When Chemists Attack

Occasionally, the current administration releases some potentially useful information … when forced.

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impact of human-caused global warming in the United States.

So, why wouldn’t Bush release this report earlier?  I suppose he didn’t like the conclusions.  The summary, which you can grab here, describes what’s likely to be in store for us in the future:  We can expect more heat – more than the global average – with more and longer heat waves and excessively hot days.  We’ll see more intense summer droughts.  We will experience more intense “extreme weather” – hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.  We can expect more illness and death from heat-loving pathogens, and so on.  It’s not a very pleasant forecast.

I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about John Kerry’s presidential campaign a few years ago, but he’s exactly right:

“The three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change,” Mr. Kerry said in a statement. “In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

This explains a lot about the last few years.  This administration’s response to any crisis has been to simply deny that a crisis exists.  And that’s never a good long-term strategy.