Many studies have claimed that the United States (U.S.) is experiencing several visible impacts due to global warming and climate change. Weather-related events have been considered the clearest evidence of global warming and climate change impacts. Events such as heat waves, droughts, and the rise in sea levels have been reported and research indicates that they are the result of an increase in temperature. Ecosystems have also been adversely impacted. Recently though, there has been significant pushback from various individuals and organizations suggesting that global warming etc. is a fallacy. In order to assess this situation on a national level, we studied the impact of global warming and climate change in the U.S. with a discussion of several significant weather-related events that occurred in the U.S. in the past 100 years due to an increase in temperature, including within our own state of South Carolina that experienced a historic 1000-year flood in 2015. To support our study, we analyzed yearly average temperatures of randomly selected states in the U.S. for the past sixty years with linear graphs an autogressive model to display the temperature trend over time.
Results/Conclusions
Our analysis of temperatures in the U.S. over the past sixty years showed that the U.S. is, indeed, experiencing increase in atmospheric and surface temperature and experiencing global warming and other ecological impacts due to climate change. Out of nine census divisions represented by nine randomly selected states, three divisions experienced temperature increase more than national average increase. These three census divisions are: Middle Atlantic (New York), East North Central (Illinois ), and West North Central (North Dakota). The average surface temperature increased in North Dakota between 1966 and 2016 was 16.76% which was more than double the rate of increase in average surface temperature in the U.S. (7.07%) for the same period. This finding is alarming because historically the West North Central division has been among the colder divisions of the country. Our tabular, graphical, and autoregressive analysis of temperature data invariably confirmed the persistent increase in surface temperature across all regions. Undoubtedly this increase in temperature will continue to impact the habitation, agriculture, biodiversity, and the entire ecosystem both in the short term and long term. Our future research will focus on trade-off analysis due to this surface temperature increase.