The Fifth National Climate Assessment

On November 14, 2023 the government released The Fifth National Climate Assessment, a summary of the state of affairs regarding climate change and how it may affect the United States.

President Biden’s White House staff used the opportunity to release a fact sheet and to praise Biden for his efforts to combat climate change. Here is the very first paragraph:

“Since Day One, President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda in history – signing into law the largest investment in climate action ever, including more than $50 billion in climate resilience, taking bold action to reduce climate pollution across every sector of the economy, protecting more than 21 million acres of public lands and waters, and restoring the vital role of science in guiding the Biden-Harris Administration’s decision-making. As a result of the President’s leadership and economic plan, Bidenomics, clean energy jobs are on rise across the country, companies have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investments, and the U.S. is on a path towards cutting carbon pollution in half by 2030.”

This is a perfect example of “greenwashing,” an attempt to show that the Biden Administration is effectively fighting climate change.

But Biden has not delivered. In fact, far from it. If he were serious about stopping climate change, he would have already banned private jets and recreational vehicles.  He would have ordered the rail road industry and the ship building industry to convert their engines from diesel to hydrogen, and he would have begun to develop the enormous geothermal potential at Yellowstone.

Farther down in the fact sheet, the White House also says this:

“Total global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities continue to increase, resulting in rapid warming and other impacts. People across the United States are experiencing warmer temperatures and longer heatwaves. Many other extremes, including heavy precipitation, droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, are increasing in frequency and/or severity. Extreme events cost the United States close to $150 billion each year—a conservative estimate that does not account for loss of life, health care-related costs, or damages to ecosystem services.
 
This year set a record for the number of climate disasters that cost the United States over $1 billion. The United States now experiences a billion-dollar disaster approximately every three weeks on average, compared to once every four months during the 1980s. Every degree of global warming we avoid matters, because each increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses in the United States. Each climate action taken to reduce and avoid warming reduces those risks and harmful impacts.”

So apparently they are aware of the risks, but are engaging in rather feeble attempts to mitigate these risks. It is apparent to me that the government isn’t doing enough to protect America from what is going to happen in the near term.

When one uses the phrase ‘climate resilience’, it sounds good, but in actual practice there is no such thing as resilience. Resilience is defined as something that has pliability, flexibility, hardiness, or toughness. But human beings are mammals, and a human body can take only so much heat for only so long. And it is the extreme heat we can expect in the future that we should be most concerned with.

The summer of 2023 was the hottest meteorological summer (June, July, and August) on Earth since we started keeping records, and according to NASA, September not only continued that trend, but was so anomalous it makes the future seem absolutely ominous.