Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was going to reject the work it had done back in 2009, when it first determined that greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to the US public. While it laid out a number of reasons for revisiting its earlier work, one of those focused on the science: The EPA's original decision was over 15 years old, and it claimed our understanding of climate change had itself changed since then.

The National Academies of Science (NAS) decided that at least one aspect of that was probably right: Our understanding of the climate has changed in the last 15 years. So, it asked a group of scientists to do a quick update of our understanding of greenhouse gases, completed before public comment was closed on the EPA's plan. That report is now out, and the NAS's conclusion is clear ...