Latest news with #FifthNationalClimateAssessment
3 days ago
- Climate
Record-shattering heat wave hitting wide swath of US: Latest forecast
A dangerous heat wave is moving in, with more than 100 million people from the Midwest to the Northeast on alert for life-threatening temperatures. The widespread heat alerts are first impacting Midwest states including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska and South Dakota. The heat index -- what the temperature feels like with humidity -- could reach 110 degrees on Friday and Saturday. Central U.S. cities like Denver and Minneapolis could shatter heat records this weekend. In the Chicago area, the heat index could hit 105 degrees from Saturday to Monday. The South will also be feeling the heat. The heat index is forecast to hit 104 degrees in Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky, on Sunday and Tuesday. The dangerous and record-shattering heat will shift east by the end of the weekend and the start of next week. Daily record highs are possible from Detroit to Raleigh, North Carolina, to Boston on Monday and Tuesday. In New York City, the heat index is expected to skyrocket to 103 degrees, 107 degrees and 105 degrees from Sunday to Tuesday. In Washington, D.C, the heat index is forecast to jump to 103 degrees, 107 degrees and 108 degrees. Boston could feel like 102 degrees on Tuesday. Heat indices up to 107 are also possible in cities including Detroit, Cleveland, Ohio, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia from Sunday to Wednesday. Doctors recommend taking excessive heat warnings seriously. Over 700 people die from heat-related illnesses every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and extreme heat is considered the deadliest weather-related hazard in the U.S., according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump gutted the National Climate Assessment. America will suffer as a result.
The National Climate Assessment is more than just a report. Aside from its unique status as the authoritative statement on the state of climate change in America, it is also an expression of service and passion from the national climate community to our fellow citizens. The National Climate Assessment is developed through an incredibly rigorous process, which includes exacting deadlines and multiple rounds of scientific, technical and public review. This is all followed by closely monitored and recorded revisions and thoughtful consideration given by the author teams of each chapter. By law, an updated report is delivered to Congress and released to the public every four years. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, was late getting started. Authors — all of whom volunteer their time to contribute to the report — faced truncated draft deadlines that challenged even seasoned academic writers. For someone like me, it meant long nights pouring over reports and academic papers, seeking to bolster my understanding and expert perspective of climate change in the Midwest, and then pour out that expertise into a brief, unbiased, well-cited sentences. I cried — some nights, I cried a lot. Despite the challenging timeline, the director of the Fifth National Climate Assessment didn't choose the easy path of doing what's always been done before. Instead, she further challenged us to seek out lived expertise, traditional ecological knowledge and credible, non-peer reviewed sources of information that would explain the changes that are occurring, what the risks are if we do not adapt and what options or strategies are there for taking action. We were, in my opinion, asked to write the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to a national climate adaptation report. The Fifth National Climate Assessment didn't stop there. Authors of the report and the team at the U.S. Global Change Research Program recognized that sharing the story of climate change needed to happen through many mediums. Dedicated, insightful colleagues launched the Art x Climate project, soliciting art from across the country, showcasing what climate means to people — young and old, rural and urban, from all races and genders. The results of the competition were integrated into the report and have made the report itself a beautiful work of art. Finally, a poetry anthology titled 'Dear Human at the Edge of Time' was published ahead of the report. It features the voices of many authors of the assessment and gave an opportunity for these scholars, activists and practitioners to transform their climate passion into climate poetry. Contributing to the National Climate Assessment and attending the in-person meeting of over 400 authors, technical reviewers and editors was the most meaningful thing I have done in my climate career. I remember standing in the room and feeling overwhelmed at the magnitude of the effort and selflessness of people who were volunteering their time, expertise, knowledge and passion to this national resource. But on April 29 of this year, the authors of the Sixth National Climate Assessment, due out in 2027, received a brief and unexpected message: 'Thank you for your participation in the 6th National Climate Assessment. At this time, the scope of the NCA6 is currently being reevaluated in accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990. We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles.' The dismissal of the 400 authors followed closely on the heels of the firing of the majority of the Global Change Research Program staff and contractors who provided the leadership, coordination and technical support for the report and other direction across 15 federal agencies. The Trump administration is already acting to seed any future version of the assessment with climate denialism. These actions ignore decades of science and, more importantly, they put American communities at increasing risk in a rapidly changing climate. I am beside myself at losing this resource. I don't want to become immune to feeling pain, shame, loss, sadness just because this awful administration continues committing unlawful, unethical and despicable acts. I don't want the erasure of my work — and the work of my colleagues and friends — to be normalized, when it is not normal and not acceptable. I am tired of trying to be okay when I am not okay. And I'm not okay because these are not remotely okay times. The National Climate Assessment is more than a report. It is a selfless contribution that the climate community painstakingly compiles, expertly reviews and earnestly delivers to the American people. It is only one of the many meaningful, necessary and useful acts of human creation that are being erased by a small group of lawless ideologues who are undermining what truly makes this country great. Beth Gibbons is the inaugural director of the Resiliency Office in Washtenaw County, Mich. She is a former executive director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. She served on the Federal Advisory Council on Climate Change Adaptation under President Biden and was a contributing author to the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
11-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump gutted the National Climate Assessment. America will suffer as a result.
