Climate change is fueling extremism, raising tempers along with temperatures — and exacerbating a dangerous pattern of xenophobia, a new report warns
It’s getting colder. Temperatures across the country have been dropping over the last few days and the pattern of extreme weather events across the US is worsening, according to a new report.
The report, released on Tuesday by the National Climate Assessment, a government-commissioned multi-year analysis of the impacts of climate change, concluded that global warming is making extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts, more common and destructive. Extreme heat has been an issue since climate scientists first measured its effects about 30 years ago, but the report made a case for why the problem is getting worse.
“Since 2007, the average global sea level has risen approximately three millimeters (or about one tenth of an inch),” said Dr. Michael E. Mann, director of atmospheric and Earth system science at NASA. “It is well below the amount of rise that scientists anticipated based on long-term oceanographic observations and climate models from the 1970s, so they have attributed the sea level rise to a combination of global warming, ice sheet and glacier melting, and groundwater pumping. But what we can’t attribute directly to climate change is the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events:”
It’s the same story for global temperatures, which are not only rising; they’re also getting hotter as the climate warms. Even more importantly, the report found that the combination of the warming effects combined with human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon-based pollutants is speeding up the pace of the climate change, and the report concluded that most of the warming of the climate since the 1970s is attributable to human activities. That, however, is not an encouraging picture.
Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing our nation in the 21st century. The impacts of extreme weather and climate disruption will be felt by Americans for generations to come.
The public health of Americans is at risk and Americans are in