An Inconvenient Assessment

Abstract

Seven years ago, scientists published a pioneering study to help Americans understand the implications of climate 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. So you might want to talk to people living on the Gulf Coast or in Florida about how rising sea levels will impact their beaches and coastal homes and change their hurricane vulnerabilities; to Californians and Pacific Northwesterners about the consequences of declining mountain snowpack for their drinking water supplies; to those living in the heartland about projected changes to agriculture; to those in the Southwest about increasing risks of wildfire and drought; and so on.

Such a project actually did exist once, though you might not have heard of it. It went by the common name of the U.S. National Assessment, though the final product's official title–Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change–was much wordier. But industry groups, conservative think tanks, and global warming skeptics despised the National Assessment like nothing else in the world of climate science (which is really saying something). They suspected a nefarious plot by then-Vice President Al Gore to build a broader constituency for action on global warming. And after they gave the report their thumbs down, their gladiatorial champion–the Bush administration–lopped off its head. Not only did the White House undermine the first incarnation of the assessment, released in 2000, but rather than following up on this pioneering experiment in a serious way, it censored mere references to it out of subsequent government climate science documents. Then the administration tried to cover its tracks by replacing a required follow-up assessment with what amounted to a scientific sham.

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 deep-sixing 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.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unlike today, the best way of responding to the threat of global warming was easily agreed upon: Thou shalt study the problem. So in 1990, Congress passed the Global Change Research Act. Among other tasks, it required the government to develop a “National Global Change Research Plan,” to be updated every three years, and a scientific “assessment” of climate change and its impacts, to be issued every four.

The first full-blown national assessment didn't actually appear until 2000, however. That's quite understandable in light of the developing nature of the science. As Piltz–who left the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in 2005, complaining of the National Assessment's suppression–explains, initially the government's climate science program largely focused on the “blue and white planet issues.” In essence, the task was to establish that global warming was actually happening (assessing its consequences without this understanding would have been premature). 2

It was only after the 1995 Second Assessment Report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which historically declared that the “balance of evidence” suggested a discernible human impact on climate, that momentum truly began to build within the Clinton administration for a comprehensive study of impacts. 3 It would be a scientific report, but of an untraditional sort, growing out of conversations between scientists and regional stakeholders across the country–farmers, hunters, ranchers, fishermen, local activists, business-people, mayors, and other elected officials at state and local levels. A nationwide “stakeholder network” would be assembled, and the report would, in a very real sense, reflect the concerns of the grassroots. Indeed, as a later scientific review committee estimated, the National Assessment's work had been roughly half devoted to a purely scientific objective (“assess”), while the other 50 percent of the effort broke down equally among two different goals: “teach” and “involve.” 4

A key feature of the National Assessment was its revelation that the consequences of climate change would not be monolithic. Different U.S. regions could be expected to respond to rising global temperatures in varied, nuanced ways.

Ultimately, the National Assessment process brought together the work of twenty university-based regional teams, five additional scientific teams studying various sectors of the economy, and a federal scientific advisory group, the National Assessment Synthesis Team, to produce two major documents–a 154-page overview and a far more detailed 600-page “foundation report”–as well as a series of regional and sectoral reports and many journal and news articles. Thus the assessment's output represented, in composite, the toils of hundreds of researchers. The first wave of reports was always envisioned as the beginning stage of an ongoing experiment in engagement between scientists and the society they serve. Future assessments would both update the science and broaden local stakeholder involvement.

In the first (and currently, the only) full-scale iteration of the National Assessment, two key climate models were used to project how further changes due to global warming would manifest in the United States. These models did not deliver revealed truths; rather, they outlined possibilities deserving of serious consideration. As the overview report put it: “Scenarios are plausible alternative futures–each an example of what might happen under particular assumptions. Scenarios are not specific predictions or forecasts. Rather, scenarios provide a starting point for examining questions about an uncertain future and can help us to visualize alternative futures in concrete and human terms.” 5

A key feature of the National Assessment was its revelation that the consequences of climate change would not be monolithic. In a country as large and ecologically diverse as the United States, different regions could be expected to respond to rising global temperatures in varied and nuanced ways. “The potential impacts on water resources are an important issue in every region examined, although the nature of the concern is very different for the mountainous West than for the East,” noted Thomas Karl, then-director of the National Climatic Data Center, and two colleagues, in a July 18, 2000 joint statement to Congress. “Overall, U.S. crop productivity is very likely to increase over the next few decades, but the gains will not be uniform across the nation. Falling prices and competitive pressures are very likely to stress some farmers.” 6

The assessment's reports were distributed among members of Congress, to state governors, major libraries, and so forth. But some didn't like its message much. Like any global warming report, the National Assessment was born into a highly politicized environment. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol in particular had amped up the Republican-Democrat polarization–as had Vice President Gore's championing of the climate issue.

