Giving Compass' Take:

• The New Food Economy discusses some possible future crises that the National Climate Assessment details, including greater risks of droughts and devastation to the farming community.

• Are there steps we can take to mitigate such risks? How can we develop more clean energy solutions, while also securing our food ecosystem from extreme weather?

• Here are some ways the private sector can approach climate change, even without government help.

On the day after Thanksgiving, a consortium of scientists from 13 federal agencies released the National Climate Assessment, a report published once every four years that looks at the present and future impacts of climate change. White House-adjacent sources told The New York Times that the timing of the release — a holiday weekend when many were tuned out of the news cycle — was not a coincidence.

A White House statement said the report is “largely based on the most extreme scenario.” On Wednesday of last week, President Trump sent a tweet that seemed to imply the cold weekend forecast negated decades of scientific consensus. “Whatever happened to Global Warming?” he said of the report on Monday, “I don’t believe it.”

Though the White House doesn’t seem intent on changing its tune, the assessment affirms what many of us already believe to be true: climate change is impacting our lives right now. If we don’t do anything about it, its effects will only get worse. Left unchecked, it could lop 10 percent off the Gross Domestic Product by the end of this century.

So what about food and agriculture? The report’s overarching takeaway is that climate change will make the food system increasingly vulnerable. Pests will get worse, droughts will get longer, dairy cows will produce less milk, algal blooms will worsen. And, the report points out, hard times for farmers mean hard times for rural communities.

Read the full article about takeaways from the National Climate Assessment by H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy.