The White House has just
released its new National Climate Assessment (NCA),
and its central scientific message will be familiar to climate
scientists and the White House press corps. Climate impacts are already
apparent in the United States, they are likely to worsen, and
communities should begin factoring climate change into all kinds of
decisions. From Hawaii to Maine, from the fishing industry to
manufacturing, the report’s 30 chapters emphasize that “evidence of
human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts
are increasing across the country.”
What’s new, however, is that after putting climate issues somewhat on
the back burner prior to the 2012 elections, the Obama Administration
is now giving a full-throated, multiday endorsement to the 1300-page
document. Top White House advisor John Podesta and several climate
scientists are briefing the press this morning, and President Barack
Obama i
will be sitting down today with TV meteorologists in a series of interviews pegged to the report. This
afternoon, visiting "stakeholders" from around the country will gather
for a high-profile White House briefing and listening session, the first
of a series planned around the country in coming months.
Today’s report is the fourth produced under a
1990 law
that instituted the National Climate Assessment. “Hundreds of the best
climate scientists from across the U.S., not just in the public sector
but in the private sector as well, have worked over the last four years
to produce this report,” Podesta told the White House press corps
during yesterday’s daily press briefing. “It will contain a huge amount
of practical, useable knowledge that state and local decision-makers can
take advantage of as they plan for the impacts of climate change.”
White House science advisor John
Holdren told reporters this morning that the report would "reinforce" all three parts of Obama's 2013 Climate Action Plan:
cutting greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to impacts, and leading internationally. Whether
or not that happens, this is by far the fullest embrace of the
assessment process in its tumultuous 24 year history. President Bill
Clinton had to fight Congress for years to publish the first National
Assessment, which came out in 2000. A conservative group sued to stop
President George W. Bush from publishing a second one. That
administration also scrubbed mention of the 2000 report from official
documents, angering climate advocates. An environmental group even sued
in 2006 to force Bush to publish the report, then two years late; it is
supposed to be quadrennial. (Here’s a historical
blow by blow,
by a former federal climate office official.) Insiders consider the
third report, published with little fanfare in 2009 during the early
days of Obama’s first term, as a “stillborn” effort.
Still, some Washington science policy veterans consider the
assessment a rather unique effort for a scientific endeavor, since it
includes input from local groups and industries facing possible climate
impacts in the future. For instance, scientists and activists involved
in the original massive effort that produced the initial 2000 report,
say the 2014 version also has a strong “bottom up” flavor. The dozen or
so federal agencies that assembled today’s report sponsored some 70
workshops and “listening sessions” over the past four years, allowing
local groups to not only give input but shape the report’s form. In
addition, small federal grants to state and local nonprofit groups,
policymakers, business owners and academics allowed them to submit
formal “input reports” that gave federal official access to local
know-how.
The overall message: “We have enough information on climate to act
and we know it’s happening,” says climatologist Victoria Keener, among
the recipients of the grants. Keener works for the Honolulu-based
East-West center, a nonprofit. As part of her group’s contribution to the NCA she led a diverse group in 2012 in publishing a 170-page
report
called Climate Change and Pacific Islands: Indicators and Impacts.
(It’s part of a project called the Pacific Islands Regional Climate
Assessment, or PIRCA). Several of PIRCA’s findings, touching on fishing,
sea level rise, disaster planning and much else, “made it into the
final report,” she says. So did one of her document’s anecdotes: It
relates how Steve Jacobs, the vice president of a landfill in Waianae,
Hawaii, used climate prediction information on La Nina in 2010 to drive a
decision to spend $300,000 to upgrade his facility’s storm water
system. “When the rain hit we were ready,” he says.
Keener and others are hopeful that the NCA has catalyzed a process
that doesn’t stop with the publication of the massive document today.
And to keep the buzz going, a federal climate office has created
discussion boards, planned follow on meetings, and organized local
organizing committees to follow up on the report with meaningful climate
adaptation and resilience planning.
For her part, Keener says that the White House effort has helped
drive local regulatory decisions and government interest, including a
ruling by a local water board to alter policies in light of predictions
of future dry conditions. (See
these minutes,
page 5.) And Jacobs says he’s expecting more extreme events in the
coming years, and has helped lead local efforts to improve planning for
hurricanes on the islands. “We believe an ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure,” he says.
The White House and its hundreds of scientist allies are hoping that
kind of thinking makes the National Climate Assessment the rare report
in Washington – one that has a real-world impact.
But some outsiders say the report could have gone further. The World
Wildlife Fund's Nicky Sundt, a former federal official with the U.S.
Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), lauds the new report as part of
"a permanent process" to spin out subsequent updates and reports as the
nation prepares for climate change. But he says the federal advisory
committee that oversees the report, which includes both government and
non-government members, prevented the process from including “some of
the most important policy issues… There's nothing in the report on
budgets, nothing on national security."
