“In the United States, Congress has a unique and powerful moment to move forward legislation that could be a big down payment on climate action. When considering the enormity of the climate impacts the nation is already experiencing, as well as the tremendous health and economic benefits of a clean energy economy, the choice for policymakers should be obvious.
“There’s really one key message that emerges from this report: We are out of time. And this report really provides compelling, scientific linkages between the headlines that we see today and what we know about the physics of the climate system and how it’s being impacted by rising greenhouse gases.”
“The biggest, most important aspects of climate change are not changing from report to report. And so things like the fact that the earth—were we to double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere—would warm by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t change in this report. But the precision with which we can say that has improved, and in particular regional information, and information about extremes is provided in this report at a level of detail that exceeds any of the previous reports.”
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“So we keep hearing more and more in the news about these extreme events, and the takeaway message from this new report is that these events are just going to occur more and more often as global temperatures rise. And they may get more and more intense. And so in the Western U.S., for example, we need to think hard about issues like water conservation and water storage in order to sort of weather through these increasingly extreme events.”
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