PD Editorial: Climate report has dire predictions for California

The biggest surprise with a recently released federal report on climate change wasn’t the doom it contained. It was that a White House filled with climate deniers allowed the report to be published without political meddling.

Carl Mears, a Santa Rosa scientist and a coauthor of the first volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, summed up its findings in a Nov. 17 Close to Home column (“What new climate report says. It’s urgent”):

“Global warming is happening now. It’s caused by human activities, mostly emission of carbon dioxide. And the consequences are beginning now - and becoming increasingly serious as the warming continues.”

The climate assessment is a report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. A bipartisan 1990 law mandated that a quadrennial review be submitted to the president and Congress to analyze climate changes and their effects on public health, energy production and agriculture.

The key findings of this assessment differ little from past reports. The scientific consensus has long held that man-made global warming is happening and that its consequences will grow increasingly severe if we do not take immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

But, as Mears said in his column, some of the new findings in this report should cause special concern in our region, especially uncertainty about the expected level of sea rise by 2100. Depending on how the ice in Antarctica responds to warming temperatures, the oceans could rise by as much as eight feet - inundating low-lying land around San Francisco Bay.

Warming could also impact the Sierra snowpack, Mears noted, resulting in more wintertime precipitation taking the form of rain instead of snow. This could lead to flooding and dam failures, as well as drastically reducing the amount of water available during summer months.

And after this year’s wildfires, California and Sonoma County in particular are acutely aware of the risk caused by climate change-induced drying of soil and vegetation in the summertime.

The broader conclusions of the assessment should serve as a strong call to action and as a major rebuke of Trump administration actions to turn back progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that an administration stacked with fossil-fuel industry executives, lobbyists and sycophants would take giant steps backward like announcing the U.S. pullout from the Paris Climate Accords, reversing the Clean Power Plan and extolling nonexistent “clean” coal.

Thankfully, states, localities and others are stepping up to pick up the slack. Gov. Jerry Brown recently led a group of political and business leaders to a climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, where he pledged that California and others would take real action to curb emissions. “In the United States,” he said, “we have a federal system, and states have real power as do cities. And when cities and states combine together, and then join with powerful corporations, that’s how we get stuff done.”

Climate change is happening now. We are feeling its effects, and they will become increasingly severe and costly. This is a horrible time for the United States to abdicate its leadership role in dealing with the crisis.

The Trump administration allowed this report to be released without watering it down. We wish that were a sign that things are changing, but we fear it’s more likely that no one high enough up bothered to read it before it came out.