The White House has been slow to acknowledge global warming as a real and current threat, but yesterday the Bush administration made a pretty bold statement regarding the state of climate change given its past hesitations. Yes, the White House has in fact stated that global warming is real, and — surprise, surprise – humans are causing it.
The “Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States,” one of two reports released yesterday by the Bush administration, does in fact acknowledge that rising temperatures and changing climate are on account of humans and that they could in fact pose very serious problems.
While the language seems light — humans’ impact on global warming has gone from likely to very likely — it’s a big step for a government who has previously been known to scoff at, or even stimie reports about, the real impact of climate change. According to the report, “most of the recent global warming is very likely due to human generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.†On top of that, “emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use and from the effects of land use change are the primary sources of this increase.â€
Read the whole report here.