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.

Drought and fires devastated parts of southeastern Washington State in 2006, a consequence, some scientists believe, of warming temperatures

George W. Bush came into office as a presumed global warming convert: He claimed on the campaign trail that as president he would regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Yet before long, Bush and administration officials made an about-face, expressing skepticism of modern climate science and dismissing Kyoto. These did not sound like the sort of people interested in building upon the admittedly incomplete experiment that had been the first National Assessment. In fact, they weren't even up for defending the report they had inherited. The administration soon settled the lawsuit with an odd admission that the National Assessment did not constitute a statement of government “policy,” rather than defending strongly against it. 9

Coral reefs off the coast of Belize (pictured) and elsewhere are dying due in part to rising ocean temperatures, scientists believe.

Meanwhile, the assessment's detractors–especially the CEI, an industry-funded think tank that at the time received substantial donations from fossil fuel behemoth ExxonMobil and had long been at war with the findings of modern climate science–prepared their next move. The institute became particularly energized on this front in mid-2002, after the State Department released a required report on climate change to the United Nations that contained a recap of the assessment's findings. 10 The report inspired a front-page New York Times story about the “stark shift” that it apparently represented for the administration. 11 This, in turn, prompted a dismissive comment from the president stating that the document had been “put out by the bureaucracy,” and provoked much wailing from groups such as CEI, who redoubled their National Assessment offensive.

Conservatives had long been blasting the National Assessment as “junk science,” in line with a clever political strategy of fighting over the science of climate itself to prevent its use as a basis for undesired political action to cap greenhouse gas emissions. 12 With the National Assessment in particular, a chief criticism turned on the report's two climate models, which had been used to project different plausible futures and naturally didn't agree in some respects, particularly when it came to smaller scale features. Testifying before Congress on July 25, 2002, Patrick Michaels–a longtime climate change skeptic who in the past had received substantial funding from energy interests–argued, “Under the ethics of science, [the models] should have been abandoned or modified, rather than used as input to a document with substantial policy implications.” The National Assessment, Michaels concluded, “should be redacted from the public record.” 13 Since models allegedly weren't valid “data,” critics soon pronounced the National Assessment–and any government report relying upon it–to be in violation of a recently passed statute often referred to as the “Data Quality Act.” In August 2003, CEI brought the first lawsuit under the Data Quality Act, seeking to have the assessment declared in violation and to legally block its further “dissemination.” 14

On a scientific level, such attacks were spurious. To understand the caliber of the National Assessment, consider that in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the nation's leading independent scientific advisory body, released a report that relied upon the assessment for an entire section on possible climate change impacts on the United States. “The U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts,” wrote the NAS, “provides a basis for summarizing the potential consequences of climate change.” 15 The report went on to characterize the models at the basis of the assessment as “well-regarded.”

Conservatives blasted the assessment as “junk science,” in line with a clever political strategy of fighting over the science of climate to prevent its use as a basis for undesired political action.

But in this type of political brawl, considered scientific opinion didn't much matter. Even as the National Assessment won applause in scientific sectors, the Bush administration worked to limit its potential influence (and please the White House's allies). Rather than issuing a robust defense of the report in response to the second CEI lawsuit–explaining, for instance, that using climate models doesn't violate standards of “data quality”–the administration said nary a word. Instead, even as the lawsuit was dismissed, the administration released a highly misleading disclaimer–blazoned to this day on the government website that hosts the National Assessment–to the effect that the report was “not subjected” to the guidelines of the Data Quality Act. 16 Of course it wasn't. The Data Quality Act was not even operative during the days when the National Assessment was prepared and released. However, an NAS endorsement strongly suggests that the report passes reasonable scientific scrutiny.

The Bush administration undermined the National Assessment not only by saddling it with a misleading disclaimer that denigrated its value. At around the same time, the CCSP, the interagency structure set up by the current administration to manage the government's climate research enterprises, began to act as if there were something so wrong with the study that it couldn't even be cited or mentioned in other government reports. Piltz, a former senior associate of the CCSP, revealed in his 2005 resignation memo that the Bush White House, and particularly the Council on Environmental Quality, had made a habit of removing virtually all discussion of the National Assessment from CCSP reports and documents, beginning with the 2002 edition of Our Changing Planet, the program's annual report to Congress. 17 Piltz's revelations led to front-page newspaper headlines about the man who, Piltz charged, had been either directly or indirectly involved in editing many of these documents–a lawyer named Philip Cooney, who had previously been a chief lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute on climate issues and, after the scandal brought on by Piltz's revelations, moved on to work for ExxonMobil.

