From the White House Science Guy, Dr. John P. Holdren:
Hi, everyone —
Today, we released the third National Climate Assessment report, by far the most comprehensive look ever at climate change impacts in the United States.
Based on four years of work by hundreds of experts from government, academia, corporations, and public-interest organizations, the Assessment confirms abundant data and examples that climate change isn’t some distant threat — it’s affecting us now.
Not only are the planet and the nation warming on average, but a number of types of extreme weather events linked to climate change have become more frequent or intense in many regions, including heat waves, droughts, heavy downpours, floods, and some kinds of destructive storms.
The good news is that there are sensible steps that we can take to protect this country and the planet.
Those steps include, importantly, the three sets of actions making up the Climate Action Plan that President Obama announced last June: cutting carbon pollution in America; increasing preparedness for and resilience to the changes in climate that already are ongoing; and leading the international response to the climate change challenge.
We’ve made great progress in the year since his announcement — but there’s much more work to be done.
Watch this short video to learn more about the new report and see how climate change is affecting people across the United States today:
Explore the full report, and find out how you can help — because every one of us has to do his or her part to meet the challenge of climate change.
Thank you,
John
Dr. John P. Holdren
Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy
The White House
Climate Change And President Obama’s Action Plan
The National Climate Assessment
On May 6, the Administration released the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment, the most authoritative and comprehensive source of scientific information to date about climate-change impacts across all U.S. regions and on critical sectors of the economy.
The report, a key deliverable of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, confirms that climate change is not a distant threat – it’s affecting us now.
Today, delivering on our legal mandate and the President’s Climate Action Plan, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released the Third National Climate Assessment, the most comprehensive, authoritative, transparent scientific report on U.S. climate change impacts ever generated.
The report confirms that climate change is affecting every region of the country and key sectors of the U.S. economy and society, underscoring the need to combat the threats climate change presents and increase the preparedness and resilience of American communities.
The Third National Climate Assessment is available to download and can be explored interactively through our newly redeployed website. In this mobile-compatible site, every piece of the report is shareable, including graphics, key messages, regional highlights, full chapters, and more. More broadly, the new site features accessible and dynamic information, topical call-outs, resources, and news about global change and related Federal research and engagement efforts.
The findings of the Third National Climate Assessment are fully traceable and supported by metadata through the Global Change Information System (GCIS), a new gateway to Federal global change information that delivers on goals set in USGCRP’s 2012-2021 Strategic Plan. The GCIS enables traceability between environmental data streams (such as observations from sensors and outputs from models) and the resulting scientific findings and publications. Going forward, the GCIS is intended to expand to provide this traceability for other key reports.
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