Weather Now Extra: How Nebraska, United States have continued to get warmer since Earth Day started
Earth Day is this Saturday, and we're taking a look at warming trends across the county since the first Earth Day in 1970.
All 50 states and at least 241 U.S. cities have warmed in the last 52 years. The fastest-warming city was Reno, Nevada, and the fastest-warming state was Alaska.
Continued warming can harm people and ecosystems, but we have many options to cut carbon pollution from energy, transportation, agriculture, and more.
States have already reduced heat-trapping emissions by an average of 19% from 2005 to 2020. But this pace is not fast enough to meet national targets by 2030. In fact, Nebraska is one of only four states that have seen an increase in heat-trapping emissions since 2005.
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Concentrations of CO2, methane, and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have increased globally due to a range of human activities — causing temperatures to rise and putting people and entire ecosystems at risk.
Nebraska's greatest emissions sector remains to be agriculture. Emissions from agriculture and cattle can be reduced by capturing carbon in soils, climate-smart farming and even by reducing food waste.
Even with solutions in place and many states backing off on heat-trapping emissions, the United States is 2.5 degrees warmer for this Earth Day than it was in 1970, dangerously close to the global warning limit of 2.7 degrees that 196 countries, including the U.S., have agreed to pursue.
Twenty-two states have released official clean energy goals, including efforts made by Lincoln Electric and Omaha Public Power District to be carbon-free in Nebraska. However, Nebraska is not one of the 24 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance or one of the 33 states with an official Climate Action Plan.