2022 Climate Review

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Now for our climate story of the week, we'll look at the climate stats of the year. Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, which tracks global temperatures, reported this week that the last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, with 2022 being the fifth hottest year ever recorded.

We'll look at some of those numbers. Let's see what happened to the climate in 2022 with Henry Fountain, climate change reporter for the New York Times. Hi, Henry. Thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Henry Fountain: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: 2022 was the fifth hottest year on record, according to Copernicus. Can you give us some of the numbers that that ranking is based on?

Henry Fountain: Copernicus, which is basically the European version of what NOAA does in the United States, takes monthly temperature readings all around the world, takes data from other countries, et cetera, uses some modeling, some computer simulation, and comes up with a figure. They do it every month. They also do it yearly.

I think this year the finding was that, globally, temperatures were 1.18 degrees centigrade, which is roughly about 2.1 Fahrenheit higher than the late 19th century, which is before we started pumping all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

They do this regularly. They're very good at it just as NOAA. NASA does it as well, and all the agencies that do it tend to agree every year. I think NASA's and NOAA's numbers are coming out tomorrow, and they'll be pretty much exactly the same. The take home is that global warming is still happening. It wasn't the hottest year ever, but it was really much hotter than 100 years ago.

Brian Lehrer: 2016 remains the hottest year thus far, according to those numbers. Is it a sign of improvement that 2022 was only the fifth hottest year?

Henry Fountain: No. In fact, it's just a sign that the planet is warming inexorably, essentially. There's some variability from year to year that has nothing to do with climate change. For instance, this year, as in the past two, we've been in what's called a La Niña which is a climate-affecting pattern that starts with colder than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and that tends to keep temperatures globally a little bit lower than normal.

Despite the fact that we had this La Niña this year, or in 2022, we still are near the top in terms of record keeping. As you said, the last eight years were the hottest on record. You can actually go back to 2000, and I think 19 of the 22 years or 20, or 21 of the 22 years were the hottest on record.

It's just another sign that the planet is warming. We haven't really stopped it. We're making some progress and hopefully going to figure out how to slow it down and stop it, but as of now, it's still happening.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any global climate change data questions for Henry Fountain, climate reporter for the New York Times, as we talk about the 2022 global warming numbers that are out now and reinforcing that the last eight years as he just mentioned and as we said in the lead, last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record on planet Earth? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer.

Just don't mind, listeners, of some of the basics here. If the big picture is that the world is just over 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was at the beginning of the fossil fuel zero, late 1800s, why is that such a big deal? 2 degrees doesn't sound like very much in terms of our experience day to day.

Henry Fountain: Although I think, as we've all discovered in the last 5 or 10 years, particularly, 2 degrees does make a big difference. It increases extreme weather in summer. It increases the duration and intensity of things like heat waves for the simple reason that we're starting at a higher baseline temperature now.

It has all these effects, and in fact, a lot of climate scientists have predicted that warming of 2 degrees Fahrenheit would produce these impacts, these extreme weather impacts, other impacts. I think a lot of them are-- I wouldn't say the word alarmed, but they're noticing that these impacts are actually happening faster than we thought they would.

2 degrees may not sound like a lot but really makes a big difference. The planet has been fairly stable temperature-wise for a long time. It has had ups and downs over millions of years. Usually, those ups and downs occur very, very slowly. We've increased temperatures by 2 degrees in 130 years, say, and that's super fast, and that's because of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Brian Lehrer: Were there particular hottest hotspots on Earth last year, or doesn't it get measured that way?

Henry Fountain: No, it definitely gets measured that way. It's a good question because, in fact, Europe was really a hotspot last year, particularly last summer. I think they had the warmest summer ever in Europe. I don't know if you remember, but there were a succession of really intense heat waves across Europe, and there were temperature records being set in towns all over Continental Europe, all over the UK.

