VIDEO: 97% of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong

The biggest survey of climate research to date finds that scientists are more united than ever.

Telling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That "consensus gap", as it's known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook's website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the some 4000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it's caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2000 journals across two decades. "People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy," he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look, "like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here."

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: "All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent."

http://climatedesk.org/2013/05/video-97-of-climate-scientists-cant-be-

Climate Science Denier Leads House Science Subcommittee

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee has named a climate science denier congressman as the new chairman of the subcommittee responsible for climate change issues. With Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) as subcommittee chair, House Science has no shortage of climate deniers making science their prime target.

Stewart uses familiar Republican tactics to argue against cutting our greenhouse gas pollution: He told Mother Jones he is unconvinced anthropogenic global warming is "based upon sound science" - despite 97 percent of climate scientists saying otherwise - "before we make any long-lasting policy decisions that could negatively affect our economy."

Stewart also told The Salt Lake Tribune:

"I'm not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is. I think it is probably not as immediate as some people do." [...]

"What is the real threat? What are the economic impacts of those threats? And what are the economic impacts of those remedies?" he asked, explaining his approach. "Some of the remedies are more expensive to our economy than the threat may turn out to be."

For more context of Stewart's views, just look at where he is directing the subcommittee's attention. At a hearing Wednesday, Stewart knocked the EPA's extensive review of rules that protect the air and lamented that industry-funded research play too small a role at the agency. Not surprisingly, oil and gas was a top player in funding Stewart's election to Congress.

Weeks ago, House Science attempted to hold a hearing stacked with climate deniers as witnesses (only to be foiled by bad weather that same day).

Back in Stewart's home state, The Salt Lake Tribune has urged Utah leaders to take the opposite action. In a strong editorial, the paper pointed fingers at lawmakers for their ignorance, "blind or willful," that has "transformed climate change into a political issue rather than the global threat it clearly is proving to be."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/20/1748771/climate-science-de

(Mis)Understanding Sea-Level Rise And Climate Impacts

Cross-posted from National Geographic

One of the most important and threatening risks of climate change is sea-level rise (SLR). The mechanisms are well understood, and the direction of changes in sea-level is highly certain - it is rising and the rate of rise will accelerate. There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes) about the timing and rate of rise that have to do with how fast we continue to put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the responses of (especially) ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the sensitivity of the climate.

Even little changes can have big consequences. As we saw with Superstorm Sandy, where extremely severe weather was combined with a very high tide, on top of sea levels that have risen six to nine inches over the past century, even a little bit of sea-level rise around the world has the potential to cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and the displacement of millions of people.

The Pacific Institute, among many other organizations, has been working to understand and evaluate the nature of the threat of sea-level rise and the risks posed to coastal populations, property, and ecosystems. In 1990, a colleague and I published the first detailed mapping and economic assessment of the risks of sea-level rise to the San Francisco Bay Area, looking at populations at risk, the value of property in new flood zones, and the costs of building some kinds of coastal protection ("adaptation") to protect higher valued assets. That early report can be found here.

Then, in 2009 and 2010, the Pacific Institute, with funding from the State of California, conducted a detailed, high-resolution mapping analysis of the entire coast from Oregon to Mexico. We analyzed a set of sea-level rise scenarios developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and worked with the California Energy Commission, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Ocean Protection Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Survey, FEMA, and others to evaluate the risks to people, property, transportation infrastructure, ecosystems, power plants, wastewater treatment plants, and more, should those scenarios of sea-level rise happen. The full peer-reviewed report, the high resolution maps, specialty maps, and all open source GIS data can be publicly downloaded here. (A peer-reviewed journal article was also published.) That analysis suggests coastal regions are highly vulnerable to even modest sea-level rises with hundreds of thousands of people and more than a hundred billion dollars of infrastructure already in zones at risk of future flooding.

