The New York Times has allegedly received a copy of yet-to-be-released climate change report and it was leaked by “some government scientists” who feared that the Trump administration would suppress it.
“One government scientist who worked on the report,” told TheNYT on condition of anonymity “he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.” The so-called National Climate Assessment will be released once the Trump administration approves it.
“The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years,” TheNYT reported Monday evening.
The report also stated that these leaks are being sent to the media due to the politically appointed figureheads muzzling federal research on global warming. with some even predicting that President Donald Trump would “delete the data” that countered his views on global warming, this despite no evidence to support it.
“The Research Plan was published days before President Trump took office,” former EPA official David Schnare wrote in a recent op-ed.
“Both the Research Plan and the Assessment need to go back to ground zero and be redone, and a properly appointed [Office of Science and Technology Policy] leadership and staff have all the authority and tools needed to reexamine the science,” Schnare wrote.
“How much more the climate will change depends on future emissions and the sensitivity of the climate system to those emissions,” reads the draft report obtained by TheNYT.
You can see the document here.
As reported by The New York Times:
The study examines every corner of the United States and finds that all of it was touched by climate change. The average annual temperature in the United States will continue to rise, the authors write, making recent record-setting years “relatively common” in the near future. It projects increases of 5.0 to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 to 4.8 degrees Celsius) by the late century, depending on the level of future emissions.
It says the average annual rainfall across the country has increased by about 4 percent since the beginning of the 20th century. Parts of the West, Southwest and Southeast are drying up, while the Southern Plains and the Midwest are getting wetter.
With a medium degree of confidence, the authors linked the contribution of human-caused warming to rising temperatures over the Western and Northern United States. It found no direct link in the Southeast.
Additionally, the government scientists wrote that surface, air and ground temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic are rising at a frighteningly fast rate — twice as fast as the global average.
“It is very likely that the accelerated rate of Arctic warming will have a significant consequence for the United States due to accelerating land and sea ice melting that is driving changes in the ocean including sea level rise threatening our coastal communities,” the report says.
The study does not make policy recommendations, but it notes that stabilizing the global mean temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius — what scientists have referred to as the guardrail beyond which changes become catastrophic — will require significant reductions in global levels of carbon dioxide.