It’s no secret that warming temperatures, wildfires, and flash floods are increasingly affecting lives across the United States. With the U.S. government now planning to ramp up fossil fuel use, the risks of these events are likely to become even more pronounced.
That leaves a big question: Is the nation prepared to adapt to the consequences?
As climate disasters grow in frequency and intensity, from devastating wildfires to relentless hurricanes to record-breaking heat waves, the Trump administration has once again taken a step that threatens to deepen the climate crisis: formally announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In the midst of an escalating climate crisis that’s upending livelihoods and lives, this decision raises urgent questions about the future of national and global progress. Namely, what does it mean for the international climate effort to combat climate change when the world’s largest historical emitter steps away from the table? And what are the implications for Americans already grappling with the mounting costs of a warming planet?
Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowners insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country.
To add insult to injury, those rates go even higher if you make a claim – as much as 25% if you claim a total loss of your home.
Why is this happening?
Less than a month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population has already experienced an extreme heat wave. Millions of people were under heat warnings across the western U.S. in early July or sweating through humid heat in the East.
Death Valley hit a dangerous 129 degrees Fahrenheit (53.9 C) on July 7, a day after a motorcyclist died from heat exposure there. Las Vegas broke its all-time heat record at 120 F (48.9 C). In California, days of over-100-degree heat in large parts of the state dried out the landscape, fueling wildfires. Oregon reported several suspected heat deaths.
The heat wave that left more than 100 million people sweating across the eastern U.S. in June 2024 hit so fast and was so extreme that forecasters warned a flash drought could follow across wide parts of the region.
Prolonged high temperatures can quickly dry soils, triggering a rapid onset drought that can affect agriculture, water resources, and energy supplies. Many regions under the June heat dome quickly developed abnormally dry conditions.
If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care, or education.
Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country.
Despite this, research that I conducted with my colleauges suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections. Climate change opinions may even have had a large enough effect to change the 2020 election outcome in President Joe Biden’s favor. This was the conclusion of an analysis of polling data that we published on Jan. 17, 2024, through the University of Colorado’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures.
Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts, and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.
While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?
National weather analysts released their 2023 “billion-dollar disasters list” on Jan. 9, just as 2024 was getting off to a ferocious start. A blizzard was sweeping across across the Plains and Midwest, and the South and East faced flood risks from extreme downpours.
The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each.
Urban agriculture is expected to be an important feature of 21st century sustainability and can have many benefits for communities and cities, including providing fresh produce in neighborhoods with few other options.
Among those benefits, growing food in backyards, community gardens, or urban farms can shrink the distance fruits and vegetables have to travel between producers and consumers – what’s known as the “food mile” problem. With transportation’s greenhouse gas emissions eliminated, it’s a small leap to assume that urban agriculture is a simple climate solution.
A few months ago, the Alabama Resilience Council convened to discuss ways to prepare the state for extreme weather events.
Interesting ideas surfaced, especially on fortifying homes against storm and wind damage.
What wasn’t discussed?
Climate change.
Torrential downpours sent muddy water racing through streets in Libya, Greece, Spain, and Hong Kong in early September 2023, with thousands of deaths in the city of Derna, Libya. Zagora, Greece saw a record 30 inches of rain, the equivalent of a year and a half of rain falling in 24 hours.
A few weeks earlier, monsoon rains triggered deadly landslides and flooding in the Himalayas that killed dozens of people in India.
After severe flooding on almost every continent this year, including mudslides and flooding in California in early 2023 and devastating floods in New York and Vermont in July, it can seem like extreme rainfall is becoming more common.
Southeast Michigan seemed like the perfect “climate haven.”
“My family has owned my home since the ‘60s. … Even when my dad was a kid and lived there, no floods, no floods, no floods, no floods. Until [2021],” one southeast Michigan resident told us. That June, a storm dumped more than 6 inches of rain on the region, overloading stormwater systems and flooding homes.
That sense of living through unexpected and unprecedented disasters resonates with more Americans each year, we have found in our research into the past, present, and future of risk and resilience.
Power plants are an enormous source of carbon pollution, producing more than 25 percent of the United States’ total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Now—backed by the transformative power of the new clean electricity investments of the Inflation Reduction Act, which also affirmed the strength of the Clean Air Act to tackle climate change—the Biden administration has a rare opportunity to set the first-ever carbon pollution emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants.
Scorching temperatures have put millions of Americans in danger this summer, with heat extremes stretching from coast to coast in the Southern U.S.
Phoenix hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) or higher every day for over three weeks in July. Other major cities, from Las Vegas to Miami, experienced relentless high temperatures, which residents described as “hell on earth.”
A powerful storm system that hit the U.S. Northeast on July 9 and 10, 2023, dumped close to 10 inches of rain on New York’s Lower Hudson Valley in less than a day and sent mountain rivers spilling over their banks and into towns across Vermont, causing widespread flash flooding. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said he hadn’t seen rainfall like it since Hurricane Irene devastated the region in 2011.
Extreme water disasters like this have disrupted lives in countries around the world in the past few years, from the Alps and Western Europe to Pakistan, India, and Australia, along with several U.S. states in 2022 and 2023.
The role of climate change is becoming increasingly evident in these types of deluges.
Flash droughts develop fast, and when they hit at the wrong time, they can devastate a region’s agriculture.
They’re also becoming increasingly common as the planet warms.
In a new study published May 25, we found that the risk of flash droughts, which can develop in the span of a few weeks, is on pace to rise in every major agriculture region around the world in the coming decades.
Cold spells often bring climate change deniers out in force on social media, with hashtags like #ClimateHoax and #ClimateScam. Former President Donald Trump often chimes in, repeatedly claiming that each cold snap disproves the existence of global warming.
From a scientific standpoint, these claims of disproof are absurd. Fluctuations in the weather don’t refute clear long-term trends in the climate.
Yet many people believe these claims, and the political result has been reduced willingness to take action to mitigate climate change.
Honolulu has lost more than 5 miles of its famous beaches to sea level rise and storm surges. Sunny-day flooding during high tides makes many city roads impassable, and water mains for the public drinking water system are corroding from saltwater because of sea level rise.
The damage has left the city and county spending millions of dollars on repairs and infrastructure to try to adapt to the rising risks.
Future costs will almost certainly be higher. More than US$19 billion in property value, at today’s dollars, is at risk by 2100 from projected sea level rise, driven by greenhouse gas emissions largely from the burning of fossil fuels. Elsewhere in Honolulu County, which covers all of Oahu, many coastal communities will be cut off or uninhabitable.
California is embarking on an audacious new climate plan that aims to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas footprint by 2045, and in the process, slash emissions far beyond its borders. The blueprint calls for massive transformations in industry, energy, and transportation, as well as changes in institutions and human behaviors.
These transformations won’t be easy. Two years of developing the plan have exposed myriad challenges and tensions, including environmental justice, affordability, and local rule.
Rivers are critical corridors that connect cities and ecosystems alike. When drought develops, water levels fall, making river navigation harder and more expensive.
In 2022, water levels in some of the world’s largest rivers, including the Rhine in Europe and the Yangtze in China, fell to historically low levels. The Mississippi River fell so low in Memphis, Tennessee in mid-October that barges were unable to float, requiring dredging and special water releases from upstream reservoirs to keep channels navigable.
