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The White House's Outline of How Climate Change Is Breaking Down Civilization

If we don't act, the White House says, climate change will break down our most important things and overwhelm us.
Image: White House

The White House's third major National Climate Assessment is easily its most comprehensive threat analysis yet. But the most disturbing prognostications might not be the warnings of double digit temperature increases and worsening bouts of extreme weather. They're probably the parts that identify exactly how the nation's infrastructure and critical systems are already buckling under the strain of climate change, written by those who understand it best.

As a whole, the 2014 NCA focuses on the immediate and near-term impacts of warmer temps and extreme weather phenomena across the US. The product of years of research from hundreds of scientists and experts, it considers the rising specter of worsening heat waves, drought, floods, and storms. The predictions it outlines are foreboding enough that NBC titled its coverage "American Doomsday."

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And that's apt, in a way—though the danger isn't as much that Americans are going to be swallowed in flames or drowned in floods (though there will be some of that). The greater threat, as outlined in the report, is that more frequent and fiercer natural disasters will begin to break down the technologies and implements of modern society, posing dangers not just to a few unfortunate disaster victims, but everyone who has become accustomed to clean water and a steady flow of power.

One section quietly details how disruptions like worsening heat waves and drought are already spurring "cascading events" that impact not just a single region or industry, but that are capable of causing water shortages, serious strains on the electrical grid, and severe damages to lives and livelihoods across the economic and social spectrum. Another highlights the now-omnipresent threat of city-wide "multiple systems failures."

Much of the information doesn't break new ground, and perhaps the biggest news is that the White House is so aggressively shining its spotlight on the issue. Climate change is quite capable of overtaking us, the report explains, time and again. Beyond the report itself and the detailed interactive website, the Obama administration is spreading the word by hosting prominent meteorologists from across the nation in a series of interviews about the impacts. But those impacts it does detail are harrowing, especially if you peer deeper in.

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One of the report's "Key Messages" concerns those cascade events. The government seeks to explicates how climate change is ripening conditions for a set of chain reactions that could unravel the complex web of services we consider mandatory to modern life. Power, property, cropland, and water are finite resources, after all, and climate change can strain them all at once.

"The links between and among energy, water, and land sectors mean that they are susceptible to cascading effects from one sector to the next," the NCA notes. Especially in regions like the Southwest, where temps are rising and water is already scarce. The report uses the drought of 2011-12 and Texas as a case study:

In 2011, drought spread across the south-central U.S., causing a series of energy, water, and land impacts that demonstrate the connections among these sectors. Texans, for example, experienced the hottest and driest summer on record. Summer average temperatures were 5.2°F higher than normal, and precipitation was lower than previous records set in 1956. The associated heat wave, with temperatures above 100°F for 40 consecutive days, together with drought, strained the region’s energy and water resources …

These extreme climate events resulted in cascading effects across energy, water, and land systems. High temperatures caused increased demand for electricity for air conditioning, which corresponded to increased water withdrawal and consumption for electricity generation. Heat, increased evaporation, drier soils, and lack of rain led to higher irrigation demands, which added stress on water resources required for energy production. At the same time, low-flowing and warmer rivers threatened to suspend power plant production in several locations, reducing the options for dealing with the concurrent increase in electricity demand.

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You can see the domino effect in action: High temps led Texans to reach for the A/C, which raised power demand, which required more water to be diverted to electrical generation systems, which meant there was less for farmers, wildlife, and, yes, other electrical generation systems.

As such, the decline in crop yields cost farmers $5 billion. The drought killed more trees, and record wildfires torched 4 million acres and 2,763 homes. On top of that, "water shortages threatened more than 3,000 megawatts of generating capacity—enough power to supply more than one million homes." Energy prices spiked to "$3,000 a megawatt hour, which is three times the maximum amount that generators can charge in deregulated electricity markets in the eastern United States."

Water had to be rationed to farmers, trucked out to rural communities, and subjected to restrictions in over 1,000 Texas water systems. The Lone Star State endured, but it wasn't pretty. And if it had run into what the report labels a "crippling systems failure"—an overloaded power plant and ensuing blackout, say—it could well have been worse.

The NCA also runs down a harrowing section on such events, which details primarily the threat of sudden storms or blistering heat waves and blackouts.

Impacts are particularly severe when critical systems simultaneously fail. We have already seen multiple system failures during an extreme weather event in the United States, as when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Infrastructure and evacuation failures and collapse of critical response services during a storm is one example of multiple system failures. Another example is a loss of electrical power during heat waves or wildfires, which can reduce food and water safety. Air conditioning has helped reduce illness and death due to extreme heat, but if power is lost, everyone is vulnerable. By their nature, such events can exceed our capacity to respond. In succession, these events severely deplete resources needed to respond, from the individual to the national scale, but disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations.

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In the section on urban impacts, the White House again warns that floods and storms could swamp already decaying metropolitan infrastructure, and of debilitating blackouts. It notes that "electricity is essential to multiple systems, and a failure in the electrical grid can affect water treatment, transportation services, and public health. These infrastructure systems—lifelines to millions—will continue to be affected by various climate-related events and processes."

Katrina is a disturbing example of how extreme weather—very likely fueled by climate change—overtook technology and critical infrastructure, and led to collapse. In some ways, permanently. The levees failed, as did evacuation plans; the city flooded. The city still hasn't recovered in full; tens of thousands of residents had to relocate and not all its infrastructure has been repaired.

Taken together, these chapters remind us that climate change is putting the entire civilizational system under strain. There's a vastly complex supply chain that makes modern living possible—from water delivery to energy infrastructure—and climate change is capable of assaulting much of it at once. There's a reason that the most en vogue climate term of the moment is "resiliency." We're at the point where we need to actively anticipate and prepare for these dangers. That's exactly what the White House is trying to do, as grim of a project as it may be.

It's probably been decades—since the nuclear age and the cold war—since the highest office in the land handed down such a dire rundown of an existential threat. If we don't get proactive, the White House is saying, climate change will break down our most important things and overwhelm us.