Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
You can get anything you want
At Alice’s Restaurant
‑Arlo Guthrie, 1967
Late last week, the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (USGCRP) released a draft version of its latest assessment report on the impacts of climate change in the United States. Updated reports are required by Congressional decree every 4 years or so. The 2013 report, as it now stands, tips the scales at over 1,000 pages, consequently, we haven’t made our way through it yet, but if the Executive Summary is any indication, this report seems even worse than the one the USGCRP released in 2009.
This is yet another example of our imperial government’s predilection towards “show science” in order to justify taking people’s stuff. By analogy, think of the “show trials” in some of history’s more freedom‐loving regimes.
As of this writing, it’s not clear if they intend to produce another “summary” document, such as the 200‐pager they put out in 2009. That one was so bad as to require us to produce an Addendum that represents what the USGCRP report coudda, shoudda, woudda looked like had the author team made a more complete and fair assessment of the scientific literature.
Admittedly, our Addendum report, which was finalized and released last fall, did include citations from the scientific literature that were published subsequent to the publication of the 2009 USGCRP report, which obviously the USGCRP report authors couldn’t have known about. But, as our Addendum demonstrates, when these new research results are included, the potential impacts of climate change in the U.S. are substantially tempered. This leads us to think that the 2013 version from the USGCRP—which seems to hype the impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions even more so than the 2009 report did—didn’t do a grand job in synthesizing the literature.
Nor does it appear they did a good job with the statistics of climate and climate change in the U.S.