Whitehouse Statement on National Academy of Sciences Report on Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), released the following statement on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the "National Academies") new report linking human-caused, fossil fuel-driven climate change to increasingly extreme weather events in the United States and around the world:

"Today in America, wildfire smoke blankets the northeast and mid-Atlantic, heat domes settle over whole regions, and Europe remains locked in the third month of an unprecedented deadly heat wave. The National Academies report confirms that fossil fuel-driven climate change is making extreme weather and natural disasters more frequent and more intense. That in turn raise costs for Americans: higher property insurance premiums, grocery prices, electricity bills, and healthcare costs.

"The fossil fuel industry sees the public waking up to the consequences of their pollute-for-free business model, so (same old, same old) they're unleashing their dark money climate denial machine to smear the report's panel of distinguished scientists. Personal attacks against scientists and science itself will not lower Americans costs, nor save the planet from climate disaster."

The National Academies was created by Congress to serve as the scientific national academy of the United States. National Academies scientists, including the panel behind the attribution science report, are independent, nonpartisan, and highly rigorous. The National Academies new report finds that it has become increasingly possible to scientifically measure - or attribute - how much individual extreme weather events have been intensified and/or made more likely due to climate change, with a particularly high confidence for attribution for heatwaves and extreme precipitation events.

Since the climate change attribution panel was formed two years ago, fossil fuel interests and climate denial groups funded by dark money have desperately tried to discredit it, arguing that the real scientists can't be trusted, and filing records requests for private emails and documents.