Talk about cognitive dissonance. Just two days before 13 federal agencies released a report laying out the devastating human and economic toll that climate change already is taking in the United States, Donald Trump tweeted: “Whatever happened to global warming?” The tweet was based on a spurt of cold weather in the north-east, never mind that the rest of the world was experiencing higher than normal temperatures.

The administration was so concerned about what the report, called the National Climate Assessment (NCA), would reveal – including the fact that the president’s thinking on climate change is hopelessly flawed – that it chose to release it on Black Friday, hoping no one would pay attention. A member of Trump’s transition team, Steven Milloy, was candid about this strategy, saying: “Do it on a day when nobody cares, and hope it gets swept away by the next day’s news.” Fortunately for the Earth and its residents, news coverage about the report continued over the weekend and into the following week.

So, what was Trump trying to hide? The fact that global warming’s effects are here and now. When western state residents say that recent wildfires are unlike anything they’ve experienced before, there’s a reason for that. Climate change doubled the area burned by wildfires across the west between 1984 and 2015, relative to what would have burned without warming, according to the report.

And when coastal residents say that decades ago, they weren’t splashing through flooded streets on sunny days, there’s a reason for that, too. Sea level rise has increased the frequency of high tide flooding by a factor of five to 10 since the 1960s for some communities. US residents (and, of course, people all over the world), are now being forced to cope with dangerously high temperatures, rising seas, deadly wildfires, torrential rainfalls and devastating hurricanes. If carbon emissions continue unabated, life will become much more difficult.

By the end of the century annual losses in some sectors are projected to exceed $100bn and surpass the gross domestic product of many states, according to the NCA. However, we can avoid these damages by embarking on the lower emissions scenario, reducing costs by nearly 50% in the labor sector and nearly 60% in the extreme heat mortality sector.

While the report doesn’t offer policy recommendations, its findings certainly make the case that the administration must stop rolling back the climate policies the previous administration put in place, including standards requiring vehicles to go farther on a gallon of gas and rules that would limit carbon emissions from power plants. The report will also make it much harder for the Trump administration to defend these rollbacks in court: judges don’t like it when policymakers ignore authoritative science.

Though Trump has stalled progress at the federal level, he doesn’t control what states, cities and the private sector do. All have stepped up to fill the void left by the Trump administration’s abdication. For example, states across the country are implementing policies that curtail global warming emissions, either out of concern over climate change or because the policies make economic sense. California is leading the pack with a recently passed law targeting that the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2045. Texas, with its steady winds and large open spaces, is ranked number one in wind energy generation in the US, generating more wind energy than all but five countries. State leaders there had the foresight to invest more than $7bn in transmission infrastructure to connect those open areas to population centers. And sunny North Carolina is powering half a million homes with solar thanks to state incentives, renewable portfolio requirements, investments by utilities and solar energy purchases by large in-state firms such as Apple and Ikea.

The midterm elections bode well for continued progress at the state level. In New Mexico, Maine, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, gubernatorial candidates who pledged to advance science-based clean energy and climate action won their races. Even in Washington DC there are signs that the pendulum has begun to swing back, with voters deciding to end one-party rule in Congress. The House of Representatives’ new leadership plans to hold hearings on the president’s efforts to dismantle climate rules and young voters who have mobilized around climate issues plan to hold Congress’s feet to the fire, pushing Democrats to make climate legislation a priority this year.

The lesson for Trump and his supporters is that you can only ignore science for so long – eventually it catches up to you. And people around the country are realizing that we are now deep into it and climate impacts will only get worse without action. State and private sector action is helpful; national action is essential. Let’s just hope that enough federal decision-makers get the message soon. The NCA makes it clear that time is the most precious commodity of all; we are running out of it.