Report warns climate trends could have ‘major impacts’ on economy, food
A new report by AccuWeather shows several climate trends that meterologists warn could have “major impacts on the U.S. economy, our food and water supply, human comfort levels, energy needs and the health and welfare of citizens over the coming decades.” Temperatures have increased an average of 0.5% per decade over the past 70 years, AccuWeather found.
This study is compiled from a database of 44 official weather stations from across the U.S. in AccuWeather’s Data Suite.
“If these trends continue, we expect to see accelerating harmful impacts on crop production, more frequent wildfires, and less available water due to greater drought. Furthermore, the crop-growing areas in the United States may shrink as soil becomes more arid,” Dr. Joel Myers, founder and executive chair of AccuWeather, said in a statement. “Even in productive growing areas, crop yields may decline. These effects could become more obvious over the next decade or two.”
While temperatures have increased, annual rainfall has gone down 2.7% since 1995 — an average of 0.9% per decade. However, AccuWeather notes that the frequency of rainfall fall amounts of more than 4 inches in a 24-hour period went up by 70%. Heavy rainfall amounts, which they say are greater than 2 inches within 24 hours, increased by 23%.
However, the rain that’s been falling is “less effective for crop production and maintaining our water supply because it tends to come in shorter bursts,” Myers said.
When rain. comes down very hard for only a short period, a lot of it runs off, causing flash flooding and leading to erosion, Brett Anderson, a senior meteorologist for AccuWeather, told Straight Arrow News.
“We like to see rainfall not as extreme, spread out throughout the year. That’s when things are good,” he said. “That’s what we want to see.”
Dew point temperatures increased an average of 0.3°F every decade, the study says, though it notes that most of the increase happened before 1995. The dew temperature shows the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Relative humidity, while staying “more or less steady” until 1995, decreased by 5.3%, or an average of 1.7% per decade.
“This suggests we reached a tipping point around 1995, as the temperature continued to increase, evaporation from the ground and vegetation could not keep up with the increase in temperature, and so the dew point has not been able to increase as quickly as the temperature over the last 30 years, resulting in a decline of relative humidity,” Myers said. “If this trend continues, desert areas will expand.”
Industries such as agriculture will be affected by this decline in water supply, and there could be an increase in wildfires, because drying could accelerate.
“There will be less and less moisture in the soil to dampen the rise in temperature because of the heat needed to evaporate moisture from the soil, and this could also mean that the heating will accelerate,” AccuWeather wrote.
With less rainfall and more evaporation, the ground is drier, Anderson said. When the ground is dry, a lot of the sun’s energy, instead of evaporating the water, will just go directly to heating the ground.
“When you heat up the ground, you’re just going to lead to higher temperatures, and also more likely lead to a sudden drought situation,” Anderson said. “So that’s the situation we’re seeing in the West.”
Meanwhile, in the Eastern part of the country, problems are going to be caused by that extreme rainfall in a short period of time, Anderson added.
“We’ve seen that already, the impacts of that. We’re reading about a lot of these extreme weather events, much more than we ever used to,” Anderson said. “And unfortunately, as we continue to warm the planet, we are going to continue to see more of these extreme events.”
Last year, 2025, was the third-highest year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, with 23 recorded and $115 billion in damage recorded by Climate Central.
Concern about current climate models
Should these climate trends continue, Myers warned, “well-known climate models may not be capturing all of the important changes our studies have revealed.”
That’s because as the soil and ground get drier, the warming of the air and ground could accelerate past what these models are currently predicting.
“The reason for that is moisture in the soil provides a major dampening of heating. Evaporation of water utilizes a great deal of heat, as you learned in physics, 540 calories per gram of water,” Myers said. “That means the same amount of heat is used to evaporate one cubic centimeter of water as is needed to raise the temperature of an equal amount of soil by scores of degrees or more.”
Climate models have done a good job predicting the warming, but they haven’t done well predicting the increase in extreme weather events, especially when it comes to rainfall, Anderson said.
“A lot of these extreme events are smaller scale, and a lot of these climate models are large scale,” Anderson explained. “They look at the globe, or maybe North America — they’re not small scale like weather forecasting models are, so they tend to miss these small scale extreme rainfall events. So it’s understandable why they would miss that a little bit.”
Hopefully, Anderson said, in the near future, “these models can continue to improve, which they are, and be able to anticipate and take into account what we’re seeing here, which is undeniable extreme events that we’re having.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
