Earth's warming affecting Americans from coast to coast

Continued use of fossil fuels has warmed oceans, melted ice caps and led to some of the hottest years in recorded history.

Dangerous and costly severe storms and wildfires have become more frequent as the changing climate impacts everything from agriculture to the cost of homes and human health.

The term “global warming,” sometimes used interchangeably with “climate change,” describes the long-term pattern of rising temperatures that causes long-term changes in Earth’s atmosphere.

“The weather is changing. You see that your crops aren’t doing as well, or the weather is just weird. It shouldn’t be this hot,” said Erica Smithwick, a professor of geography at Penn State University and director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and Penn State Climate Consortium.

“We shouldn’t be closing schools in Philadelphia because of heat extremes. We shouldn’t be having wildfire smoke affect the East Coast from fires in Canada, and the fires in the West, that’s just not normal,” she said.

NASA notes that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.

“Most of the leading science organizations around the world have issued public statements expressing this, including international and U.S. science academies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a whole host of reputable scientific bodies around the world,” NASA notes.

That list includes the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the latter of which concluded: “… climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.”

While nearly all scientists who study the climate agree that global warming is occurring and is caused by man, only 72% of American adults believe climate change is happening and just 59% say it’s caused mostly by human activity, according to a national survey – the Yale Climate Opinions Map – conducted from November 2008 through December 2024, of respondents from all 50 states.

Results released in February 2024 from a University of Michigan study using social media data, however, suggest there are fewer climate deniers – just 15% of Americans.

Disinformation about climate change is spread by supporters of fossil fuel industries, causing millions of Americans to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is occurring and that it’s caused by humans’ use.

“There is this polarization that suggests that there is disagreement about what’s happening. But if you ask people, they get it, they see that it’s happening,” Smithwick said. “They know this accelerated warming is caused by humans, and that it’s happening now, and it’s starting to affect them personally.”

Smithwick believes that most Americans are connecting the dots between abnormally frequent extreme-weather patterns and the use of fossil fuels.

“Most people understand that this isn’t normal,” she said. “Most people kind of get it that fossil fuels probably aren’t sustainable, and are causing climate change.”

The Yale Climate Opinion Maps reveal that 63% of Americans are somewhat or very worried about global warming.

What is climate change?

Greenhouse gases come from fossil fuels – rich, dense organic material that has become packed with carbon after being buried underground for millions of years – such as coal and oil. When fossil fuels are burned to power factories, cities and cars and to warm homes, invisible carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

“A lot of good things have happened because we’ve learned how to use fossil fuels,” Smithwick said. “People can live in warm homes now in ways that they couldn’t 100 to 200 years ago. We live in healthier societies, largely because we’ve been able to leverage the energy and the power of fossil fuels. However, it comes at a cost, and this cost is climate change.”

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are essentially creating an atmospheric blanket around the Earth, trapping long-wave radiation and heating the planet, she said.

“This chemistry and the physics of how these gases are interacting in the atmosphere go back to the late 1800s,” Smithwick said. “We’ve known about that chemistry and physics for a really, really long time, and we continue to put these gases into the atmosphere and treat our atmosphere like a sewer, essentially.

“It’s starting to catch up with us.”

More moisture

Dr. Donald Friend is a geography professor at Minnesota State University, a Jefferson Science Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences and a one-year senior science adviser for the Office of Global Climate Change at U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

At USAID, he worked on climate-risk management.

Friend said the atmosphere and ocean are getting warmer, which means they retain more moisture.

“It doesn’t rain as often or snow as often because the atmosphere is warmer, but when it does rain and snow, it does so much … more intensely,” Friend said. “We see bigger rainstorms with more water. That’s because the atmosphere is warmer.

“It just holds on to the moisture longer. So when it finally has to release it — the laws of physics make it have to release it — it dumps. We get much bigger catastrophic rainstorms. Occasionally, we get catastrophic snowfalls.”

The planet is also experiencing longer droughts, rather than minor seasonal droughts, as well as larger seasonal floods or seasonal storms, bigger hurricanes and bigger rainstorms, he said.

Friend noted that climate change manifests in rainfall and storm intensity, wildfires, increased intensity and frequency of hurricanes and tornadoes and water scarcity.

Such severe weather has additional consequences: rising heat makes outdoor labor unsafe, disrupting farming; repeated natural disasters destroy livelihoods, prompting migration; and natural disasters disrupt vulnerable populations, increasing exploitation and human trafficking.

Fires in the East

Smithwick has been studying wildfires in Yellowstone National Park since 2010, building on research that began after the massive 1988 fires. Traditionally, Yellowstone’s forests burn every 150 to 300 years. Because of climate change, fires are now occurring far more frequently — every 15 to 30 years.

“I’m now starting to study that in the East,” Smithwick said. “Pennsylvania had a drought this past fall, and we had wildfires. … We have just recently had wildfires in North and South Carolina. We had wildfires in Connecticut, in Massachusetts. Fires are burning novel ecosystems everywhere. I don’t think we’re immune to that in the East.”

While wildfires close to the East Coast will be different — perhaps smaller or less frequent than other fires in Yellowstone or Los Angeles — they will have a large impact, she said.

“A, we’re not prepared, and B, we have a lot of infrastructure,” Smithwick said. “We have a lot of people living closely in wooded environments. It’s something we’re watching now moving forward. I’ve been working really closely with the prescribed fire community here in Pennsylvania and trying to think about how we’re stewarding our lands for the future.”