WASHINGTON – The climate is warming both nationwide and in Western New York, and despite recent government actions, there’s probably more warmth – and more weather misery – yet to come.
That’s the bottom line message for the Buffalo area in the federal government’s latest National Climate Assessment, which provides not only an in-depth look at what climate change means nationally, but also all the way down to the county level.
“We’re experiencing it: Climate change is here,” said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at an event unveiling the climate assessment last month. “It’s fueling wildfires and floods and drought and extreme heat and storms. It’s made its way into our lives, as predicted, which is sobering.”
Climate change is also a vast and complicated topic, and the climate assessment – mandated by Congress to be completed every four years or so – is the federal government’s most comprehensive effort to explain it. The assessment includes a complex website that breaks down the climate picture by region and by topic, along with an interactive atlas that allows Americans to drill down to the county level to gauge the potential impact.
A review of the assessment along with the atlas draws a picture of a Buffalo area that’s grown warmer and wetter, and that’s likely to become more so in the future. In fact, the climate assessment predicts that Erie County and other parts of the Northeast and Midwest will likely see temperatures rising above the national increase, though not to the uncomfortable levels expected in the South and West.
Here’s an in-depth look, then, at what the National Climate Assessment says has happened in the region, along with what could happen:
The change we’ve seen
In Buffalo, of course, mammoth lake-effect storms often come roaring off Lake Erie in the winter, dumping huge amounts of snow on the region. Meanwhile, New…
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