You may have missed it, and that may have been the point, but on Black Friday, the government released the National Climate Assessment.

The congressionally mandated report is the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 300 scientists.

It spells out how climate change is hurting people already and assesses multiple

paths to possible futures. Paths where we burn a lot of fossil fuel, paths when we burn a little.

The president wrote it off, telling the Washington Post that, quote, one of the problems is

that a lot of people like myself, we have very high

levels of intelligence, but we're not necessarily such believers. This view was echoed by

press secretary Sarah Sanders this week. It's not based on facts. It's not data driven. We'd like to

see something that is more data driven. It's based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you're talking about the...

It's just the latest chapter and the long, long history of climate scientists articulating warnings

that go unheated. 30 years ago, NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate

warning that global warming was real,

and that he was, quote, 99% certain that the warming trend was caused by humans.

He displayed a chart of rising temperatures.

In 1988, so far, is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling,

1988 will be the warmest year on the record.

This evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected,

and it is changing our climate now.

It's often cited as the moment, or at least the season, when the gravity of the science

became front-page news. The Times, putting the story on A1, ran the headline,

Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate. Just below that story was another one, drought raising food prices.

That's because the country was under a month's long drought and heat wave that summer.

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