I was reminded this week, however, of the difficulty some people have in understanding the nature of climate risks, when a climate skeptic who shall remain nameless started tweeting his misunderstandings to me without having read our studies (I know this because after I pointed out his errors, he asked me to send the studies to him). My internet-savvy sons have tried for years (only partly successfully) to teach me: DNFTT. But these tweets offer insights into what might be more general misconceptions, so let me address some of them for those who actually want to help the public understand the real risks of climate change.

Misunderstanding #1: Predication versus Scenario. There is a big difference between a prediction and a scenario. Scenarios are tools for examining how changes in some kind of conditions (such as greenhouse gas concentrations) might affect something else (such as climatic conditions or sea-level). They are stories of possible futures based on a range of assumptions. Almost all studies of climate impacts evaluate scenarios to examine possible future conditions, risks, and threats. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt sometimes uses the following:

• Forecast: What you think will happen in the future (could be probabilistic), but with no conditionals. Used in weather forecasts, sales forecasts etc.
• Prediction: A much broader category of scientific statement that implies a complete specification of the circumstances under which X would be expected.
• Projection or Scenario: A conditional prediction about the future. i.e., if a certain set of circumstances come to pass, the climate will respond in the following way.

In the case of sea-level rise, climate modelers and oceanographers make projections of how sea-level would react to a range of assumptions about energy use and type, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate and ice sensitivities. These are not predictions. In the case of our reports, we evaluate the implications for coastal regions should these future sea-level rises occur. This is a risk and vulnerability assessment. In fact, for the estimates of sea-level rise in our study, we clearly note that changes could be both smaller or larger, and slower or faster than our evaluation. None of this is actually relevant to our estimate of the things currently at risk from a 1.4 meter rise.

Misunderstanding #2: Linear versus Exponential. There is sometimes confusion in some people's minds about the difference between a linear trend and an exponential trend. In this case, data on actual changes in sea-level suggest that the recent rates of rise are between 3 and 3.5 millimeters per year. If sea-level changes are linear, then it is easy to project past trends forward: 100 years of rise would add between 0.3 and 0.35 meters. This is what my tweeter did, in an effort to say SLR is a smaller problem than the state-of-the-science 1.4-meter scenario we evaluated. Why the difference? Because climate change, and sea-level responses - are not linear; they are exponential. This means the sea level in the future will rise at an accelerating rate, leading to a much higher end point for any given year. Figure 1 shows this simple concept, but also shows that in the short term, it may be hard to distinguish between the two. A high-school student would get an F for assuming a linear rate for an exponential process. I know of no climate scientist who believes the climate will change in a linear fashion if there is continued exponential growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 1. Exponential versus linear growth. Note, for a while, it's hard to tell the difference, but then the curves diverge dramatically.

Misunderstanding #3: Evaluating Average versus Extreme Risks. Climate scientists are a conservative lot (in the scientific sense, as shown in a recent journal article). As a result, assumptions and scenarios that are typically analyzed (including the ones we used, developed by the Scripps Oceanographic Institute) are in the middle of the range of what could plausibly occur. In particular, even the exponential rate that produces 1.4 meters of rise by around the end of the century includes no rapid acceleration of ice-sheet melt or ablation or other factors that could lead to even faster rates of increase or higher rises. There are some far more disturbing sea-level rise scenarios out there but we didn't analyze them. Any criticism that the scenarios evaluated were too extreme could be equally balanced by criticism that they were not extreme enough. The most recent report on SLR scenarios for the U.S. offers a range from 0.2 meters to 2 meters by 2100 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. USGCRP sea-level rise scenarios showing a range. Even more extreme increases are possible, just not considered likely. Also, note that SLR will not stop in 2100, just because the graph stops there!

Misunderstanding #4: Beware False Dichotomies and Ad Hominem Arguments. This skeptic opened his assault on the sea-level science discussion by arguing that I must not care about sea-level rise because my office was nearly at sea-level. First, a minute spent with Google Earth or a topo map would have shown that our offices are actually around +40 feet above mean sea-level - not in a vulnerable zone even with expected climate change over the next century (barring some more catastrophic scenario), and second, even if my office was in a vulnerable zone, it wouldn't mean I didn't care about the future risks of flooding. His ad hominem response was "OK I get it it [sic], the plan is to sit tight and laugh at others [sic] misfortunes." I know, DNFTT.

