BOULDER, Colo. — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), released on Tuesday, shows that climate change is worsening as human emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continues to build globally in the atmosphere.
“Every now and then, there’s an aspect of my job as a climate scientist that’s a little bit depressing,” said NOAA climate scientist Lori Bruhwiler, "For example, when you hear about the bleaching of the beautiful and important coral reefs off the coast of Florida."
Bruhwiler is one of the nearly 500 authors of the assessment, a new one of which is released every five years. She works at the Global Monitoring Lab in Boulder where she measures and models greenhouse gas emissions firsthand.
“One thing that alarms me is that climate change seems to be proceeding faster than we thought it would,” she said. "Some of the things that the experts have been warning us about are already happening."
She said recent extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and flooding are a response to the added heat, water vapor and ultimately energy to the atmosphere.
Americans have added the most carbon to the atmosphere over the past 125 years, but Bruhwiler said a bright spot in this year’s climate assessment is that our nation’s contribution while still high, is at least diminishing.
“And this is because we’re burning less coal and we’re using natural gas, which is cleaner in many ways, and this is causing our carbon emissions to go down,” she said.
She said Europe's contribution also continues to decrease, and for the first time, South America's annual carbon dioxide contribution is decreasing. China is now the world's heaviest polluter and is on pace to eventually become responsible for the most accumulated carbon.
This year's assessment shows that at this point, reversing climate change would be nearly impossible because carbon dioxide can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but Bruhwiler said the goal of halting the planets warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is achievable.
“You know we have to work hard because this is a huge problem confronting society,” Bruhwilder said.
NCA5 Atlas
With this year’s assessment, NOAA has released a new digital tool called Atlas. It's an extension of NCA5, offering interactive maps that show projections of future conditions in the United States.
With the NCA Interactive Atlas, users can access and explore climate data for locations across the United States, even if the data were not explicitly presented in NCA5.
The NCA Interactive Atlas also includes features to help users interpret and compare maps. Click an area of interest on any map to see a plain-language summary of what the map is showing, or select the swipe feature to compare projected conditions at various levels of global warming.
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