggeringly, the Northeast has seen a 71 percent increase in the amount of precipitation that now falls in the heaviest precipitation events, rain or snow, since 1958.

National Climate Assessment.

5. There is less of America. Thanks to global warming, the United States has shrunk. That’s right: Sea level around the world has risen by eight inches in the last century, swallowing up coastline everywhere, including here. Granted, “eight inches” in this case is just an average; the actual amount of sea level rise varies from place to place. But the risk is clear: When a storm like Sandy arrives, those living on the coasts have less protection. Quite simply, they’re closer to the danger.

Such is the condition for quite a lot of Americans: Almost 5 million currently live within four vertical feet of the ocean at high tide, according to the assessment. In the future, they’re going to live even closer than that, as sea level is projected to increase by one to four feet over the coming century.

Oh, and then there’s the infrastructure. “Thirteen of the nation’s 47 largest airports have at least one runway with an elevation within 12 feet of current sea levels,” notes the assessment.

6. Alaska is becoming unrecognizable. Nowhere is global warming more stark than in our only Arctic state. Temperatures there have increased much more than the national average: 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1949, or “double the rest of the country.” The state has the United States’ biggest and most dramatic glaciers—and it is losing them rapidly. Meanwhile, storms batter coasts that used to be insulated by now-vanished sea ice.

And the ground is literally giving way in many places, as permafrost thaws, destabilizing roads, infrastructure, and the places where people live. Eighty percent of the entire state has permafrost beneath its surface. The state currently spends $10 million per year to repair the damage from thawing permafrost and is projected to spend $5.6-$7.6 billion repairing infrastructure by 2080.

7. America is ablaze. More drought, and more heat, means more wildfires. And sure enough, the United States has been setting numerous records on this front. In 2011, Arizona and New Mexico had “the largest wildfires in their recorded history, affecting more than 694,000 acres.” The same went for scorching Texas that year; it also saw unprecedented wildfires and 3.8 million acres consumed in the state. That’s “an area about the size of Connecticut,” notes the assessment.

And then there is Alaska, where “a single large fire in 2007 released as much carbon to the atmosphere as had been absorbed by the entire circumpolar Arctic tundra during the previous quarter century.” Because, on top of everything else, increasing wildfires actually make global warming itself worse, by releasing still more carbon from the ground.

In sum, you don’t live in America any more. To borrow a page (or, a title) from Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, perhaps we should say you live in Ameriica. It is a different place, a different country, and by now, everybody is noticing.

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7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

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