Misunderstanding #5. Mitigation versus Adaptation versus Suffering: That same nasty tweet also reveals a deeper misunderstanding about the nature of responses to sea-level rise or any other climate impacts. We only have three options for sea-level rise: trying to reduce the rate of rise (mitigation), coastal defense or retreat (adaptation), and suffering the impacts. People and valuable property in zones threatened by sea-level rise will either suffer greater and greater damage, or will have to be protected with new costly infrastructure, moved away over time in advance of rising seas, or abandoned. These are issues discussed clearly in our studies. Moreover, our work at the Institute explicitly identifies vulnerable populations and strategies to protect them.

This particular climate skeptic lives nowhere near the coast. That could partly explain his lack of understanding or interest in the threats posed by sea-level rise to our extensive coastlines. But the risks facing his own community include growing heat stress and extreme temperatures, loss of inexpensive local hydropower generation, increased forest fire risks, greater air pollution, and, should sea-level rise get really bad, migration of lots of people to his community! More on these risks later.

Let's put these errors and misunderstandings to rest and begin the necessary climate mitigation and adaptation responses, soon, or those exponential curves will begin to bite.

Dr. Peter Gleick is a scientist, innovator, and communicator on global water, environment, and climate issues. He co-founded and leads the Pacific Institute in Oakland.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/06/1645901/sea-level-rise-cli

Explained in 90 Seconds: It's Cold. That Doesn't Mean Global Warming is Fake.

This crash course on climate modeling will come in handy if you ever have to explain a cold snap to a climate denier.

At Climate Desk, we like to call them-affectionately-our "pet trolls." (You know who you are. Hi!) They are regular readers that pepper us on Twitter and Facebook with one of several climate myths upon the publication of every article, sometimes with freakish speed. One of the most popular myths is this: Global warming isn't real because it's really cold outside; climate models are thus full of sh*t. So, here in 90 seconds, is our attempt to explain something we interact with every day, in all sorts of ways, from flying in a plane, to getting a loan, to betting on a horse: computer modeling.

Our video features Drew Purves, from Microsoft in Cambridge, UK, a statistics whiz specializing in modeling the climate and ecosystems. Think of him as the Nate Silver of carbon. You can read about his latest research project, a rallying cry to model the entire world's ecology-that's right, the entire world-in the latest edition of Nature.

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/explained-in-90-seconds-its-cold-that-d

Why Greenland's Melting Could Be the Biggest Climate Disaster of All

Glaciologist Jason Box is racing to figure out just how rapidly we're pushing the 7 meters of sea rise level locked up in the Greenland ice sheet onto our shores.

Jason Box

Jason Box speaks the language of Manhattans. Not the drink-the measuring unit.

As an expert on Greenland who has traveled 23 times to the massive, mile thick northern ice sheet, Box has shown an uncanny ability to predict major melts and breakoffs of Manhattan-sized ice chunks. A few years back, he foretold the release of a "4x Manhattans" piece of ice from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, one so big that once afloat it was dubbed an "ice island." In a scientific paper published in February of 2012, Box further predicted "100 % melt area over the ice sheet" within another decade of global warming. As it happened, the ice sheet's surface almost completely melted just a month later in July-an event that, in Box's words, "signals the beginning of the end for the ice sheet."

Box, who will speak at next week's Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., pulls no punches when it comes to attributing all of this to humans and their fossil fuels. "Those who claim it's all cycles just don't understand that humans are driving the cycle right now, and for the foreseeable future," he says. And the coastal consequences of allowing Greenland to continue its melting-and pour 23 feet's worth of sea level into the ocean over the coming centuries-are just staggering. "If you're the mayor of Hamburg, or Shanghai, or Philadelphia, I think it's in your job description that you think forward a century," says Box. "They're completely inundated by the year 2200."

