Environmental Law

Climate Change Effect, Cause Evidence Compiled in Exhaustive Report

By Dennis Pfaff and Kevin Livingston, Editors

The newest  in a recent series of federal reports on the potential effects of climate change is perhaps the most comprehensive to date, and predicts wide-ranging challenges for human society and natural systems, including the spread of certain diseases.

The document, the release of which was the subject of a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, also implies a strong role for people in causing global warming, primarily through emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. A federal judge in Oakland, California, last year ordered the assessment to be produced by this May 31. 

Issuance of the document, "Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States," follows by a few days reports that painted a sobering picture of the impact of a warming climate on agriculture, and also found changes in ocean acidity, both of which Climate Law Update recently featured. It also comes a few months after another federal agency focused on global warming's potential effects on the Gulf Coast, as Climate Law Update reported at the time.

Results of both the agriculture and Gulf Coast studies were incorporated into the new report, which also synthesized data from a variety of other studies and sources, including the multi-agency U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the United Nations' Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The compendium analyzes a host of subjects, including temperature, precipitation, sea level rise, and Atlantic hurricanes, as well as potential effects on transportation, water resources, human health and energy production and use. It also looks at what has been causing the planet to warm, a phenomenon scientists believe has doubled in the last half-century.

In addition to the new assessment, government officials also unveiled a new research plan for studying the effects of climate change, and what to do about them. 

Some of the report's predictions were familiar, such as warmer oceans, more intense hurricanes and rising sea levels that could spread spread storm damage inland. Changes in stream flows and precipitation patterns, including more winter precipitation in the North, and less in the Southwest,  were also envisioned, creating unpredictability in managing water supplies. More prosaically, it also included such predictions as a decreased need for winter road maintenance but an uptick in problems such as railroad tracks buckling in the heat.

The document predicted decreasing energy going toward heating but potentially much more devoted to cooling and refrigeration. It also found that every existing source of energy in the country faced some kind of vulnerability to climate change. 

Even more seriously, it saw an uneven pattern of human health impacts from such causes as  water-borne diseases, air pollution and illnesses that could thrive under the changed conditions, such as the rodent-spread Hantavirus (see picture of cotton rat, a virus carrier). Those effects, it concluded, could fall most heavily on people least able to cope:

"Finally, climate change is very likely to accentuate the disparities already evident in the
American health care system. Many of the expected health effects are likely to fall
disproportionately on the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the uninsured. The most
important adaptation to ameliorate health effects from climate change is to support and
maintain the United States’ public health infrastructure."   

The assessment "represents a comprehensive look at the effects of climate change for the United States and will be yet another tool for the nation's decision-makers to use when planning for the future," said Sharon Hays, associate director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a statement upon the release of the report. The science and technology office oversees the climate change science program. The report was released by the Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources National Science and Technology Council, a panel of government officials established under a 1990 law to coordinate research efforts. 

At its base, the report acknowledges a potentially key role for human beings in causing the planet to warm. "Several lines of evidence, including those outlined in the following sections, point to a strong human influence on climate," its authors wrote. Emissions from fossil fuel use and land use change are the primary sources of buildup of carbon dioxide, the chief heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere, according to the document. 

Although environmentalists frequently criticize the administration for allegedly not doing enough to combat global warming, a spokeswoman for the White House science office said the president has long acknowledged that the phenomenon is real and has a human component. Kristin Scuderi pointed to a variety of actions President Bush has taken in the area, including his recent announcement, on new efforts to tackle global warming, again in the face of environmentalists' criticism. She told Climate Law Update:

 "President Bush has always acknowledged climate change. I feel like the administration just gets a bad rap, that we don't believe in it, because that's certainly not the case."

But one of the administration's harshest critics, the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups suing to prod the release of the report, and which also pushed for the recent climate-related protection of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, saw it differently. In a statement, Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the organization, said:

“This administration has seen seven years of suppression of science and a refusal to act on global warming. With today’s scientific assessment along with the listing of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act earlier this month, the tide is finally turning and the administration has been forced to acknowledge the harsh reality of global warming. The important thing now is to actually do something about it.”

The report comes just as congressional debate on bills to address global warming heat up, as  Climate Law Update has been reporting. Scuderi declined to predict the impact of the new report on those deliberations, other than to help lawmakers "in their policy making process."

Scuderi also said the government had not been trying to hide the report. She said Bush administration lawyers had argued that the earlier releases of the separate reports constituted compliance with the law at issue in the case.

 (Photo: Cotton rat; Credit: Wikipedia)

Full post as published by Climate Law Update on May 29, 2008 (boomark / email).