IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The world needs dedicated action and resilience to climate change. The objective of the dialogue process is to gather and share answers and best practise cases in order to create new responses to climate change.
A new federal report on the effect of climate change condenses the latest science from a variety of disciplines. Among the findings:

Heavy downpours are now twice as frequent in the Midwest as they were a century ago. Summer and winter precipitation have increased.

Large heat waves have become more frequent in the Midwest over the past 30 years than at any time since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

Average temperatures have increased noticeably, despite year-to-year variation. The growing season has increased by more than a week.

The cause of climate change is "due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases."
It's said that if you put a frog in a pot and then turn up the heat, the frog won't notice until the water boils. Global warming has the same effect on many people. Its impacts have occurred slowly over time. Coupled with normal seasonal variations, they've seemed almost undetectable.

But they're very real. They can be and have been detected and measured. That's given us the ability to make changes before the worst effects become unavoidable. But so far, people have been unwilling to act on that information.

Doing nothing could be even more expensive. The greatest risk of all is summarized in four words: "Thresholds will be crossed."

Climate systems and ecosystems contain what you might consider points of no return. Cross them and things will never be the same. Pack ice disappears, permafrost melts and animals that are superbly adapted for those environments disappear forever.

That can trigger so-called feedback loops -- other changes that exacerbate the impact of climate change. Large quantities of carbon dioxide, for example, could be released by the melting permafrost.
The time to address global climate change is now. Congress should enact legislation that caps and reduces the emissions of greenhouse gases. And the government should redouble efforts to negotiate an effective international treaty that cuts emissions around the globe.