Climate Change Science Program

The Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) was the program responsible for coordinating and integrating research on global warming by U.S. government agencies from February 2002 to June 2009. Toward the end of that period, CCSP issued 21 separate climate assessment reports that addressed climate observations, changes in the atmosphere, expected climate change, impacts and adaptation, and risk management issues. Shortly after President Obama took office, the program's name was changed to U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) which was also the program's name before 2002. Nevertheless, the Obama Administration generally embraced the CCSP products as sound science providing a basis for climate policy. Because those reports were mostly issued after the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in some cases focused specifically on the United States, they were generally viewed within the United States as having an importance and scientific credibility comparable to the IPCC assessments for the first few years of the Obama Administration.

The primary outputs from the CCSP were its strategic plan and 21 Synthesis and Assessment Products (SAP), five of which were released on January 16, 2009, the last business day of the Bush Administration. The CCSP Strategic Plan of 2003 defined five goals:

The plan also proposed 21 SAP's, each of which were designed to support one of these five goals. The plan was updated in 2008. The following sections discuss the SAP's, grouped according to the five topic areas.

Three SAP's evaluated observations of climate change and our ability to definitively attribute the causes of these changes.

NOAA released the first of 21 CCSP Synthesis and Assessment reports in May 2006, entitled Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences. The report identified and corrected errors in satellite temperature measurements and other temperature observations, which increased scientific confidence in the conclusion that lower atmosphere is warming on a global scale: "There is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere," said the report, "the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone". The report also said that "all current atmospheric data sets now show global-average warming that is similar to the surface warming. While these data are consistent with the results from climate models at the global scale, discrepancies in the tropics remain to be resolved."

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