White House Sounds Alarm On Climate Change

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The White House document - a climate status report required periodically by Congress - contains no new research. But it paints a fuller, more cohesive and darker picture of global warming in the United States than previous studies and brief updates during the George W. Bush years. Bush was ultimately forced to issue a draft report last year by a lawsuit, and that document was the basis for this new one.

One administration official, Jane Lubchenco, called the new report a game changer that would inform policy but not dictate a particular solution.

"This report provides the concrete scientific information that says unequivocally that climate change is happening now and it's happening in our own backyards and it affects the kind of things people care about," Lubchenco said at a White House briefing. Her agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was among the key contributors to the document.

According to the report, in the Northeast by late this century, summer will arrive three full weeks earlier - so hot that in New Hampshire summers will become more like those in North Carolina, reports CBS News science and technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg. Hartford, Connecticut and Philadelphia will suffer through 100-degree temperatures for up to 30 days a year.

In the Southeast, rising water temperatures will feed ever more intense hurricanes, reports Sieberg. They may not hit land, but if they do, rising sea levels may wipe out wetlands that usually slow storms.

Throughout much of the West, wildfires will increase and animals and plants ranging from monarch butterflies to cactus will be harmed as higher temperatures affect habitats, adds Sieberg. On the west coast, California cities already have the worst air quality in the nation with 8,800 deaths a year. That's expected to get even worse with rising heat levels.

But diehard critics remain unconvinced.

"Somebody has a story they're trying to pitch, agenda that they're selling," James Taylor of the Heartland Institute told Sieberg. "But they're not necessarily basing their report on the best available science."

The "major disruptions" already taking place will only increase as warming continues, the authors wrote. They project the average U.S. temperature could rise by as much as 11 degrees by the end of the century.





White House science adviser John Holdren said in a statement that the findings make the case for taking action to slow global warming - both by reducing emissions and adapting to the changes that "are no longer avoidable."

"It tells us why remedial action is needed sooner rather than later," Holdren said.

Jerry Melillo, one of the report's authors, said at a White House briefing Tuesday that if action is taken soon to reduce heat-trapping gases, chances improve for avoiding some of the effects detailed in the report.

"There are a lot of things that are potentially possible if we don't bring climate change under control, and we would like to see them avoided," said Melillo, a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory.


Water - too much or too little - is a dominant theme through much of the report, which says that resource will continue to be a major problem in every region of the country.


The nearly 200-page report has chapters examining the effects of global warming in each region - from coastal zoning officials who must consider sea rise to Midwestern farmers recalculating their planting seasons.


"The emphasis has shifted from just looking at the physical climate science to adapting to change," Burkett said in an interview.

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