Climate Change Is Making Big Problems Bigger

Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner.

Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up.

The freshly compiled data, the federal government’s most comprehensive and up-to-date information yet, shows that a warming world is making life harder for Americans, in ways that threaten their health and safety, homes and communities. And it comes as the Biden administration is trying to propel aggressive action at home and abroad to cut the pollution that is raising global temperatures.

“There is no small town, big city or rural community that is unaffected by the climate crisis,” Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said on Wednesday. “Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity.”

The data released Wednesday came after a four-year gap. Until 2016, the E.P.A. regularly updated its climate indicators. But under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly questioned whether the planet was warming, the data was frozen in time. It was available on the agency’s website but was not kept current.

The Biden administration revived the effort this year and added some new measures, pulling information from government agencies, universities and other sources. The E.P.A. used 54 separate indicators which, taken together, paint a grim picture.

It maps everything from Lyme disease, which is growing more prevalent in some states as a warming climate expands the regions where deer ticks can survive, to the growing drought in the Southwest that threatens the availability of drinking water, increases the likelihood of wildfires but also reduces the ability to generate electricity from hydropower.

The E.P.A. data can help people make sense of the shifts they’re already seeing in their daily lives, according to Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. That’s especially useful because many Americans tend to view climate change as a problem affecting other people or more remote parts of the world, she said.

“Having relevant indicators is a really important way to show people that climate is already changing, and it’s changing in ways that affect you,” Dr. Hayhoe said. “It helps us connect climate change to our lived experience.”

The new data shows that temperatures are rising, and that increase is accelerating. Since 1901, surface temperatures across the lower 48 states have increased by an average of 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit each decade; since the late 1970s, that rate has jumped to as much as half a degree per decade.

The increase has been even more pronounced in Alaska, parts of which saw average temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1925. And it’s affecting the permafrost: At 14 of 15 sites, permafrost temperatures rose between 1978 and 2020.

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