The National Climate Assessment is more than just a report. Aside from its unique status as the authoritative statement on the state of climate change in America, it is also an expression of service and passion from the national climate community to our fellow citizens. The National Climate Assessment is developed through an incredibly rigorous process, which includes exacting deadlines and multiple rounds of scientific, technical and public review. This is all followed by closely monitored and recorded revisions and thoughtful consideration given by the author teams of each chapter. By law, an updated report is delivered to Congress and released to the public every four years. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, was late getting started. Authors — all of whom volunteer their time to contribute to the report — faced truncated draft deadlines that challenged even seasoned academic writers. For someone like me, it meant long nights pouring over reports and academic papers, seeking to bolster my understanding and expert perspective of climate change in the Midwest, and then pour out that expertise into a brief, unbiased, well-cited sentences. I cried — some nights, I cried a lot. Despite the challenging timeline, the director of the Fifth National Climate Assessment didn't choose the easy path of doing what's always been done before. Instead, she further challenged us to seek out lived expertise, traditional ecological knowledge and credible, non-peer reviewed sources of information that would explain the changes that are occurring, what the risks are if we do not adapt and what options or strategies are there for taking action. We were, in my opinion, asked to write the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to a national climate adaptation report. The Fifth National Climate Assessment didn't stop there. Authors of the report and the team at the U.S. Global Change Research Program recognized that sharing the story of climate change needed to happen through many mediums. Dedicated, insightful colleagues launched the Art x Climate project, soliciting art from across the country, showcasing what climate means to people — young and old, rural and urban, from all races and genders. The results of the competition were integrated into the report and have made the report itself a beautiful work of art. Finally, a poetry anthology titled 'Dear Human at the Edge of Time' was published ahead of the report. It features the voices of many authors of the assessment and gave an opportunity for these scholars, activists and practitioners to transform their climate passion into climate poetry. Contributing to the National Climate Assessment and attending the in-person meeting of over 400 authors, technical reviewers and editors was the most meaningful thing I have done in my climate career. I remember standing in the room and feeling overwhelmed at the magnitude of the effort and selflessness of people who were volunteering their time, expertise, knowledge and passion to this national resource. But on April 29 of this year, the authors of the Sixth National Climate Assessment, due out in 2027, received a brief and unexpected message: 'Thank you for your participation in the 6th National Climate Assessment. At this time, the scope of the NCA6 is currently being reevaluated in accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990. We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles.' The dismissal of the 400 authors followed closely on the heels of the firing of the majority of the Global Change Research Program staff and contractors who provided the leadership, coordination and technical support for the report and other direction across 15 federal agencies. The Trump administration is already acting to seed any future version of the assessment with climate denialism. These actions ignore decades of science and, more importantly, they put American communities at increasing risk in a rapidly changing climate. I am beside myself at losing this resource. I don't want to become immune to feeling pain, shame, loss, sadness just because this awful administration continues committing unlawful, unethical and despicable acts. I don't want the erasure of my work — and the work of my colleagues and friends — to be normalized, when it is not normal and not acceptable. I am tired of trying to be okay when I am not okay. And I'm not okay because these are not remotely okay times. The National Climate Assessment is more than a report. It is a selfless contribution that the climate community painstakingly compiles, expertly reviews and earnestly delivers to the American people. It is only one of the many meaningful, necessary and useful acts of human creation that are being erased by a small group of lawless ideologues who are undermining what truly makes this country great. Beth Gibbons is the inaugural director of the Resiliency Office in Washtenaw County, Mich. She is a former executive director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. She served on the Federal Advisory Council on Climate Change Adaptation under President Biden and was a contributing author to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
As the ocean rises, NCDOT looks for a way to maintain ferry service to Ocracoke
