The floods, heat waves, storms and fires fueled by global warming are worsening across the United States and will pose increasing danger to Americans unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut sharply and quickly. The tools to do so are available today and are being adopted by communities nationwide, though not quickly enough to avert the crisis, according to a major government report released Tuesday.
Called the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the report “is the authoritative, definitive assessment of how our country is doing on climate change,” Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said before its release. It not only makes clear that “climate change is here,” she said, it also underscores how “America is stepping up to meet this moment.”
The report comes at a time of record heat. This June, July, August, September and October were all the hottest respective months on record worldwide, putting 2023 on track to be the hottest year on record. All this heat is coming in the form of devastating disasters in the U.S. The nation has already experienced a record 25 disasters this year that have generated at least $1 billion in damages each, from deadly wildfires in Maui to floods in Vermont to a hurricane. Idalia striking Florida. On average, according to the report, the United States now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks, compared with once every four months (adjusting for inflation) in 1980, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration first began counting records.
“The effects of climate change continue to change faster than we expected them to,” Kris May, CEO of Pathways Climate Institute in San Francisco and lead author of two of the report’s chapters, told Bloomberg Green in an interview. “It increases the urgency and mitigation of greenhouse gases and also implementing adaptation efforts to help us adapt, because we are not slowing (warming) anytime soon.”
About 2,000 pages long, the latest National Climate Assessment is the most comprehensive study of the risks and impacts of climate change on the United States. About 750 people wrote or contributed to this report, a mix of scientists across federal agencies as well as outside the government. This is the fifth edition published since Congress passed the Global Change Act in 1990, establishing the Global Change Research Program. The act requires the program to regularly evaluate current scientific research on climate change and present an assessment of its effects on the country to Congress and the president. The fourth edition of the report was released in phases in 2017 and 2018.
The new report confirms previous estimates that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate, human-caused greenhouse gases are the cause and climate impacts are a problem of the present, not just the future.
“Too many people still think of climate change as a problem that is far away from us in space or time or importance,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, who helped author this and the previous one. versions of the assessment. “But NCA clearly explains how climate change affects us here in the places where we live, both now and in the future, and across every sector of human and natural society.”
Most everywhere in the United States is affected by the extra heat trapped in the Earth system. Forest fire smoke is quickly becoming a health threat in addition to conventional air pollution. Forest owners and managers around the country are bracing for a continued increase in weather favorable to large fires. Sea levels along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts will rise 11 inches by 2050—about the same increase as they experienced during the entire past century.
Each region is changing in ways that present particular challenges. California has languished for more than two decades in its worst drought in more than 1,200 years, although the winter of 2022 to 2023 brought some relief. Fisheries collapsed in Alaska. Diseases from ticks and mosquitoes are on the rise in the Southeast.
In the Midwest, which is responsible for producing nearly a third of the world’s corn and soybeans, higher temperatures and faster oscillations between extreme droughts and floods threaten agricultural production and, by extension, the global food supply.
Markets are already absorbing the losses, and both business and economic growth are directly affected. This edition of the report is the first to include a chapter devoted to economics, exploring both cumulative and expected future losses of greenhouse gases. American households can expect impacts on property values, employment, income and quality of life.
Compared to past editions, the report strengthens climate justice and climate solutions and will be the first to be completely translated into Spanish. Climate change disproportionately harms the health and well-being of historically marginalized populations in the United States, including black and indigenous communities. This exacerbates other community stressors such as pollution and lack of access to high-quality health care.
At the same time, steps to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of warming are taking place around the country. Farmers in Texas and Kansas, for example, are adopting soil management practices that prioritize carbon storage. The city of Pittsburgh updated its stormwater code last year to account for heavier expected rainfall.
The report “is designed to provide detailed practical information for everyone,” Prabhakar said. She gave the example of how a city planner in Texas might consult it to say “where to find cooling centers so they can create a refuge from the extreme heat that’s going on right now.”
Weeks ahead of the COP28 global climate conference in Dubai, and with President Joe Biden seeking re-election in 2024, White House officials used the report’s release to highlight the progress the country has made on climate change since he took office in January 2021, including the passage. of Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, last year.
“The estimate shows falling costs for clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, and rising deployment,” said John Podesta, senior White House adviser on clean energy innovation. Since Biden took office, the private sector has invested nearly $350 billion in clean energy and green projects have created more than 210,000 jobs, Podesta said.
US emissions have declined since the peak in 2007, even as the country’s population and per capita gross domestic product have risen. But the United States remains the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Without much deeper cuts by it and other nations, climate risks to people and property will grow. And even with major cuts, some further warming and damage from it would be inevitable.
“The undoing of all our collective work should not be doom and gloom,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, but “a sense of hope and possibilities.”