Then in August, Maui was devastated by a fast-moving wildfire and Florida’s Gulf Coast was slammed by its second major hurricane in two years. In July, a torrential rainstorm deluged parts of Vermont in deadly floodwaters. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesĬountries’ emissions plans put the world ‘wildly off track’ to contain global heating, UN assessment shows Some of the report’s sweeping conclusions remain painfully familiar: No part of the US is truly safe from climate disasters slashing fossil fuel use is critical to limit the consequences, but we’re not doing it fast enough and every fraction of a degree of warming leads to more intense impacts.īut there are some important new additions: Scientists can now say with more confidence when the climate crisis has made rainstorms, hurricanes and wildfires stronger or more frequent, long-term drought more severe and heat more deadly.īelchatow Power Station, is the world's largest lignite coal-fired power station, on November 29, 2018. “Climate change is affecting every aspect of our lives,” Hayhoe told CNN. This year’s assessment reflects the reality that Americans can increasingly see and feel climate impacts in their own communities, said Katharine Hayhoe, a distinguished climate scientist at Texas Tech University and contributor to the report. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report due roughly every five years, warned that even though planet-warming pollution in the US is slowly decreasing, it is not happening nearly fast enough to meet the nation’s targets, nor is it in line with the UN-sanctioned goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – a threshold beyond which scientists warn life on Earth will struggle to cope. The effects of a rapidly warming climate are being felt in every corner of the US and will worsen over the next 10 years with continued fossil fuel use, according to a stark new report from federal agencies.
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