Bad News, Good News

According to a new federal report on climate change, global warming has already had serious negative environmental ramifications for the United States, including an increase in forest fires and drought.

The report comes from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the lead agency on such matters.

Obviously, the report is disheartening, but there is a silver lining. The CCSP is the same group that GAP client Rick Piltz previously worked for before leaving it to blow the whistle on the White House’s censoring and editing of climate data. This was a political decision taken by the White House in order to lower the perception of the human impact on climate change. Rick Piltz now is the director of the GAP program Climate Science Watch. The White House official who edited the documents, Phil Cooney, left the White House two days after Piltz’s story broke to work for ExxonMobil, where he remains today.

The bright side is that, three years later, a hard-hitting report by the CCSP such as this is able to be presented to the American public, without any political censoring (that we know of).

-- Dylan Blaylock