More American children are getting asthma and allergies, and more seniors are suffering heat strokes.
Food and utility prices are rising. Flooding is overrunning bridges, swamping subways and closing airport runways.
People are losing jobs in drought-related factory closings. Cataclysmic storms are wiping out sprawling neighborhoods. Towns are sinking.
This isn't a science-fiction, end-of-the-world scenario. Though more anecdotal than normal -- today, at least -- these scenes are already playing out somewhere in the United States, and they're expected to get worse in the years ahead. In fact, a remaking of America is likely in our lifetimes -- a flicker in geological time. This will transform how and where we live, work and play.
Massachusetts' climate will start to look more like North Carolina's, and Illinois will begin to feel like Texas. Montana's Glacier National Park, a glorious site that draws tourists from around the world, will likely lose its glaciers.
Climate change is partly the culprit. Scientific research shows that it's increasing the risk and intensity of heat waves, downpours, drought and wildfires. A key factor: the burning of fossil fuels. With these changes come rising sea levels and acidified oceans. So when Superstorm Sandy struck New York harbor in October, the flooding that killed scores of people, ruined thousands of homes and closed subways as well as airports came amid already rising seas.
As the planet edges this year toward what some scientists say will be the highest concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions in at least 800,000 years, USA TODAY reporters will travel the country to explore places where climate change is already affecting lives.
Not all of it is bad news. As with any change, there will be winners and losers, especially at the local level. There will be longer growing seasons, lower heating bills and fewer cold-related deaths. Melting Arctic sea ice is opening the Northwest Passage off Alaska's coast to tourism, maritime shipping and oil exploration.
Yet on a national level, the losers will probably outnumber the winners, according to a draft report of the third National Climate Assessment released by the U.S. government in January.
Americans can adapt to some climate change, and indeed already are, but a continuing rise in global carbon emissions will make adapting increasingly costly and difficult -- especially in developed coastal areas.
Some potential impacts, such as higher flood-insurance premiums for luxury waterfront homes or more bald spots on ski slopes, might seem trivial. Others -- lower home values on the coasts, heat-related deaths in the Midwest or the relocation of entire villages in Alaska -- not so much.
The effects of this new world are reverberating from coast to coast:
"Who's going to hire me now?" asks Barbara Roberts, 56, who lost her job of 36 years a month ago on Feb. 1 when a Cargill beef-processing plant in Plainview, Texas, closed. The facility, which employed 2,000 people, was starved of cattle because of the drought. Roberts, who earned $13.70 an hour plus benefits, says she hurt her back after 20 years on the production line, leaving her unable to lift heavy items. The only other large, decent-paying employer in town, she says, is Walmart.
"My house isn't straight anymore. It's tilted," says Jeff Miskill, a contractor in Norfolk, Va., where rising sea levels have contributed to repeated flooding throughout the city and a shifting of the ground under his home.
"You can feel it inside. You feel like you're walking uphill." Miskill says neighbors aren't worried about the semantics of what's happening, whether climate change or flooding. "Call it what you will," he says, "but we have a water problem."
"My windows and doors are rotted away," says Stanley Tom, 52, the tribal administrator of Newtok, Alaska, a place where severe flooding is always a risk. The area's infrastructure was built on permafrost -- soil saturated with frozen water -- that because of higher temperatures is now melting into mud. Roads and runways have been ruined, and water supplies are contaminated.
All of Newtok's 350 or so residents are being relocated from the eroding coastline to higher ground because, as Tom says, "the village is sinking."
Inside 'the mixed bag'
Scores of politicians and millions of Americans are skeptics. After all, no single storm, heat wave or wildfire -- unlike longer-term patterns -- can be linked directly to climate change. These esteemed scientists don't have all the answers, particularly as their projections stretch far into the future. Although almost all agree on the broad contours of human-induced climate change, they continue to refine the details as new data and better tracking technology -- such as a series of NASA satellites launched in 2000 -- become available.
"It's a mixed bag," says Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the link between extreme weather and climate change. Though Emanuel once doubted the evidence, he now says the world is clearly warming beyond its natural variability.
Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change, says rainfall may have the clearest climate link. He says it now occurs less often, but when it does rain, downpours are more likely. So wet regions will be wetter, causing flash flooding. Dry ones will get drier, resulting in drought. Heat, of course, is another consequence. So a heat wave that used to occur once every 100 years now happens every five years.
