White House, AAAS Each Roll Out A Climate Initiative

The White House and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced separate initiatives last week to raise public awareness of climate change and to avoid, mitigate, or at least prepare for its most harmful impacts. The Obama Administration’s new Climate Data Initiative is a broad effort to make readily available the government’s free climate data and to combine it with private-sector resources to support national climate-change planning and preparedness. The Web-based program will join the climate-related activities of several federal agencies, including the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and NASA, with the resources of businesses—such as Google, Intel, and Microsoft—and a broad range of nonprofit organizations and academic institutions. Also last week, the scientific organization AAAS said it’s planning an educational outreach effort to publicize the risk from climate change and to make clear that for 97% of scientists human-induced climate change, driven by human greenhouse gas emissions, is a certainty. The program will include speaking tours, testimony, and an interactive website.