Unless, that is, something big changes-something big enough to start Greenland cooling, shifting its "mass balance" from ice loss to ice gain once again. But that would require us to reverse global climate change, in an ever-dwindling time frame for doing so.

Currently based at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State-with a joint appointment at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland-Box got his research start while an undergraduate at the University of Colorado-Boulder. As a senior, he traveled north with the Swiss glaciologist Konrad Steffen. In subsequent years, as his scientific career developed, Box increasingly began to think outside of...his last name. Rather than waiting on funding agencies, he teamed up with Greenpeace on a series of expeditions to document, and also dramatize, the ice sheet's melting. He also began to set up time lapse cameras to observe the ice as it declines, something captured in the new documentary Chasing Ice, which features Box's work.

Today, Box is trying to understand the feedback loops that may be driving a melting of Greenland that is much faster and more dramatic than many scientists expected. Take, for instance, melting on the ice's sheet surface: Warmer or melting ice (or just plain meltwater) absorbs more sunlight than does healthy, cold ice. So as warmer temperatures melt the ice, the ice sheet absorbs more solar heat-melting even more. Another example: As Greenland melts, the massive ice sheet, more than two miles above sea level at its highest point, slumps in altitude. When that happens, more of the ice sheet is bathed in the warmer atmospheric temperatures that are found at lower elevations. So-you guessed it-it melts more.

But Box is most intrigued by one of the processes occurring atop the ice sheet, on its surface. Last summer, wildfires torched large parts of the US West, and especially Box's home state of Colorado. The soot from the fires traveled as far north as the Greenland ice sheet and, once deposited on the ice, these dark particles absorbed additional sunlight. Compounding this effect are the Arctic microbes that live off of impurities from soot-living longer as the ice warms, and releasing dark pigments to protect themselves from the sunlight.

"I'm sitting in LaGuardia on my way to Greenland, people riveted to the TV with news about fire across the US," Box remembers. "It was really dramatic, but I'm like, 'Hold on, we need to really measure the soot." Thus was born the Dark Snow project, in which Box and colleagues are trying to crowd-fund an expedition to sample the ice at high elevations and determine just how much soot from global wildfires and pollution are amplifying Greenland's melting.

The upshot of what they know so far is that Greenland is not only melting-it may be melting faster than anyone expected, including most scientists. And what's more, we may be blowing past a point of irreversibility, where the world commits, irrevocably, to a level of sea level rise that, as it unfolds over the coming centuries, would devastate many coastal megacities.

Just consider one striking statistic from Box: The summer melt from Greenland in 2012 alone added a millimeter to the global sea level. And not only is that millimeter felt around the globe, but it is felt in specific places. For instance, it rode atop the wall of water that Superstorm Sandy pushed inland at New York and New Jersey.

And that's just a tiny fraction of what's to come. One recent scientific prediction suggested that 1.6 degrees Celsius (just under 3 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature rise above pre-industrial levels might be enough to lock in Greenland's complete melting. Greenland temperatures in summer have already risen a full degree Celsius since the year 2000, and if the soot-related and biological feedbacks that are Box's current focus turn out to be big enough, the 1.6 degree threshold might also be too conservative.

In other words, Box's boots-on-the-ground perspective on Greenland suggests that the models might be undershooting things-and all that water may be coming faster still.

In his inaugural address, President Obama put a strong focus on the issue of climate change, citing the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms." But all of this pales in comparison to a global ocean containing what used to be Greenland. And that, Box says, should serve as a major wake-up call, since "there's no doubt that if climate continued like in 2012, Greenland's gone."

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/why-greenlands-melting-could-be-the-big

VIDEO: Is it Obama? Is it Gore? No! It's the Green Ninja!

A group of researchers and educators based at San Jose State University think climate science needs a superhero. So they created one.

