The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency today announced that the agency officially sees man-made greenhouse gases as harmful to health and the environment. What? That hasn’t happened already? Shocking, I know; there’s a good reason Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place.“
The EPA announcement coincides with the start of the global climate change conference (as we’re covering here) in Copenhagen, Denmark, when world leaders hope to make significant progress toward a new climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol. The announcement also comes in the wake of a recent brouhaha over e-mails stolen from a climate research institution, which has spurred skepticism about climate science, especially in the US.
“It’s time that we let the science speak for itself,” Lisa P. Jackson said in a press conference. “In making this finding, we relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data. That data came from around the world and from our own U.S. scientists.”
Combined with Obama’s last-minute decision to visit the Copenhagen summit on the correct date instead of too early, this announcement should raise the spirits of anyone who cares about how the US is approaching global warming.
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