Early in April of this year, Reveal News reported that National Park Service (NPS) officials had “deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea level rise and storm surge.” The report didn’t, and frankly couldn’t, dismiss that climate change was and is happening—but the new Republican tack is to say we don’t know if we are causing and exacerbating it, and even if we are there’s nothing we can do to stop it so … let’s set ourselves on fire? According to Think Progress, the NPS dumped the report on Friday, with zero mention of it by the NPS or Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and his department. The report, uncensored, has classics like this introduction:
Global sea level is rising. While sea levels have been gradually rising since the last glacial maximum approximately 21,000 years ago (Clark et al. 2009, Lambeck et al. 2014), anthropogenic climate change has significantly increased the rate of global sea level rise (Grinsted et al. 2010, Church and White 2011, Slangen et al. 2016, Fasullo et al. 2016). Recent analyses reveal that the rate of sea level rise in the last century was greater than during any preceding century in at least 2,800 years (Kopp et al. 2016, Sweet et al. 2017). Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm (IPCC 2013, Mearns et al. 2013, Melillo et al. 2014). Further warming of the atmosphere will cause sea levels to continue to rise, which will affect how we protect and manage our national parks.
And there’s more:
Sea level rise is caused by numerous factors. As human activities release CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, mean global temperatures increase (IPCC 2013). Rising global temperatures cause ice located on land and in the sea to melt. The melting of ice found on land, such as Greenland and Antarctica, is a significant driver of sea level rise.
And this:
Global mean sea levels have been rising since the last glacial maximum (Lambeck and Chappell 2001, Clark and Mix 2002, Lambeck et al. 2014). Church and White (2006) estimated that twentieth century global sea levels rose at a rate of approximately 1.7 mm/y, although this rate accelerated over the latter part of the century. Slangen et al. (2016) found that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities have been the primary driver of global sea level change since 1970 and that the rate of sea level rise has increased over time (Table 1). Satellite altimetry data shows that present-day global relative sea levels are increasing at approximately 3.3 mm/y (Cazenave et al. 2014, Fasullo et al. 2016).
The uncensored release of the study comes a month after Democrats in Congress pushed for the Department of the Interior’s inspector General to investigate whether Zinke and his NPS were in violation of its scientific integrity policy. Mother Jones says that the study’s lead author is “extremely happy” with the released report’s language.
“The fight probably destroyed my career with the [National Park Service] but it will be worth it if we can uphold the truth and ensure that scientific integrity of other scientists won’t be challenged so easily in the future,” said Caffrey, a University of Colorado research assistant who had worked on the report for five years.
The Sea Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections for the National Park Service can be viewed and downloaded here.