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CONDITION
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TIMELINE
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LIKELY RESULTS FOR US
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ATMOSPHERE
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Global average temperatures are rising rapidly.
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The 7 warmest years on record have all been since 2015. It’s an exponential curve.
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Increased heat deaths, increased health effects, decreased intelligence, decreased areas of livability, increased energy needs.
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The number and severity of extreme weather events is rising and the locations where such events occur are expanding.
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This is happening now. The number of severe storms has jumped 40% in the last 20 years.
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Climate disasters from 2000 to 2019 killed 1.23 million people and cost $2.97 trillion in economic losses. Even wealthy locations are now vulnerable.
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The atmospheric/oceanic conveyor belt of energy is being disrupted.
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This is ongoing.
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The polar vortex splits, sending killing cold weather far south. La Niña is locked in, causing a megadrought.
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Increased fires are causing increased pollution.
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This is happening now.
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Increased health problems, decreased life expectancy, increased outcome disparities.
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CRYOSPHERE
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Freshwater ice and snow are disappearing.
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This is happening now.
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Decreased snowpacks and glacier water sources mean decreased freshwater, causing drought, famine, and wars worldwide.
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The polar ice caps are melting.
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This is ongoing, and is causing rapidly increasing sea level rise.
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Sea level rise means we are now losing shoreline and low lying lands, with higher elevations to follow.
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HYDROSPHERE
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The ocean surface is heating up.
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This is the new norm with the hotter water producing much larger storms.
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Bigger floods and ever larger hurricanes are costing more lives and money, and causing more displacement.
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The ocean’s salinity is decreasing due to melting ice.
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This is ongoing and causing increased stratification of the ocean’s layers.
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This weakens the oceanic and atmospheric currents, increasing extreme weather events like polar vortexes, and harms ocean species.
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The ocean’s pH is decreasing due to CO2 absorption.
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This is ongoing and increasing.
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Shell-forming animals cannot form shells. This impacts all fisheries as these animals are often the base of the food chain.
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Freshwater sources are drying up.
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This is ongoing and increasing as atmospheric temperatures climb.
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Drought is currently causing famine and wars worldwide, and reduced energy availability.
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BIOSPHERE
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Ocean life is dying, migrating, and shrinking due to temperature increases and pH changes.
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This is ongoing and rapidly worsening.
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The amount and variety of life in the ocean is plummeting. We are likely to see a world with no fish.
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We are in a Great Extinction Event.
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This is ongoing and rapidly worsening.
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Life depends on life. Reducing the amount and variety of life significantly impacts our ability to adapt (ex. Irish Potato Famine), means fewer nutrients, fewer medicines, less system resilience, and decimation of megaflora and megafauna.
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Every season is getting shorter except summer.
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This is ongoing and rapidly worsening.
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Increased and longer fire seasons, increased and longer droughts, mismatches between flowering and migration arrival times, crop failures, increased invasives (in numbers and ranges), spread of tropical and subtropical diseases, and increases in heat deaths.
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LITHOSPHERE
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The Carbon cycle has been disrupted.
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This is ongoing and getting worse as we continue to increase the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere.
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More carbon in the atmosphere and oceans decreases the ability of the land and soil to hold carbon, causing increased carbon in the atmosphere, causing increased average temperatures.
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Melting permafrost is causing methane releases.
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This is ongoing and could rapidly become catastrophic as methane is 28 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.
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Extinction.
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