Many members of the public heard about the Cooney “fox in the henhouse” story, but media accounts rarely emphasized that the war on the National Assessment lay at its heart. In fact, Piltz has charged in federal court that Cooney “played a lead role as White House agent for enforcing the suppression of the National Assessment and the systematic removal of meaningful reference to it from CCSP publications.” 18 By 2003, as the CCSP prepared its legally required Strategic Plan to govern climate change research over the course of the administration, the phenomenon appeared particularly stark. As Piltz's court declaration described the Strategic Plan's editing process:

In the March 31, 2003 draft, there were a total of 12 references to the National Assessment. In the June 2, 2003 draft, four of these references had been removed. In the June 30, 2003 “Agency Concurrence Draft,” seven references remained. In the July 24 pre-publication version that was released in a limited edition, five references remained. In the September 2003 final printed version of the plan, four of these five references had been removed. The National Assessment was mentioned only in a single sentence, which did not include the actual title of the report. 19

Reductions in forests, such as this Costa Rican tropical forest, would diminish the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

The CCSP called upon the NAS to review its Strategic Plan for climate research. The NAS strongly criticized the document's virtually nonexistent treatment of the National Assessment, which had made “important contributions to understanding the possible consequences of climate variability and change.” 20 The NAS report added that the National Assessment's “processes of stakeholder engagement and transparent review” had been “exemplary” and upbraided the administration for ignoring it, rather than building upon its example. Yet once again, in a by-now-typical pattern, the administration did not provide a substantive explanation or justification for its blatant ignoring of the previous administration's central assessment project. Perhaps that failure to respond substantively shouldn't be surprising. In 2005, then-CCSP director James Mahoney told the publication Environmental Science and Technology that his program had been restricted “on our use of information” from the assessment. 21

The CCSP's 2003 Strategic Plan did not lay out a blueprint for the follow-up National Assessment that had once been envisioned. Instead, it outlined 21 shorter technical reports on various climate issues to be released over the course of the Bush administration. All were originally intended to be out this year, but only two have been completed. One is a study meant to clarify debate over atmospheric temperature trends, and the other concerns greenhouse gas emissions scenarios; neither of which is a “backyard” topic like the National Assessment's subject matter. Not only does it seem inconceivable that the rest of the planned studies will emerge as originally scheduled, but it's also hard to argue that these 21 “synthesis reports,” even if completed, would constitute an adequate legal substitute for the National Assessment under the 1990 Global Change Research Act. The National Assessment was a far-reaching study that synthesized a large volume of research and aimed to equip everyone from civilians to congresspersons with a better sense of our environmental risk factors, thus providing the informational tools to engender better public policy decisions. Those are exactly the areas in which the CCSP Strategic Plan–and its bevy of episodic and technocratic reports–falls short.

In April 2005, after Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate whether the Strategic Plan fulfilled the requirements of the Global Change Research Act, the GAO reported back critically. Congress's auditing office noted that the planned 21 synthesis reports treated current environmental trends and projected future outcomes, but fell short when it came to analyzing the effects of climate change on natural resources, biodiversity, agriculture, and other impact areas directly relevant to humans. 22 But perhaps that's not the goal: With the Strategic Plan and its smattering of episodic reports, the Bush administration could keep global warming in the realm of technocratic discourse, rather than engaging citizens who might care about it. And the administration has made its constituents happy at the same time. As Myron Ebell of the CEI has commented of the National Assessment: “To the extent that it has vanished, we have succeeded.” 23 On the first point, at least, Ebell agrees with his nemesis Piltz, who laments that “a nationwide network of scientists and stakeholders who participated in the 2000 assessment was disbanded and largely disappeared, and this major study almost vanished from public consciousness.” 24

On November 14, 2006, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth sued the Bush administration for not issuing a 2004 National Assessment on Climate Change. The plaintiffs argued the CCSP had failed to abide by the stipulations of the Global Change Research Act, which requires the development of an updated research plan every three years and an assessment every four. The only National Assessment was released in November 2000, and the last Global Change Research Plan in July 2003. Both are, accordingly, out of date.

In late August 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong decided in favor of the plaintiffs, rebuking the Bush administration for its failure to produce these required documents. The judge ordered the administration to produce a new plan by March 1, 2008, as well as a new assessment by May 31, 2008. However, the ruling remained ambiguous about the form that the new assessment must take. There's wiggle room, and it is likely the administration will use it. Indeed, as recently as this summer, the government signaled its continuing unwillingness to seriously study the implications of global warming for its own citizens, or to inform them about those impacts. In July 2007, the State Department released (considerably late) its next required communication to the United Nations on climate change. The report failed to address climate impacts upon the United States in a scientifically rigorous or thorough manner and was widely denounced by critics for this omission.

