Decade of Climate Evidence Strengthens Case for EPA's Endangerment Finding

Scientific understanding of the risks greenhouse gases pose to public health and welfare has strengthened and broadened in the decade since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made its landmark "endangerment finding," according to a new review of the latest science published Thursday.

A new review by climate scientists and legal scholars
adds to the legal arsenal of those opposing the Trump
 administration’s rollbacks of climate policies. It says
the EPA's endangerment finding, “fully justified in 2009,
 is much more strongly justified in 2018.”

From the worsening of chronic disease to the perils hurricanes and wildfire, the peer-reviewed paper published in the academic journal Science found new evidence of risk in all eight of the areas cited in the EPA finding, which focused on carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases.

The authors also argue that areas that were not even considered by the EPA at the time—ocean acidification, increased threat of violence and risks to national security and economic well-being—should be included in the government's assessment of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the Inside Climate News story by Marianne Lavelle - “Decade of Climate Evidence Strengthens Case for EPA's Endangerment Finding.”