Europe is definitely and it's becoming a hotspot. It seems to be warming faster than some other parts of the planet. Some of it definitely has to do with global warming, but some of it might have to do with atmospheric circulation, oceanic circulation that might not be directly linked to climate change. That's one of the things when I talk about climate change with scientists or with other people, there's a lot of variability in the climate, natural variability. There's patterns that change and shift of oceanic circulation or atmospheric circulation over years or decades.

On top of that, now we have this climate change signal, we have this warming signal, and that's pushing things in the direction of being hotter or rainstorms being rainier and stuff, but there's always been, and there will continue to be natural variability in all of those things. You might have a year with not very many heat waves because that's just kind of the variability of things, but that doesn't mean climate change is not happening, warming is not happening.

Brian Lehrer: That's why we have to look at the longer-term trends and things like the last eight years being, in the aggregate, the eight hottest years on record. The European summer last year, a particular hotspot. I know there was also the lengthy extreme heat wave in Eastern and Central China, another one in Pakistan followed by that horrible flooding that a lot of people probably heard about even here, lengthy extreme heat wave in India, all that stuff from the Western US, heat, and dryness impacting wildfires, the drying of the Colorado River which is the major water source for so much of the Southwest population centers. I think it's from the article The Arctic is cooling four times as fast as the rest of the world is that something you've reported on?

Henry Fountain: Warming four times as fast.

Brian Lehrer: Is warming, yes. Warming, sorry.

Henry Fountain: Is warming fast. Yes, I've written a lot about that over the years. The actual rate of warming is-- the scientists have been trying to quantify it better, and the latest is that it's close to four times as fast. The reason has to do with what we call Arctic amplification, where when it warms up, you lose sea ice in the Arctic Ocean because, remember, the North Pole is mostly water.

You lose this sea ice, and sea ice is white, and so when it's there, it reflects a lot of the sunlight, so it doesn't warm up so much because of that reflectance. If you warm the planet and start melting the sea ice, so there's less sea ice in the Arctic over time, you have more dark ocean to actually absorb that sunlight that was previously being reflected.

The Arctic Ocean gets warmer, the region warms up, and it's like a feedback loop. The more that happens, the more ice you lose, the more ocean you expose, the more heat you generate, and it just keeps building, and that's why it's amplifying in that way, and that's why it's warming so quickly.

Brian Lehrer: I think we have an Arctic-related question here from Cheryl in Soho. Cheryl, you're on WNYC with Henry Fountain, who covers climate for the New York Times. As we go over 2022 climate year and review data on our climate story of the week. Hi, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi. Much a fan. My question. Okay, so the North Pole has shifted slightly, and in '97, I read that the Gulf Stream has slowed down somewhat. Clearly, Europe has gone through some catastrophic things increasingly. I'm wondering, with the Gulf Stream slowing down more and more, what's the impact going to be from that? I'm assuming that it's true. What's the impact of that?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Cheryl. Did the North Pole shift slightly as she said?

Henry Fountain: The Earth does-- the axis of the Earth that it rotates around does shift slightly over long periods of time. There's not been a sudden or recent shift in the North Pole. There's also the magnetic pole shifts, but that's not related to the climate.

The Gulf Stream, it's a little complicated situation, but the Gulf Stream is part of what's called the Atlantic Meridian overturning circulation, which is this giant current that takes water up to the north. Then the water sinks and comes back down at the bottom of the ocean. It's really part of the overall global oceanic circulation that does influence climate around the world.

There is some evidence that it may be slowing down a little bit. I don't think most climate scientists would say they-- or oceanographers would say they definitely know that yet. There's some indication that it's slowed down way in the past. If it were to slow down, the reason would be more warming, melting in Greenland, in particular, putting a lot of freshwater into the ocean, changing the salinity of the ocean in the Northern Atlantic, and that would change this circulation pattern.

There's really not much evidence of it happening yet. A lot of scientists think it will eventually happen. If it were to happen, it would particularly affect weather in Northern Europe. It might make things colder in Northern Europe. It's not something that's going to happen tomorrow.

