Polls show that tackling climate change is a low priority for the American public. Indeed, a Yale poll found that only 12 percent of Americans were “very worried” about global warming.
In the last few days, the Environmental Protection Agency seems to have initiated a public campaign to make clear where it, and the science, stand, stating that the rise in greenhouse gases is a serious problem to be confronted.
On Monday night, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa Jackson, made the point as a guest on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” And on Tuesday, the agency released an 80-page glossy report called “Climate Change Indicators in the United States” to help Americans make sense of climate change data.
That report begins: “Over the last several decades, evidence of human influences on climate change has become increasingly clear and compelling. There is indisputable evidence that human activities such as electricity production and transportation are adding to the concentrations of greenhouse gases that are already naturally present in the atmosphere.”
The agency lays out 24 possible indicators of climate change — from United States greenhouse gas emissions to tropical cyclone activity to bird wintering ranges — while tracing how they have shifted in recent decades. It lays out what is known, according to the agency’s survey of current science, and what remains uncertain.
Some of the conclusions are already well publicized: “In the United States, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities increased by 14 percent from 1990 to 2008.”
Others are less so: “Long-term studies have found that bird species in North America have shifted their wintering grounds northward by an average of 35 miles since 1966, with a few species shifting by several hundred miles.”
And, given the long snowy winter in the mid-Atlantic states this year, readers will certainly find this one interesting: “The portion of North America covered by snow has generally decreased since 1972, although there has been much year-to-year variability. Snow covered an average of 3.18 million square miles of North America during the years 2000 to 2008, compared with 3.43 million square miles during the 1970s.”
The report makes clear that some phenomena that might be viewed as “proof” of climate change may or may not be: From 2001 to 2009, it notes, roughly 30 to 60 percent of the nation was experiencing drought at any given time. But it adds that “data for this indicator have not been collected for long enough to determine whether droughts are increasing or decreasing.”
Filled with charts and graphs, the report is a valuable resource for voters who are trying to make sense of climate change or how they feel about national environment and energy policy.
And just as the climate skeptics pored over a landmark 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in search of possible errors, I’m sure that they’ll be going over the E.P.A.’s offering with a very fine-tooth comb.