N.C. 12, the highway that runs down the spine of the Outer Banks, is constantly at risk of being covered in water and sand because of erosion and sea-level rise. Those forces also threaten one of the state's ferry terminals. Ocean water has swallowed pavement and the septic drain field at the Hatteras Inlet car ferry terminal on Ocracoke, forcing the N.C. Department of Transportation to consider whether to fortify the docks or build new ones elsewhere on the island. NCDOT has come up with four options that it made public in May. Because of the dramatic loss of shoreline in front of the ferry terminal at the north end of Ocracoke, doing nothing is not one of them, said Jed Dixon, director of the NCDOT's Ferry Division. 'In one storm, we could lose all this if nothing's done,' Dixon said, gesturing toward an aerial photo of the terminal, known as South Dock. 'So we really need to start the planning now.' Ferries are lifelines for Ocracoke, an island community of fewer than 800 year-round residents whose population swells several times that size in the summer. NCDOT's vehicle ferries between Ocracoke and Hatteras carried 186,156 cars and trucks last year and 426,222 passengers. Two of the options for preserving that service involve expanding the ferry terminal in Ocracoke Village and landing the Hatteras ferries there. That would more than double the run time between Hatteras and Ocracoke to 2 1/2 hours and require NCDOT to buy more of the larger boats capable of operating in the open waters of Pamlico Sound. A third option would be a new ferry terminal at Devil Shoals, in an undeveloped area outside the village near the Ocracoke Campground. It also would require larger boats and a longer trip, and would come with unpopular environmental costs both in the water and on land. The final option is to overhaul South Dock, with new slips for larger boats and new 'stacking lanes,' where cars can wait to board. The old waiting area is no longer usable after large sections of pavement were washed away. The big challenge with maintaining South Dock is that more than a mile of N.C. 12 just south of the terminal is close to the surf and prone to flooding. In 2020, after Hurricane Dorian washed away the beach and left the road broken and buckled, NCDOT installed 2,500 sandbags to try to stabilize the protective dune. The bags just barely hold back the sea, says Dave Hallac, superintendent of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which stretches over 70 miles and includes most of Ocracoke. 'Even on a calm day, the waves are basically hitting the other sides of those sand bags,' Hallac told members of the N.C. Board of Transportation's ferry committee in December. 'And then when the surf kicks up, there's just nothing to stop it.' Because of rising ocean waters and subsiding land, scientists predict sea-level rise of 15 to 22 inches along the Outer Banks by 2050, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment released in late 2023. That will make South Dock and other areas of N.C. 12 even more vulnerable, Hallac said. 'Challenges associated with erosion are going to become worse with sea-level rise, and you don't have to be an oceanographer to know that,' he said. 'With more water, we're going to have more erosion.' What to do at South Dock is just the latest challenge for NCDOT along N.C. 12. Four years ago, Dare County created the N.C. 12 Task Force to work with NCDOT, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Hyde County to develop a long-term plan to keep the highway open. The plan focused on seven 'hot spots' where the road is especially vulnerable, including the section on Ocracoke near South Dock. One of the hot spots has been fixed in a way that shows how difficult and expensive maintaining N.C. 12 can be. Two years ago, NCDOT bypassed the so-called S-curves north of Rodanthe by building a 2.4-mile bridge out over Pamlico Sound, at a cost of $154 million. It's hard to focus on one trouble spot without thinking about the others. At a public meeting about South Dock on Hatteras last month, charter boat captain Steve Coulter asked NCDOT officials about the section of highway between Frisco and Hatteras Village that became an inlet after Hurricane Isabel in 2003 and remains perilously narrow. 'All of this is moot if that doesn't get fixed,' said Coulter, who heads Dare County's Waterways Commission. 'That's the narrowest place on the damn island. The most susceptible spot on Highway 12 from Ocracoke to Oregon Inlet right now is right there.' The narrowest place on Ocracoke is just south of South Dock. Of the four choices presented by NCDOT, fortifying the existing ferry terminal would be the least expensive and disruptive to residents and visitors alike. But it can't be done without also fixing the road, says Natalie Kavanagh, another member of the Dare County Waterways Commission who attended the meeting. 'That is the one that makes the most sense,' Kavanagh said, nodding toward the NCDOT's South Dock plan. 'But we've got to get people safely from there to the village.' Ronnie Sawyer, NCDOT's deputy division engineer for the area that includes Dare and Hyde counties, said the N.C. 12 Task Force identified potential strategies for stabilizing that stretch of highway, ranging from more sand bags to moving or raising the road or building a bridge. The problem, Sawyer said: 'We don't have any money to go with our desires there.' In addition to public meetings on Hatteras and Ocracoke, NCDOT collected feedback on its four plans for South Dock online, where some patterns emerged from the mostly anonymous comments. For starters, few support moving the Hatteras car ferry to Silver Lake in Ocracoke Village. Many said that would both suffocate the community with cars and threaten the tourism business with fewer and longer boat trips. 'The Village couldn't handle traffic from all the runs, especially in season,' one person wrote. 'Moving the terminal and creating a 2+ hour trip will kill the economy and turn Ocracoke into another Portsmouth,' a reference to the abandoned town on a neighboring island. A new terminal at Devil Shoals enjoys a little more support, though usually as the best of four bad choices. Many oppose the dredging and loss of habitat that would be required to make it work and worry about marring a pristine part of the island. 'Please leave this area alone,' one person wrote. Reinforcing South Dock is the most popular choice, as long as it includes stabilizing N.C. 12. 