7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States
The National Climate Assessment isn't just about our future. It's about our scarcely recognizable present.
By Chris Mooney at Mother Jones
Your new America (observed temperature changes over the last 22 years).
Excerpt:
The new National Climate Assessment, being launched today by the Obama administration, is a landmark document.
It is a landmark because unlike the reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is written in plain language that ordinary mortals can understand. ("Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans." "Data show that natural factors like the sun and volcanoes cannot have caused the warming observed over the past 50 years.")
It is a landmark because unlike past National Assessments, this report is not being buried or ignored. Rather, President Obama is using it to launch a very impressive communications campaign aimed directly at Americans via one of their most trusted scientific sources, TV meteorologists.
But most of all, it is a landmark because it shows, unequivocally, that we simply do not live in the same America any more, thanks to climate change. It is a different place, a different country. Here are some of the most striking examples of how:
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3. America is parched. According to the assessment, the Western drought of recent years "represents the driest conditions in 800 years." Some of the worst consequences were in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and 2012, where the total cost to agriculture amounted to $10 billion. The rate of loss of water in these states was "double the long-term average," reports the assessment. And of course, future trends augur more of the same, or worse, with the Southwest to be particularly hard hit. As seen in the image at right, projected "snow water equivalent," or water held in snowpack, will decline dramatically across this area over the course of the century.
4. But when it rains, the floods can be devastating…
Full article 7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States | Mother Jones.