There was that famous movie maybe 15 or 20 years ago, The Day After Tomorrow, and that was a very exaggerated version of what we're talking about. Where all of a sudden, the circulation stopped, and the poor queen was in a helicopter in Scotland, and the rotors froze, and it fell out of the sky. Things like that. That's Hollywood. What we're talking about is a slow potential slowing of that circulation.

Brian Lehrer: Did we see more evidence last year of emissions coming mostly from the global North affecting disproportionately the global South?

Henry Fountain: I don't know if we're seeing more of that. I think we're more aware of the fact that the global North is really responsible for the mess we're in. The global South probably gets a disproportionate share of the impacts. Certainly, the ability to deal with the impacts because they're not as affluent as the global North.

I couldn't say for sure, but whether there's more extreme weather, say, in the global South now than there would be in the global North, I don't think we can say that. We can say that there appears to be more extreme weather and more extreme events overall on the planet because of warming, but whether there's more now in the global South, I doubt it.

Brian Lehrer: Though, with the economic imbalances generally between the global North and the global South, and the fact that the global North, meaning mostly the wealthier industrialized countries, have produced the lion share of the emissions. It's such a huge challenge for inequality to equality over time.

Henry Fountain: It is. That's what a lot of the debate in the big climate treaties now like what was called the COP that was held in the Middle East this year, and in Edinburgh last year, discussing--

Brian Lehrer: COP27.

Henry Fountain: Yes, COP27. Most of the discussion of that is, or a lot of the discussion these days is about loss and damage like who's going to pay, who's going to help the global South pay for the effects of climate change? The rising sea levels, more storms, more heat waves, more droughts, whatever because they're not as affluent, and they didn't create the problem. The global North is affluent, and really all the fossil fuels we've been burning over the last century is really what's caused the problem.

Brian Lehrer: We are almost out of time, but Jonathan, on the Lower East side, I think likes the way we've been referring to some of the data in this conversation compared to some other things that he's heard. It's just a technical point, I think. Jonathan, you're on WNYC.

Jonathan: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I think it's important to actually talk about this stuff in terms of Fahrenheit, not Celsius, because we don't use Celsius in this country, or Centigrade, however you want to call it. I do think, in general, this makes people think that this is like a technocratic, I don't know, European problem, talking about 2 degrees Celsius. It seems like a little thing, but I do think it's alienating. It's just a comment.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I think it's true. Henry, you know that the experts, the UN, everybody talks about 1.5 degree Celsius being this threshold that we don't want the earth to pass. I framed what has happened so far over the last 100+ years as a little over 2 degrees Fahrenheit. I got it from your article, which put it in both terms. I think he's exactly right. It makes it more relatable to people in the United States.

Henry Fountain: We always make a point of doing conversion, not necessarily every time in a story that a temperature is mentioned, but at least the first time it's mentioned. We're always going to convert it to help people. I'm in the impression or the opinion that most of the world uses Celsius, Centigrade, just as most of the world uses the metric system for length and distance and all of that.

Part of it is, we want to encourage people to think as the rest of the world thinks. Using celsius or centigrade is not a bad thing. Converting it to Fahrenheit is a good thing, but doing both is really what we should be doing, I think.

Brian Lehrer: Actually, I used to work for a radio station where, for a while, they wanted us to give the temperature both in Fahrenheit and in Celsius. This was in Albany, with the theory that, "Hey, let's help encourage the United States to join the rest of the world." It didn't catch on, and they gave it up after a while.

Henry Fountain: It's the same with the metric system. Never count on that. I think still in New Hampshire, you can see road signs where they put the distances in metric as a way to try to do that, what you're talking about.

Brian Lehrer: For the people coming from Canada.

Henry Fountain: I guess so. As someone who spends my day embroiled in science, I'm a firm believer in the metric system. It's a lot easier to calculate and figure things out than what we use here in the States.

Brian Lehrer: On the climate data of last year, that's our climate story of the week. We thank New York Times climate reporter Henry Fountain. Henry, thank you so much.

Henry Fountain: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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