An indicator of that warming is the rising concentration of carbon-dioxide emissions in the atmosphere -- now at 396 parts per million, according to January data by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was about 275 parts per million two centuries ago, and research by British Antarctic Survey's Eric Wolff suggests that it probably hasn't exceeded 400 ppm -- likely within the next few years worldwide -- in at least 800,000 years. Leading climate scientists, including NASA's James Hansen, warn that concentrations above 350 ppm risk planetary perils, including melting ice sheets and rapidly spreading drought.
The most recent decade was the nation's hottest on record, and 2012 was the hottest single year. The average U.S. temperature has risen 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since reliable record-keeping began in 1895 -- 80% of that has occurred since 1980. The increase might seem small, but scientists warn that a ripple effect can trigger "tipping points," beyond which the planet may not be able to recover.
For example, the warmer the air, the more summer Arctic sea ice is lost. The more sea ice that's lost, the more warming occurs because ice reflects sunlight while water absorbs it. As the atmosphere warms, it holds larger amounts of water vapor, which could help energize everything from hurricanes to snowstorms. And the cycle continues.
Average U.S. temperatures will likely rise at least another 2 degrees to 4 degrees in most places in the next few decades and between 3 to 10 degrees by 2100, depending on the amount of oil, gas and coal we burn, according to the draft of the 2013 National Climate Assessment. The report, written by 240 private and government scientists, is based on hundreds of studies published in science journals.
Higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, too. The reason's simple: As water warms, it expands. While global sea level has risen 8 inches since 1900 and is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100, the problem is worse along the U.S. Atlantic Coast because of differences in ocean currents, salinity, water temperatures and land movements.
The economic costs of all these changes are enormous -- not only for those directly affected but also for the nation's taxpayers, who are stuck with the bills for disaster relief, national flood insurance and drought-related crop losses. In February, for the first time, the non-partisan General Accountability Office said climate change puts the U.S. government at "high risk "of financial exposure. NOAA says 11 extreme weather and climate events last year alone in the United States cost more than $1 billion each.
At the heart of it: Water
For Jimmy Strickland, climate issues aren't theoretical. They're business. He owns an accounting firm with a one-story brick office building two blocks from Norfolk's waterfront. During his 35 years in the Hague section of town, three huge storms have struck -- all in the past decade. Each time, his building flooded and had to be closed at least two months for repairs that cost his insurance company about $250,000.
"You lose time, and time is money," Strickland says.
While Norfolk is second only to New Orleans for sea-level rise, partly because its land is naturally sinking, other coastal U.S. cities -- Boston; Charleston, S.C.; Miami; New York; Seattle; San Francisco; Tampa -- are vulnerable, too.
"It's a harbinger of things to come," says Leonard Berry, a geoscience professor at Florida Atlantic University, of the regular high-tide flooding on Miami's streets. The Army Corps of Engineers expects that South Florida's sea level will rise 3 to 7 inches by 2030; the range jumps from 9 to 24 inches by 2060.
While there's too much water in some places, there's not enough in others. Drought afflicted as much as 65% of the contiguous lower 48 states last year and still lingers in more than half of the country. Corn, wheat and soybean crops were decimated, prompting higher food prices. Nearly two dozen ethanol plants in 13 states halted production because they lacked a key ingredient: corn.
In Plainview, Texas, Cargill's plant closing took workers by surprise.
"They didn't tell us 'til that day," Roberts says. "It was 10:45 a.m. when the announcement came: 'Everyone off the floor.'" She says they went to the cafeteria for the news. "We didn't go back to the floor. We went home."
"The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level since 1952," Cargill Beef's president, John Keating, said in announcing the closure. He said the company held off "as long as possible," hoping the drought would break. "Unfortunately," he added, "the drought has not broken."
But heat alone is a hazard
Others have suffered from, if not drought, the heat itself.
"It's the silent killer," says Laurence Kalkstein, a University of Miami professor who studies the effect of heat on health. He says if climate change brings hotter -- but still variable -- weather, more heat-related deaths will likely occur.
Riley Kimble was found dead in a tiny, stifling apartment without air conditioning in Chicago last July on a day when outside temperatures reached 103. The city's medical examiner said heat stress contributed to his death and that of at least two dozen others. He was 59.
His stepdaughter, Nicole Hughes, says he suffered from schizophrenia. As a young man, before his illness struck, she says, Kimble was a college student and avid reader who helped her with homework. He was the only dad she ever knew.
Ernestine Williams says she's struggling to "keep it together" since her daughter Mary, then 56, died in the same Chicago heat wave. She lives on a widow's pension but has taken in Mary's three young adult children, who she says took the death "real hard. No one was prepared for that."
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
Copyright 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.