Global warming is already here, striking substantial regions of the United States with increasing severity. That's according to an exhaustive Washington Post investigation that analyzed decades of local temperature records and identified a variety of hot spots where warming has proceeded more quickly.
"A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark," The Post found. An increase of 2 degrees Celsius--3.6 degrees Fahrenheit--is a temperature threshold that scientists warn the world, on average, should not surpass.
Surpassing 2 degrees locally means different things in different places. If the average world temperature were to breach the 2-degree threshold, that would mean some places would have warmed far more than 2 degrees, bringing massive changes, and some places less. But in many of the regions The Post examined, substantial negative effects were clear.
Scientists offer various reasons for the temperature hotspots that have emerged across the United States. Alaska's breakneck heating aligns with their prediction that human greenhouse-gas-driven warming strikes higher latitudes particularly hard. In the Northeast, a shifting Gulf Stream--a massive flow of water that runs from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Atlantic coast of the United States and then toward Europe, its path influenced by melting Arctic ice--seems to explain some of the temperature anomalies. The underlying cause, though, is human-caused global warming.
The warming will continue. Humanity has steadily shifted the chemistry of the atmosphere, in ways that could not be reversed quickly even if rational policy were being implemented. The carbon dioxide that emerges from smokestacks and tailpipes lingers in the air for decades. All the more reason to change behavior now.
Yet, whether for political advantage or out of sheer pigheadedness or both, President Donald Trump continues to deny and ignore reality. It is beyond unforgivable.
Editorial on 08/22/2019