If the federal government does not study climate risks regionally, it ought to at the very least provide some type of funding for various states so that they may do so.

Alas, the ongoing inability of the Bush government to discuss global warming impacts or communicate about them with the broader public becomes more tragic as climate change makes itself more manifest. In his declaration in the 2006 lawsuit, Michael MacCracken, a climate scientist who coordinated the National Assessment process during the Clinton administration, noted, “In my expert opinion and that of much of the scientific community, the impacts of climate change are appearing sooner and with greater intensity than had been projected.” MacCracken added that in light of these changes, “the limits of the 2000 National Assessment are becoming more apparent and more serious.”

Updates to the old National Assessment are needed for many reasons, MacCracken explained. The 2000 report didn't study all U.S. regions with the same thoroughness; a much better suite of climate models are now available for any future study, allowing for more reliable regional-scale projections than before; and updates are desperately needed in a number of particular impact areas: “projections of sea-level rise and hurricane intensification, regional changes in temperature and precipitation, changes in soil moisture and runoff, and of the potential for a higher frequency of conditions favorable for drought and wildfires.” 25 Likewise, Thomas Karl, as director of the National Climatic Data Center, told Congress that future National Assessments would need to utilize global models that examine the “interactive effects of changes in land use and vegetation” to gain a better understanding of “local and regional climate change and variability.” Another high priority would be “improved efforts that combine analysis of the model results with the insights available from analysis of historical climatology and past weather patterns.” 26

In sum, we can think of the late Clinton-era National Assessment process, however imperfect and experimental, as a model of how democratic governments can and should do science–in interaction with their people, in the service of their people. Without a nationally coordinated effort to study and communicate these types of impacts, U.S. communities cannot be expected to prepare in anything beyond a haphazard fashion. Consider just one case study: the issue of changing hurricane risks. Global warming is currently expected not only to raise the sea level but also to intensify the average hurricane and to increase its rainfall (though other changes, such as storm numbers, are not well understood). How will such changes affect the vulnerability of exposed coastal cities, such as New Orleans, Galveston/Houston, Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg, Miami, New York, and many others? No national effort exists to contemplate countermeasures.

The end result of this controversy has been that any substantial means of addressing climate change from the standpoint of vulnerability and preparedness has been indefinitely suspended in the United States, at least on the national level. Congress has made some effort, but with little success. Last May, for instance, Senator Kerry introduced a bipartisan amendment to the Water Resources Development Act, which would have required projects undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “to use the best available climate science, account for potential future impacts of climate change on storms and floods, and account for the costs and benefits associated with the loss and protection of wetlands, floodplains, and other natural systems that can buffer the effects of climate change.” 27 The amendment failed by a vote of 51-42.

Densely inhabited areas on the U.S. Gulf Coast, as well as Venice (pictured), face the likelihood of rising seas

To be sure, states and communities may well begin to ready themselves in the absence of any federal initiative, and indeed some, such as California and Florida, already have. But the problem with this piecemeal approach is that others states haven't and won't take up the slack for the federal government–indeed, they may not even be able to afford to. If the federal government does not study climate risks regionally, it ought to at the very least provide some type of funding for various states so that they may do so. Ideally, however, a nationally coordinated effort would exist to ensure scientific accuracy and comprehensiveness.

From Montana to the Pitzal Glacier, Austria, (pictured) warmer temperatures contribute to receding glaciers and ice caps

To accomplish this, we must resuscitate the full-fledged National Assessment endeavor–even if that may be impossible at any time prior to the dawn of a new U.S. administration in early 2009. Policy makers, stakeholders, and the climate science community must not forget the lesson of the past, but at the same time, their chief objective should be to push the current crop of presidential candidates to pledge that they will begin to undertake a farsighted National Assessment immediately upon taking office. Any new president who does otherwise would fail, as George W. Bush's administration has thus far failed, in performing a core duty to the voters of the United States: preparing them for the future that they'll have to live with and in. In an interview with Environmental Science and Technology in 2005, Rick Piltz may have put it best. He was asked, “So when you stop debating the carbon cycle and the contribution of aerosols to radiative forcing and begin discussing the effects of climate change to Alabama or Colorado, the administration gets scared?” Piltz curtly replied: “Yes, you start talking about real things that affect people.” 28

Supplementary Material

Summary for Policy Makers: The Science of Climate Change

Supplementary Material

Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change