National Academies Praise Obama Climate Report Pending Under Trump

"The United States’ top independent science experts have blessed a draft Obama administration climate science report — left behind for the Trump administration to finish — that presents a strong contrast to inaccurate scientific claims by President Trump’s top environmental official.

The document, dubbed the “Climate Science Special Report,” is a product of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the federal entity that coordinates climate research across the government and publishes, every four years, a major assessment of how climate change is affecting the United States. A draft of the report was submitted for review to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine shortly before the change in administration.

The report’s text, which strongly affirms that global warming is being driven by humans, received an overall clean bill of health Tuesday from the academies. The committee of 11 scientists reviewing the report called it “impressive, timely, and generally well-written” and said it was “generally impressed with the breadth, accuracy, and rigor of the draft. The draft emphasizes the robust evidence that human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have substantially warmed the planet and are causing myriad changes to the Earth system, some of which are effectively irreversible on human timescales.”"

Chris Mooney reports for the Washington Post March 15, 2017.