Government’s new climate assessment paints grim picture
Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says.
The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level. Unveiling the report at the White House, President Joe Biden blasted Republican legislators and his predecessor for disputing global warming.
“Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future. Impacts are only going to get worse, more frequent, more ferocious and more costly,” Biden said, noting that disasters cost the country $178 billion last year.
“None of this is inevitable.”
Overall, Tuesday’s assessment paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future.
Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have warmed by 2.5 degrees and Alaska has heated up by 4.2 degrees, compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees, the report said.
But what people really feel is not the averages, but when weather is extreme.
With heat waves, drought, wildfire and heavy downpours, “we are seeing an acceleration of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth. And that’s not healthy. Climate change is ”harming physical, mental, spiritual and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security,” the report said.
Compared to earlier national assessments, this year’s uses far stronger language and “unequivocally” blames the burning of coal, oil and gas for climate change.
The 37-chapter assessment includes an interactive atlas that zooms down to the county level. It finds that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk.
Northeastern cities are seeing more extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality, as well as risks to infrastructure, while drought and floods exacerbated by climate change threaten farming and ecosystems in rural areas.
The United States will warm in the future about 40% more than the world as a total, the assessment said. The AP calculated, using others’ global projections, that that means America would get about 3.8 degrees hotter by the end of the century.
Hotter average temperatures means weather that is even more extreme.
“The news is not good, but it is also not surprising,” said University of Colorado’s Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who was not part of this report. “What we are seeing is a manifestation of changes that were anticipated over the last few decades.”
The 2,200-page report comes after five straight months when the globe set monthly and daily heat records. It comes as the U.S. has set a record with 25 different weather disasters this year that caused at least $1 billion in damage.
Biden administration officials emphasize that all is not lost and the report details actions to reduce emissions and adapt to what’s coming.
By cleaning up industry, how electricity is made and how transport is powered, climate change can be dramatically reduced. Hausfather said when emissions stop, warming stops, “so we can stop this acceleration if we as a society get our act together.”
But some scientists said parts of the assessment are too optimistic.
“The report’s rosy graphics and outlook obscure the dangers approaching,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson said. “We are not prepared for what’s coming.”