President Obama's high-profile statements about climate change in his inauguration speech-"Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"-will need to be backed by strong action if there's any hope of dimming recent attacks on science in America's classrooms.

The National Center for Science Education lists four new bills in the last week alone that have been introduced in state legislatures: two in Oklahoma, and one each for Missouri and Colorado. For example, House Bill 179, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 16, labels as controversial the teaching of "biological and chemical evolution;" Ditto for Colorado, which on the same day introduced House Bill 13-1089 (PDF) which also misrepresents global warming and evolution as questionable science.

No wonder Dr Eugene Cordero thinks climate change needs a superhero. Bam! Enter the Green Ninja, the not-very-talkative martial arts master who whips up all sorts mayhem to teach young minds about carbon footprints, energy-saving strategies and gas guzzling leaf blowers, a kind of climate-bent Captain Planet, for a younger generation.

Cordero-both the creator of Green Ninja and a climate scientist at San Jose State University-has already created a series of videos and lesson plans for teachers. And they are now looking to the crowd on the popular funding website Kickstarter for more cash to produce a 16-episode YouTube series, starting this Spring. At the time of writing, with just 10 days to go, the Green Ninja team has raised half of its stated $10,000 goal.

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/video-is-it-obama-is-it-gore-no-its-the

Could This Scary Report Get Americans to Care About Climate?

Yes, it's only a draft, but here's why the National Climate Assessment is a BFD.

National Climate Assessment

Lately we're being bombarded by news about just how dramatically climate change is transforming the United States. Early last week, we learned that 2012 was by far the hottest year on record in the lower 48. Late Friday came another gut punch: a draft of the third US National Climate Assessment. The report describes, among other things, a future of disappearing coastlines, a staggering rise in average temperatures of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (~6 C) this century, and more frequent heat waves and weather extremes. What's more, it bluntly states that our modest efforts thus far are "not sufficient" to avert these devastating futures. If we don't do a lot more to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the report warns, the warming will "accelerate significantly."

From a public opinion perspective, it's hard to think of a more propitious moment for the arrival of such a document. Polling suggests that Americans are increasingly aware-and unnerved-that our world is changing rapidly. They've seen the devastation from Superstorm Sandy and the droughts across the heartland. "The third assessment is coming out at a time when it is now becoming better understood that the words 'climate change' are not the third rail of politics," says Ed Maibach, director of George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication and a member of the federal advisory committee that wrote the new assessment. "Data is accumulating to show that Americans want their politicians to take action."

But will they? Shortly after his reelection, President Obama pledged to lead a "conversation across the country" about climate change. This new report is perhaps the single best conversation piece he's likely to encounter.

What makes the new National Climate Assessment so powerful-and accordingly, so threatening to the climate-change deniers-is that it brings the debate down from the atmosphere and puts it, Google Maps-style, right smack in your backyard. And unlike the two previous national assessments-which, largely for political reasons, failed to reach the audience they deserved-this document might finally help push us to deal meaningfully with a problem we should have addressed decades ago.

With a little help from the president, that is.

A quick dive into the checkered history of the national climate assessments conducted so far shows how potentially transformative they are, and just how much an administration's receptivity (or lack thereof) determines their fate:

Although the 1990 Global Change Research Act states that there should be a National Climate Assessment every four years, there have only been three so far (counting the latest draft). And neither of the previous two-released in 2000 and 2009-has enjoyed a political reception worthy of the quality or the urgency of the science it contained.

The first assessment, released late in the Clinton years and then handed off to the environmentally hostile Bush team, was widely attacked by the denier crowd and was subject to a censorship campaign by administration itself. I told the whole story in my first book, The Republican War on Science, and in an extensive article (behind a paywall, alas) in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But here's the gist: Following dubious assertions that the report wasn't reliable and didn't live up to "data quality" standards, the Bush administration started refusing to even cite it in other government reports. (For more on this, see the court declaration of climate-science whistleblower Rick Piltz, who described how references to the national assessment would strangely "disappear" during federal editing processes.)

