It’s easy to be discouraged these days by the state of progress on addressing climate change. This week’s United Nations climate change conference in Poland risks concluding without having made any meaningful progress, in part due to obstruction from the U.S. delegation. The failure would come at a bad time. In late November, the U.S. federal government released the fourth national climate assessment, a series of reports mandated by a 1990 statute called the Global Change Research Act. These blockbuster assessments, produced roughly every four years, comprise hundreds of pages of detailed analysis of climate change’s impact on various ecosystems, […]