Draft Report Offers Starkest View Yet of U.S. Climate Threats
“The things Americans value most are at risk,” says a draft of the National Climate Assessment, a major federal scientific report slated for release next year.
The U.S. has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years, the draft report says. The final report isn’t scheduled to be published until late 2023, but the Trump administration tried, but largely failed, to halt work on the next report.
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.