New Report Highlights Visible Effects of Climate Change in U.S.

The federal governemnt issued a report yesterday that says global warming is already affecting the nation's natural resources and will have serious negative consequences over the next 25 to 50 years. The report, which runs 193 pages and synthesizes a thousand scientific papers, highlights how human-generated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest fires, reduced snowpack and increased drought, especially in the West.

"Climate change is currently inpacting the nation's ecosystems and services in significant ways, and those alterations are very likely to accelerate in the future, in some cases dramatically," the report says. "Even under the most optimistic CO2 emission scenarios, important changes in sea level, regional and super-regional temperatures and precipitation patterns will have profound effects." Read more here.