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So far, 2023 is the hottest year ever recorded.

Big exhale. But that means it seems like it's a good moment to check in on how climate change is affecting people across the U.S.

And luckily, there's a monumental new National Climate Assessment that just came out and can help us do just that.

Rebecca Herscher and Alejandra Burunda from NPR's Climate Desk have been covering it.

They've read all 1700 plus pages.

Hello, Al-Ojandra. Hello. And Becky, I hope your eye strain's not too bad.

Yeah, I'm holding up. So can you both just break down what the National Climate

Assessment is? Yeah, it's the most important climate report in the United States. It comes out every five years and it gets used for all

sorts of things. It gets used to make laws, to help governments decide where to build roads or houses as evidence in court cases about who should pay for the

costs of climate change, it's super influential.

Okay, and what does it say this time?

Yeah, there are three big takeaways this time and these are topics where there's been a lot of new research since the last time this report came out.

The first is pretty dark, honestly. Climate change is really bad for people's health.

Wildfire smoke, for example, it is not great to breathe that in. And insect-borne diseases like malaria or

lime, they're spreading more now, which is kind of wild honestly.

Yeah, and to say nothing about summer heat waves that lasted this year all the way into October.

Yeah, exactly.

The second big takeaway from this report is that climate change, it's really, really expensive,

so disasters like that, they cost us a lot of money it's

heat waves but it's also hurricanes and wildfires and floods and droughts they're all getting

more severe and I talked to the person who led the National Climate Assessment about this.

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