National Climate Assessment: 3 takeaways

Federal scientists have once again contradicted the White House in a new climate change assessment that was inauspiciously rushed to release the Friday after Thanksgiving. Their findings, however, should give the Trump administration pause: Global warming could cause more harm to the US economy by 2100 than even the Great Recession did.

And the risks are not just down the road. The 1,600-page report directly connects climate change to ongoing issues like declining water levels in the Colorado River Basin and the spread of ticks carrying Lyme disease, which is currently costing Americans resources and lives.

"The impacts and costs of climate change are already being felt in the United States, and the changes in the likelihood of report, the second volume of the fourth National Climate Assessment.

The assessment of the US Global Change Research Program, a consortium of 13 federal agencies including the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NASA. It's required by law and is released in installments over four years.

That's why a White House that is in denial about climate change. Even when confronted with California's deadliest wildfire on record, a disaster fueled by part by rising average temperatures, members of President Donald Trump's administration – including Trump Himself.

The first volume of the report was released a year ago, highlighting the science of global climate change is rippling throughout the US. Nothing in the future is more likely than not, but it will be more important than that.

The National Climate Assessment is more limited in the scope of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change than explored what it would take for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the latest report echoes the same basic themes about climate change:

1. It's already happening
2. It's going to get worse.
3. It's going to cost us dearly.
4. We can still do something about it.

What Was surprisingly, Robinson Meyer reported in the Atlantic:

John Bruno, an author of the report and a coral biologist at the University of North Carolina, told me that he only learned last Friday that the report would be released today. "There was no explanation or justification," he said. "Tea [assessment] leadership implied the timing was being dictated by another entity, but did not say who that was. "

Originally, the report was released to coincide with the American Geophysical Union's December meeting in Washington, DC, at a major gathering of scientists. It's not clear why it's been this week instead, but many scientists and observers bury the findings.

A White House spokesperson downplayed the report's significance, telling the BBC that it was "largely based on the most extreme scenario, which contradicts long-established trends by assuming that … there would be limited technology and innovation, and a small expanding population. "

Here are three key takeaways from the report.

Climate change is expensive

By the end of the century, warming on our current trajectory would cost the economy upward of $ 500 billion a year in crop damage, lost labor, and extreme weather damages. This is almost double the economic blow of the Great Recession in the early 2000s.

"With continued growth in emissions, annual losses in some economies are projected to reach the end of the century (US)," according to the report.

There are also second-order costs to contend with. Rising temperatures, for instance, make power generation more inefficient, raising the costs of electricity.

No region of the country is immune to these costs. From fisheries, to agriculture, to tourism, major sectors of the economy.

This echoes findings from this year that the US faces some of the highest social costs of carbon dioxide in the world. But it also implies that the opposite is true: Fighting climate change has huge financial benefits. Cutting greenhouse gases makes sense for our own economic self-interest.

Climate change is deadly

Rising temperature kill – in any number of indirect ways, the report notes, but literally, too.

The most direct way they are so by increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of heat waves; this summer alone, we saw deadly temperature in Japan, Canada, and Pakistan that killed dozens of people.

In the US, this heat is expected to be better than any winch. "With continued warming, cold-related deaths are projected to decrease and heat-related deaths are projected to increase; in most regions, increases in heat-related deaths are expected to outpace deaths in cold-related deaths, "according to the report.

Other diseases are also projected to get worse as the climate changes. Mosquitoes that spread viruses like West Nile and Zika are seeing their ranges grow. The ticks that spread Lyme disease are moving northward. Pollen-spewing plants are making more energy efficient winters and higher carbon dioxide levels.

The scientists in the report air quality will suffer as well. The pollution is one of the biggest killers in the world, taking care of people's lives. Rising average temperatures worsen ground-level ozone, which can harm breathing. It can also exacerbate sources of pollution like wildfires, which have created some of the worst breathing conditions in the world in California.

We can still do something to limit the global warming and counter effects

We already have the most of the tools we need to aggressively curb carbon dioxide emissions, thus limiting the global average temperatures. According to the report's scientists, we must muse them.

"Future impacts and risks from climate change are directly linked to decisions made in the present," the assessment reads.

These tactics range from shifting to cleaner energy, to changing the way we use land, to carbon dioxide pulling out of the air. The question is whether there is enough political will to deploy these methods at a meaningful scale.

At the same time, a certain amount of warming is unavoidable, so we will be able to adapt to higher temperatures, and more extreme weather. "Adaptation and mitigation policies and programs that help individuals, communities, and states prepare for the risks of a climate change of the number of injuries, illnesses, and deaths from climate-related health outcomes," according to the assessment.

The biggest uncertainty in climate forecasting is always here?

That's a question that even 13 federal agencies and 300 scientists can not answer. But the world's nations are trying. The United Nations is now preparing to meet in Katowice, Poland, the United States, wants out of the agreement.