Federal report: Warming disrupts Americans’ lives

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans are already feeling
man-made global warming, from heat waves to wild storms to longer
allergy seasons. And it is likely to get worse and more expensive, says a
new federal report that is heating up political debate along with the
temperature.
Shortly after the report came out Tuesday, President
Barack Obama used several television weathermen to make his point about
the bad weather news and a need for action to curb carbon pollution
before it is too late.
"We want to emphasize to the public, this
is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is
affecting Americans right now," Obama told "Today" show weathercaster Al
Roker. "Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to
drought, more severe wildfires — all these things are having an impact
on Americans as we speak."
Climate change’s assorted harms "are
expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout
this century and beyond," the National Climate Assessment concluded,
emphasizing the impact of too-wild weather as well as simple warming.
Still,
it’s not too late to prevent the worst of climate change, says the
840-page report, which the Obama administration is highlighting as it
tries to jump-start often-stalled efforts to curb heat-trapping gases.
Said White House science adviser John Holdren: "It’s a good-news story
about the many opportunities to take cost-effective actions to reduce
the damage."
Release of the report, the third edition of a
congressionally mandated study, gives Obama an opportunity to ground his
campaign against climate change in science and numbers, endeavoring to
blunt the arguments of those who question the idea and human
contributions to such changes. Later this summer, the administration
plans to propose new regulations restricting gases that come from
existing coal-fired power plants.
Not everyone is persuaded.
Some
fossil energy groups, conservative think tanks and Republican senators
immediately assailed the report as "alarmist."
Senate Republican leader
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama was likely to "use the platform
to renew his call for a national energy tax.
And I’m sure he’ll get
loud cheers from liberal elites — from the kind of people who leave a
giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow
toilets."
Since taking office, Obama has not proposed a specific
tax on fossil fuel emissions. He has proposed a system that caps
emissions and allows companies to trade carbon pollution credits, but it
has failed in Congress.
Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana
said the report was supposed to be scientific but "it’s more of a
political one used to justify government overreach." And leaders in the
fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for a large amount of the
heat-trapping carbon dioxide, said their energy is needed and America
can’t afford to cut back.
"Whether you agree or disagree with the
report, the question is: What are you going to do about it? To us that
is a major question," said Charlie Drevna, president of the American
Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. He called the report "overblown."
The
report — which is full of figures, charts and other research-generated
graphics — includes 3,096 footnotes referring to other mostly
peer-reviewed research. It was written by more than 250 scientists and
government officials, starting in 2012. A draft was released in January
2013, but this version has been reviewed by more scientists, including
twice by the National Academy of Sciences which called it "reasonable,"
and "a valuable resource."
Environmental groups praised the
report. "If we don’t slam the brakes on the carbon pollution driving
climate change, we’re dooming ourselves and our children to more intense
heat waves, destructive floods and storms and surging sea levels," said
Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Scientists and the White House called it the most detailed and U.S.-focused scientific report on global
warming.
The
report looks at regional and state-level effects of global warming,
compared with recent reports from the United Nations that lumped all of
North America together.
"All Americans will find things that
matter to them in this report," said scientist Jerry Melillo of the
Marine Biological Laboratory, who chaired the science committee that
wrote it.
"For decades we’ve been collecting the dots about climate
change; now we’re connecting those dots."
In a White House
conference call with reporters, National Climatic Data Center Director
Tom Karl said his two biggest concerns were flooding from sea level rise
on the U.S. coastlines — especially for the low-lying cities of Miami,
Norfolk, Virginia, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire — and drought, heat
waves and prolonged fire seasons in the Southwest.
Even though the
nation’s average temperature has risen by between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees
since record keeping began in 1895, it’s in the big, wild weather where
the average person feels climate change the most, said co-author
Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist. Extreme
weather hits us in the pocketbooks and can be seen with our own eyes,
she said.
The report says the intensity, frequency and duration of
the strongest Atlantic hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s,
but it is still uncertain how much of that is from man-made warming.
Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity and have shifted
northward since the 1950s, it says. Also, heavy downpours are
increasing — by 71 percent in the Northeast. Heat waves, such as those
in Texas in 2011 and the Midwest in 2012, are projected to intensify
nationwide. Droughts in the Southwest are expected to get stronger. Sea
level has risen 8 inches since 1880 and is projected to rise between 1
foot and 4 feet by 2100.
Climate data center chief Karl
highlighted the increase in downpours. He said last week’s drenching,
when Pensacola, Florida, got up to two feet of rain in one storm and
parts of the East had three inches in one day, is what he’s talking
about.
The report says "climate change threatens human health and
well-being in many ways." Those include smoke-filled air from wildfires,
smoggy air from pollution, and more diseases from tainted food, water,
mosquitoes and ticks. And ragweed pollen season has lengthened.
Flooding
alone may cost $325 billion by the year 2100 in one of the worst-case
scenarios, with $130 billion of that in Florida, the report says.
Already the droughts and heat waves of 2011 and 2012 have added about
$10 billion to farm costs, the report says.
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AP writers Josh Lederman and Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.
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Online:
The National Climate Assessment: http://www.globalchange.gov/
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/borenbears
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