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Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States

Once considered a problem mainly for the future, climate change is now upon us. People are at the heart of this problem: we are causing it, and we are being affected by it. The rapid onset of many aspects of climate change highlights the urgency of confronting this challenge without further delay. The choices that we make now will influence current and future emissions of heat-trapping gases, and can help to reduce future warming. Likewise, our decisions on whether and how to adapt to the degree of warming that is already inevitable can help us reduce the impacts of future warming.

1. Human-induced climate change and its impacts are apparent now throughout the United States. Global warming is unequivocal and is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollutants. [This actually is technically an error, if their baseline is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports from last year. They assert that humans are the dominant warming influence since 1950 with greater than 90 percent confidence, which is different than the certainty here. (UPDATE 7/18: Susan Hassol helpfully pointed out that the IPCC’s “very likely” confidence level is “greater than 90 percent.”)] Observed changes in the United States include temperature increases, sea-level rise, increased heavy downpours, rapidly retreating glaciers, regional droughts, substantial changes in sensitive wildlife, earlier snowmelt, and altered timing and amount of river flows. Impacts of these changes are apparent in many facets of society including health, water, food, energy, and quality of life.

2. Many climatic changes are occurring faster than projected even a few years ago. Global emissions of heat-trapping gases are now increasing even more rapidly than the highest emissions scenario scientists have been analyzing. Arctic sea ice and the large ice sheets on Greenland and parts of Antarctica are melting faster than expected.

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