New National Climate Assessment Report: We’re on pace to heat the U.S. by 10°F

[octoberlib]

Another day, another alarming report on climate change. The U.S. government has just released an initial draft of its third national climate assessment (pdf), a massive document looking at how a hotter planet will affect the United States.
Most of the 1,193-page report, compiled by more than 300 experts over the past three years, just recapitulates what’s already known about climate science — the report is useful mostly as guidance for federal agencies. But old or not, there’s no getting around the fact that this is a very red and very striking chart:


The maps represent predictions by the latest climate models for what the United States will look like in 2100 under different emissions scenarios. In the top left corner is RCP 2.6, a world in which everyone has taken very aggressive action to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Parts of the United States get a few degrees hotter, thanks to the carbon we’ve already loaded into the atmosphere, but temperatures stabilize after that.

The bottom right-hand corner, meanwhile, shows RCP 8.5, a world in which we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate with no effort to tackle emissions. In this scenario, the report notes, average temperatures in the United States rise somewhere between 5°F and 10°F by century’s end (or 2.8°C to 5.5°C). A few parts of the country get up to 15°F hotter. Needless to say, that’s significant.
If you’re looking for good news in the report, there is a tidbit about how U.S. agriculture is expected to remain “relatively resilient” in the face of unchecked climate change for the next 25 years or so. But after that, crops and livestock don’t fare so well and productivity starts declining thanks to heat and drought. So it’s not exactly great news.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/11/graph-of-the-day-were-on-pace-to-heat-the-u-s-by-10f/


Here's the link to the National Climate Assessment http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-fulldraft.pdf

[CRH]

1. The latest models still do not acknowledge, ...

many of the feedbacks now known to influence the eventual heat the climate will produce.

Methane from permafrost and clathrates, and the speed of the Arctic melt, are yet to be given weight in the worst case models above.

If the government knows only what the models are predicting now, the fact that there continues to be only obstruction at international climate talks, speaks volumes of whose best interest the US government represents.

[octoberlib]

3. Oh, I agree

There's this from Think Progress : The rule in Washington, DC is if you want to bury news, release it late on a Friday afternoon. So one can only assume the climate silence crowd prevailed in the release this afternoon of the draft U.S. Climate Assessment.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/11/1438421/climate-silence-draft-climate-assessment-9-15f-warming-over-most-of-us/

[limpyhobbler]

2. kick

[Viking12]

4. Another link

You can access individual chapters if you don't want to download the entire assessment at once:

Federal Advisory Committee Draft Climate Assessment Report Released for Public Review
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/