polarbrs.jpgWhat a difference eight years makes. Take climate change . . .

As the Disgruntled Chemist noted in 2005:

That climate change is occurring and will continue to do so is not disputed within the scientific community, despite what a sizeable segment of the public thinks. Atmospheric CO2 levels are expected to reach at least double what they were in pre-industrial times within the coming century, up to 500 parts per million at least. Again, this is not disputed. There is a scientific consensus, as a survey of over 900 articles in peer-reviewed journals shows.

Nobody publishing in peer reviewed journals thinks that global climate change will have no effect, but what no one is sure of is how much world temperatures will go up. Different climate models predict different effects, and you can find a model that will give you whatever magnitude of temperature rise you want between about 1 and 10 ºC. In general, though, the most trusted models put the rise in global temperature between 1.5 ºC and 6.5 ºC over the next century, as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

So, that’s the problem. Despite what authors funded by oil companies and the Bush administration say, global warming is real and it is happening. 

[More from IPCC here]

Horrors! What did the Bush Administration do between 2005 and 2007? The GAO looked into it in 2007, and they were not impressed:

After more than three years of study, the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, harshly faulted the Bush administration for doing little to deal with the far-reaching effects of climate change rapidly taking place in national parks, forests, marine sanctuaries and other federal lands and waters — almost 30 percent of the United States.

The GAO said the Interior, Agriculture and Commerce departments have failed to give their resource managers the guidance and tools they need — computer models, temperature and precipitation data, climate projects and detailed inventories of plant and animal species — to cope with all the biological and physical effects from the warming.

"Without such guidance, their ability to address climate change and effectively manage resources is constrained," the report says.

[Full report here - pdf]  

Horrors and more Horrors!!! And how did the Bush Administration react?

The White House disagreed.

*sigh*

But that was then.

Things have changed a bit, what with the new folks in town. Take this from last Monday at the Department of the Interior:

The secretarial order signed today at Interior’s command center establishes a framework through which Interior bureaus will coordinate climate change science and resource management strategies.  Under the framework:

  • A new Climate Change Response Council, led by the Secretary, Deputy Secretary and Counselor, will coordinate DOI’s response to the impacts of climate change within and among the Interior bureaus and will work to improve the sharing and communication of climate change impact science, including through www.data.gov; 
  • Eight DOI regional Climate Change Response Centers, serving Alaska, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Midwest, the West, Northwest, and Pacific regions – will synthesize existing climate change impact data and management strategies, help resource managers put them into action on the ground, and engage the public through education initiatives; and
  • A network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives will engage DOI and federal agencies, local and state partners, and the public to craft practical, landscape-level strategies for managing climate change impacts within the eight regions.  The cooperatives will focus on impacts such as the effects of climate change on wildlife migration patterns, wildfire risk, drought, or invasive species that typically extend beyond the borders of any single National Wildlife Refuge, BLM unit, or National Park.

According to Katherine McIntire Peters at Gov Exec,

The order is an attempt to put science at the center of all planning related to department missions and to break down stovepipes created by agencies within the department, Salazar said at a briefing on Monday.

Think about that for a minute. If Salazar is just now trying to put science at the center of all planning, it kind of suggests that science has been somewhere else for the last eight years.

I think Jane nailed it in 2005: global warming will not be solved with more bikinis, iced tea, and freon. Too bad it took us four more years to get the political heads of government agencies on board with that.

(Photo by Dan Crosbie/Canadian Ice Service via Will Bunch at Attytood.)