'This is the only feasible option if Ocracoke is to survive,' someone wrote. But others are skeptical about trying to hold off the sea at the north end of the island. 'I know many prefer this, but it's not a long-term answer,' one person wrote. 'The erosion is only going to continue. Better to move it south and ensure access long term.' That's essentially what the N.C. 12 Task Force concluded in 2023. 'It was the consensus of the subcommittee that neither South Dock nor the roadway could be protected for many more years absent major engineering of the island,' it wrote in its final report. The group suggested moving the ferry dock closer to the village, south of the vulnerable stretch of highway, though it said more study was needed to find a location. NCDOT's options for landing Hatteras Inlet ferries on Ocracoke are all conceptual at this point, lacking both details and cost estimates. Once it decides later this year, the state still needs environmental permits and to find the money, which would be considerable if it must build a new fleet of larger boats. Dixon, the ferry division director, said the state could decide to work in steps, shoring up South Dock and the nearby section of N.C. 12 while it works on a longer-term solution. But there's a sense of urgency, as the waves continue to eat into the shoreline at South Dock. 'It's changed fast,' Dixon said. 'We just don't know where it stops. Is there some line where it's going to start gaining back at some point, or is it going to continue to lose? We don't know.' For more information about the South Dock study, including renderings of the four options, go to NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@
Observer
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Observer
The lights went out... the blame game began
This Monday, millions across Spain and Portugal found themselves in the dark. A massive blackout swept through both countries, halting trains, silencing cities and sending newsrooms scrambling. In one Madrid hospital, nurses moved a woman in labour down a flight of stairs by flashlight. Her story made headlines. But not the kind the clean energy transition deserved. Within hours, the whispers started: Was net-zero to blame? It was a convenient story. After all, both countries have been celebrated as renewable energy success stories. Spain recently reached 100 per cent renewable electricity on a weekday. Critics jumped at the chance to question the wisdom of phasing out fossil fuels. Commentators called it inevitable. Some even framed the blackout as a cautionary tale against going green too fast. But the facts, as they often do, told a more nuanced truth. What failed was not the solar panels of wind farms. It was the system beneath it, unprepared for the volatility they demand. Still, the damage was done, not just to infrastructure but to public trust. We are living through a global greenlash. As net-zero commitments rise, so does the backlash. It is a backlash fed not by data but by fear. In the US, President Trump dismissed the authors of the Fifth National Climate Assessment this week, calling them 'hustlers'. His rejection of science is loud and familiar. But a quieter, more insidious shift is also underway. In the UK, former Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that phasing out fossil fuels is doomed to fail and called for greater focus on technologies like nuclear energy. While not a denial of climate action, this framing signals a growing acceptance of a two-degree world and weakens the already fragile commitment to keeping 1.5 alive. I remain skeptical. These arguments, dressed as pragmatism, risk normalising failure. For countries like Oman, where two degrees could mean unbearable heat, water scarcity and coastal loss, this realism comes at an impossible price. In boardrooms too, the tone is shifting. Companies once eager to advertise green credentials are now going quiet, a trend known as greenhushing. Some are not abandoning climate goals, but they are whispering them when the world needs conviction. People are tired, not just of rising costs or changing habits, but of hearing climate pledges that never materialise. They are watching companies pull back on ESG. They are seeing climate leaders voted out. They are wondering why they are being asked to sacrifice when the biggest emitters still profit. In that vacuum, the anti-net-zero narrative is growing louder and facts are struggling to keep up. And behind this backlash are familiar forces, those who benefit from delay. Fossil fuel interests, short-term political agendas and reactionary media all have something to gain from the doubt they help sow. The longer they stall the transition, the longer their business as usual model lives on. And yet, none of this changes the science. The world still faces a narrowing climate window. The solutions from decarbonisation, resilience, to innovation haven't changed. What is needed now is not less ambition but better preparation. For us in the region, the lesson is sharp. From Egypt's solar buildout to Saudi Arabia's giga-projects to Oman's green hydrogen aspirations, our climate goals are bold, but so must be the storytelling around them. In a world where backlash can arrive faster than reform, success depends not only on how cleanly we power our grids, but how clearly we defend the transition. In this climate, it is not enough to power change. We have to protect it, before the lights go out again. The writer is an Omani environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development, focusing on climate change impacts in the Middle East and women's empowerment in environmental solutions. Follow her on LinkedIn: @RumaithaAlBusaidi Rumaitha al Busaidi The writer is environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development
