An inconvenient assessment (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

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http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/hl524lvr17054q65/fulltext.pdf

Seven years ago, scientists published a pioneering study to help Americans understand the implications change. Here's why you've never heard of it.

Global warming is definitely happening. That’s the easy part. But it’s no cinch to dramatize the phenomenon, or to personalize it. As scientists repeatedly caution, climate change can’t be cited as the direct cause of any individual weather event, no matter how extreme. Furthermore, many climate-induced changes are occurring on a relatively slow timescale.

Take sea-level rise: It’s one of the most certain outcomes of global warming, but at least at the moment the increase is probably about an inch per decade—not exactly something you’d notice on your beach vacation. And as for the culprits behind it all—the greenhouse gases—they’re invisible in the atmosphere. All of which raises the question: How do you make people wake up about global warming, take it seriously, and perceive it as a core component of the future they’ll have to live with? How do you get them to prepare, just as they might for a terrorist attack, or a pandemic, or an intense hurricane landfall?

One idea would be a national initiative to make climate science and its implications accessible to every American, translating the science in a way that citizens cannot only understand but also begin to perceive in their backyards and communities. Sure, you’d need a rigorous scientific report, but you’d also have to go beyond mere technical jargon to engage local stakeholder communities with issues that will affect them. You’d have to bring global warming down from the atmosphere to a personal level.

Such a project actually did exist once, though you might not have heard of it.

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1. A very important article. Thanks for posting this.

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In the context of repeated scandals over
the relationship between the Bush government
and science, the story of the National
Assessment often has been overlooked.
Other tales may have had more immediate
flair—former industry lobbyists revising
climate reports and then getting jobs with
ExxonMobil, for example, or top scientists
(including the former surgeon general)
going public to announce they’ve been
gagged. Yet in the words of global warming
whistleblower Rick Piltz, the deepsixing
of the National Assessment remains
“the central climate science scandal of the
administration.”1

If we wish to grasp the true consequences
of the so-called war on science—and to
learn how it has rendered us, during a crucial
period of six to eight years, unable to
grapple with what is arguably our biggest
national and global problem— learning
about the National Assessment’s suppression
is critical. And as climate change continues
apace, and may be moving much
faster than expected, we need an updated
assessment now more than ever.

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Even before the National Assessment’s
completion and final release,
therefore, its potential to trigger a
broad national dialogue about the repercussions
of human-induced global
warming drew fierce resistance. Toward
the tail end of Bill Clinton’s
time in office, conservatives fought
to quash its influence. Republican
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who
would later become chairman of the
Committee on Environment and Public
Works, even helped stage a lawsuit
against it.7 He was joined by the
right-wing Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI) and other conservative
members of Congress including
Republican Cong. Jo Ann Emerson
of Missouri, who dubbed the National
Assessment “a biased, gloom
and doom piece of science fiction.”8
The lawsuit sought, astonishingly,
to prevent the release of the report
itself—in essence, the legal suppression
of scientific information—based
upon various procedural objections
to the manner in which the National
Assessment Synthesis Team and Clinton
administration went about preparing
it. The legal proceedings were
a prelude of things to come.

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