New Climate Change Report: From Bad to Worse

Scientists and officials working with the United States Global Change Research Program released on Tuesday the first climate change assessment to be completed during Barack Obama's presidency. The assessment, which is required periodically by Congress, breaks down the predicted impacts of global warming in the United States by region and sector; it contains no new research, but it paints a detailed and worrying picture of what a warmer America will be like 10, 50 and 100 years from today. "It is clear that climate change is happening now," said Jerry Melillo, a lead author of the report and an ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. "The observed climate changes we report are not opinions to be debated. They are facts to be reported."(See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Produced by 13 federal agencies and several major universities and research centers, the climate report found that if carbon emissions continued growing unabated, the mainland U.S. would heat up anywhere from 7 degrees F to 11.5 degrees F by 2090, with some margin of error. That's similar to the predictions found in the 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the real value of the new assessment is found in its detailed breakdown of the different impact warming will have in the various regions of the U.S. — in a country as geographically vast and diverse as the U.S., climate change won't be felt monolithically. 


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