WASHINGTON – Sea levels are already rising, prolonged droughts have hit the Southwest and it’s raining more in the Northeast due to climate change, a new White House report warned Tuesday. President Barack Obama, in releasing the third U.S. National Climate Assessment, said the nation needs to act quickly before more damage is done.
“Climate change is happening now in every region of the country and is affecting Americans not only on a day-to-day basis but also on the longer term as well,” Jerry Melillo, one of the collaborators on the report, said at a news conference. “All Americans will find things that matter to them in this report.”
The assessment, four years in the making, is a big component of the president’s Climate Action Plan, which he announced last June. More than 300 scientists worked on the report, which was reviewed by federal agencies including the National Academy of Sciences.
“A key feature of the new report is the unprecedented comprehensiveness,” John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology, said. This work hones in on eight geographically variant regions of the U.S. and discusses the effects of climate change on multiple sectors of the U.S. economy.
Holdren said he was hopeful the report would spur legislative action, even though, he acknowledged there are still climate change deniers on Capitol Hill. The Energy Savings and Industrial Competiveness Act, a bill that promotes increased energy efficiency in buildings, is up for debate in the Senate this week.
“We need to put a lot of effort into mitigation and adaptation. This is not a problem in which we just need to wring our hands,” Holdren said during a telephone conference with reporters. “Climate change deniers will recede and those willing to take the challenge will step forward.”
Melillo, chairman of the National Climate Assessment Advisory Committee and a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory said one of the greatest threats outlined in the report is the rise of sea levels.
“The sleeping giant in sea level rise projection is the ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic,” Melillo said. Uncertainty about the rate of melting means scientists cannot accurately predict just how high the sea levels will go. But the scientists making the climate assessment project a rise of between one and four feet before the end of the century, Melillo said.
This could severely impact low-lying cities like such as Miami, Fla., Norfolk, Va., and Portsmouth, N.H.
Droughts in the Southwest are another cause for concern. Longer and dryer summers lead to more forest fires and competition for water sources. The report noted that 2001 to 2010 had the hottest annual temperatures in the Southwest, compared to the last 110 years of recorded data.
On the flip side, rainfall in the Northeast has increased by 10 percent every decade since 1895, the report said. The amount of rainfall in heavy precipitation events, lasting several days, is expected to continue to increase as well. Between 1958 and 2010, the report noted, the Northeast has had more than a 70 percent increase in the amount of rainfall in heavy rainstorms.
The report is “actionable science,” Dr. Tom Karl, director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center said. He said he hopes the report will increase awareness and encourage public education about the effects of climate change.
“They [Americans] get that climate change is happening, they get that it’s caused by burning of fossil fuels,” the NOAA director said. “But they don’t feel that sense of urgency.”