As politicians dither, the planet continues to experience the dire impacts of a changing climate—likely just a small, bitter taste of the disruptions yet to come. Here are some measures of the climate emergency:
7: The number of years from 2015 to 2021 that are among the hottest seven years on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
7,700,000: The number of acres of land that burned in the United States during 2021, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
4,519: The number of recorded deaths due to weather and climate disasters in the United States over the past five years, as reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
83: The worldwide percentage increase in climate-related natural disasters in the twenty-year period from 2000 to 2019, as compared to 1980-1999.
7,348: The number of “major recorded disaster events” between 2000 and 2019, according to a United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction report, published in 2020. The study said these events claimed 1.23 million lives and cost the global economy approximately $2.97 trillion.
3.6: Number of inches that the global sea level has risen since 1993. The total since 1880: eight to nine inches.
200,000,000: The number of people globally whose coastal homes are on land that is predicted to be below the high tide line by 2100, according to a 2019 report by Climate Central.
1: The number of countries that are on track to meet their Paris Agreement climate pledges. (It’s Gambia.)
71: The percentage of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds living in the United States who are “very/somewhat concerned that global climate change will harm them personally at some point in their lifetime,” according to a September 2021 report from the Pew Research Center.
0: The number of Republicans in Congress who voted for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which would have directed $555 billion to the fight against climate change.