What was it about this document that so scared the climate deniers? Probably the way it got people to care about climate change by zooming in on regional changes, thereby helping to relate them to people's own lives and communities. In the past, scientific reports of this type "were done by some agency somewhere in the Beltway," says climate adaptation expert Susanne Moser, who helped oversee the committee that drafted the latest assessment. "And the 2000 one really broke out of that by saying, 'it's really about everybody out there, so we need to engage them.'"

The 2000 report was thus based on input from a national network of citizen stakeholders, ranging from farmers to local officials-a dramatic effort to bring science to the people and listen to what the people had to say in return. That approach was abandoned, however, by the Bush crew.

The second National Climate Assessment didn't fare much better. While the report was released in 2009 under the Obama administration, it was largely based on research conducted by the Bush administration-research that could be described as incomplete at best. Rather than complete a full assessment as the law requires, the Bush administration instead commissioned 21 separate "synthesis" reports, many of them quite technical-a move for which it was ultimately faulted in federal court. Thus ensued a scramble to produce a true assessment, a process ultimately culminating in the 2009 report. But the document received relatively little attention from the newly elected President Obama, whose climate messaging strategy was focused on clean energy and green jobs, not climate change impacts across the US. As Moser put it recently, "People actually do not know that there was a second assessment in 2009."

This time could be different. Granted, the draft report-the work of some 240 scientists so far-still has quite a long way to go in the course of its public birthing. (Releasing it on a Friday at 4 p.m. certainly did not help matters.) Now begins a three-month public comment period, and there will also be further reviews by government agencies and the National Academy of Sciences. While key officials like presidential science adviser John Holdren and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco have offered considerable praise for the draft report, they warn that it'll be a year before we have a final, final, final one. In sum, brace yourself for a lengthy, public, editing process-with plenty of sniping by the climate-denial trolls.

The good news is that the process involves scientists traveling around the country and getting people's reactions to this series of alarming predictions-which makes the final assessment more likely to gain traction. Indeed, the development of the draft report coincides with the launch of "NCANet," a "network of networks" to get everyone from civil engineers to zoo to aquarium managers involved. So far, 60 organizations have signed on.

"The greatest potential of the National Climate Assessment," Maibach says, "is to give communities in every region of the country good data on the changes that have already happened, and good projections about what is likely to happen in the future, so they can rethink their assumptions and start making some hard calls about what do we want to do differently to respond to this problem."

This may be the real genius of such an approach-and the thing that really terrifies the deniers. If you go into communities and get people thinking about what they will have to do to prepare for climate change, there's a good chance they will conclude that they can't simply "get ready." Preparedness and adaptation may sound good in theory, but are they really plausible when we're talking about turning planetary knobs far past the settings that have endured for most of recent human civilization?

Such realizations are already taking hold in some coastal communities, where the notion of adapting to the absence of land beneath one's feet increasingly sounds like a cruel joke. But the rest of us may well come to the same conclusions when forced to think about what climate change really, really means to the places we live. In fact, there's even some data to suggest that thinking about adaptation or preparedness has precisely this effect. Call it the "Oh shit!" factor: Thinking about trying to adapt makes you think about your inability to do so.

If this holds true for the population at large, then President Obama would do well to base his "conversation across the country" on the regional scenarios in the national assessment-and talk about how climate change affects everyday Americans, and what they might want to do about it. At which point those people who really think things through may realize that they do want the federal government to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and do so immediately.

So how has the administration reacted to the report? It's worth noting that just after the draft assessment came out, Obama's weekly address included another call to tackle climate change. But his top science advisers, despite their praise for the document, are keeping their distance for now, saying they haven't had a chance to review it.

This, after all, is not yet the administration's official report. It's merely the product of an impressive team of scientists and an impressive advisory committee. At the same time, it's based on a body of science that isn't exactly new. Obama needn't endorse every last finding to start talking it up. Yearlong review process or not, the planet isn't waiting.

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/could-this-scary-report-get-americans-t