The glaciers in Glacier Bay National Park are moving faster than Congress and the White House in reacting to global climate change.
This week’s circulation of an authoritative government report on global climate change is putting some heat on America’s denier-in-chief, according to the New York Times. The draft report, written by scientists inside and outside the U.S. government, “will force President Trump to choose between accepting the conclusions of his administration’s scientists and the demands of his conservative supporters,” the Times says.
That’s true. Trump now must decide to publish the report as written or to allow his non-scientists to alter its contents to conform with his belief that global warming isn’t real. As it stands now, the report’s conclusion that “evidence for a changing climate abounds” leaves little room for equivocation.
What frustrates the overwhelming number of scientists who keep warning us about climate change and the local leaders whose communities are being assaulted by extreme weather events is that the debate over climate science should have been settled, and in fact was settled, years ago. The Administration’s objective and the strategy of climate deniers in Congress has been to keep the debate alive to legitimize doubt and justify inaction.
Equally frustrating is that Washington’s stalemate on this issue could be resolved easily if the combatants really wanted to find common ground. As so many of us have said for so long, the deniers and skeptics could at least acknowledge the chance that our climate scientists have it right. From that perspective, the latest report can be accepted as an assessment of risk if not reality. The responsible reaction would be to minimize and manage that risk.
Furthermore, as so many of us have said for so long, the things we can do to manage climate risks are socially, economically and environmentally beneficial to the nation, even if it turns out that scientists have over-estimated the threat of global warming and misdiagnosed its causes.
Climate deniers deny that fact, too, arguing that confronting climate change would kill American jobs and cripple our economy. But what kills jobs and cripples competitiveness are elected leaders who want to keep the economy stuck in 20th century technologies and fuels rather than grabbing the opportunities in front of us today.
The data show clearly that our most dynamic jobs engine now is the renewable energy industry. The world’s most competitive economies will be those that capitalize on rather than resist the world’s transition to clean energy. In fact, the work involved in mitigating and adapting to climate change can and should be one of our most vibrant new industries.
In short, this tedious conflict between climate denial and climate activism should not continue. Record-setting weather disasters consistent with climate science are happening all around us. The risks of denial are evident, considerable and real. Keeping the federal government from acknowledging that is not healthy skepticism. It’s a dangerous and despicable political strategy.
Correction: My original post said the new report from federal climate scientists had been “leaked”. The New York Times, where the news story of the report first appeared, has since acknowledged that the document was not leaked; its authors had previously made it available to the public for review.