Disclosure
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.