The League joined partners in signing onto a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives opposing H.R. 3, legislation that would allow the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline without first receiving a permit.

The League sent a letter to President Obama asking him to lead the fight for climate change.

The impacts of global warming on human and natural systems are now being observed nearly everywhere. In 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted serious risks and damages to livelihoods, human infrastructure, societies, species, and ecosystems unless future warming is reduced. So far this decade, emissions, warming, and impacts, such as ice melt and sea level rise, have all been at the upper end of IPCC projections.

Global warming is happening, and its impacts are already being felt today.

Evidence includes disappearing glaciers, increasingly severe heat waves and droughts in some areas, intensifying hurricanes and floods in others, and more wildfires. If left unchecked, the effects could be catastrophic: millions of people displaced as rising sea levels flood coastal areas; many regions devastated by reduced crop yields and shortages of drinking water; human health threatened by the spread of malaria and other vector-borne diseases; many plant and animal species at risk of extinction.