I hope President Obama can also reverse the denialist stance in the Climate Change Science program as well. Because of the Bush Administration, more than 5 years have been wasted. Even as the evidence has become more certain and the need for basic structural changes more urgent, the CCSP has slowly issued a series of reports which present a picture that implies there's no big problems to worry about. Without truthful information from the government sponsored scientific community, there's little way that he can make the basic policy shifts required.

I contributed to two rounds of this process. The latest one, assessing the probability of abrupt change, still contains basic errors, IMHO, although they did add in a graph from a report which shows how wrong they are. Look at Box 4.1. Figure 1, page 338 in the latest draft of Chapter 4 of SAP 3.4 (PDF warning), which compares modeled with actual Arctic sea-ice decline. With regards to sea-ice, the models are woefully wrong, yet the risk assessment is based on the projections from these models. If the model builders can't get it right, how can the results from the models be considered representative of the Earth's future climate?

E. Swanson