What people say they know about climate change is a roller coaster of human ignorance—wait, everyone knows that but no one knows that? It’s striking to learn (according to Yale’s climate survey program) that 74 percent of women and 70 percent of men believe climate change will harm future generations of humans, but just 48 and 42 percent, respectively, think it’s harming them personally.

It is, of course, in lots of ways. Yet fewer than half of Americans think climate change is a right-here, right-now problem. So it’s critical that a new report on the impact of climate change is about the present as much as the future. The topline results: 157 million more people experienced a heat wave in 2016 than in 2000—12.3 million Americans. That heat and the injuries that can come from it cost the world 153 billion hours of labor—1.1 billion in the US. The geographic range of the mosquitoes that carry dengue fever, Zika, malaria, and chikungunya is spreading. So is the range of the bacterium that causes cholera. Global crop yield is going down.

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You’re like, old news! But you might be thinking of last week’s apocalyptic climate-is-broken report. That was volume 2 of the fourth National Climate Assessment. Today’s red alert is the 2018 Lancet Countdown, a British medical journal’s annual accounting of how climate change affects public health.

Some confusion here would be understandable. What both reports have in common (along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s October report on a 1.5-degree planetary temperature increase) is immediacy. These reports are designed to show climate change happening now, today—and to actually spur people to do something about it. How? Show them how climate change affects them personally, and describe those effects in ways that transcend their politics. Global warming is causing “present-day changes,” the Lancet report says. On a telephone briefing for reporters, Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the report’s US iteration,1 described seeing more patients with asthma attacks and heat stress. “Viewing climate change as a public health emergency is literally second nature,” Salas said.

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Still, these reports tackle immediacy with different strategies. The Lancet Countdown focuses on health. For NCA4, the approach was a little more subtle. Its hundreds of authors started by considering their audience. The 1990 Global Change Research Act says these quadrennial reports are specifically for the president and congress. Climate change affects the American southwest very differently than the northeast, so breaking regional effects into chapters makes that data more useful for people in congress, who can see specific effects on their districts. (NCA isn’t the only research that does this; you can drill down as far as county-by-county economic effects, if you’re into it.)

Breaking out climate impacts by region and by sector gives the report a potentially wider impact. “The idea is that risks are most salient if they apply to you,” says Robert Lempert, a principal researcher at RAND and an author of the report. “We very much intended it to speak to, call them decision-makers, on many levels—not just the federal government.” Lempert says they were thinking of water management agencies, land managers: the people who write the guidances.

Over the 20 years of the NCA’s life, science has gotten better. So has the thinking about how to tell people about that science in ways they can understand it. Talking about tens of thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars can help with that. “Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve gotten better at thinking about the economic costs,” says John Furlow, a development and aid expert at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and an author of NCA4. “And we have more examples.”