(Photo: Noofangle Media)
Global warming is making hot days hotter, rainfall and flooding heavier, hurricanes stronger and droughts more severe. This intensification of weather and climate extremes will be the most visible impact of global warming in our everyday lives. Here are 13 ways you’ll experience climate change, according to the National Wildlife Federation:
- In the northern United States, winter is becoming milder and shorter on average.
- Spring arrives 10 to 14 days earlier than it did just 20 years ago.
- Most snowbelt areas are still experiencing extremely heavy snowstorms. Some places are even expected to have more heavy snowfall events as storm tracks shift northward and as reduced ice cover on the Great Lakes increases lake-effect snowfalls.
- Over the next century, we will have more extremely hot summer days.
- Every part of the country will feel the increased heat.
- Urban areas will feel the heat more acutely because asphalt, concrete and other structures absorb and reradiate heat, causing temperature to be as much as 10°F higher than nearby rural areas.
- Global warming is shifting precipitation patterns and also increasing evaporation rates. These trends will create persistently drier conditions in some places, including the American Southwest.
- There will be longer and drier droughts that will have major consequences for water supply, agriculture and wildlife.
- In the American West, wildfire frequency, severity and damages are increasing because of rising temperatures, drying conditions and more lightning brought by global warming, combined with decades of fire suppression that allowed unsafe fuel loads to accumulate, a severe bark beetle infestation that is rapidly decimating trees and ever expanding human settlements in and near forests.
- Warmer air can hold more moisture, so more and heavier precipitation is expected in the years to come.
- Shifts in snowfall patterns, the onset of spring and river-ice melting may all exacerbate some flooding risks.
- The latest science indicates that maximum hurricane wind speed will increase 2 to 13 percent and rainfall rates will increase 10 to 31 percent over this century.
- Sea-level rise will cause bigger storm surges and further erode the natural defenses provided by coastal wetlands that buffer storm impacts.