AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the June 6 edition of Climate In The News.
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00:00We're covering two interesting climate stories today. We'll start with a very timely topic as we head into wildfire season, look at climate change's impact on wildfires, and then turn to the global temperature and how that's expected to change over the next five years.
00:14Brett, our first story from NASA on wildfires and climate change, a really good overview of how climate change is impacting wildfire activity, how many there are, how large they are.
00:24Yeah, extreme wildfire activity has more than doubled over the past 20 years. Actually, not very surprising right there. Fire season, of course, getting longer, 30 days longer than it was in the 1990s, and with all this increase in fire activity, we're seeing a 60% increase since 2001 of carbon dioxide emissions, which is, of course, helping warming the planet.
00:47Yeah, that feedback loop that we've talked about on other episodes, too. Obviously, significant factors that influence wildfire behavior, hotter temperatures being one of them. There's many others, though.
00:57Yeah, nighttime temperatures is really talked about in the article. We're seeing much warmer nights. The warming at night is exceeding, certainly, during the day.
01:07Normally, fires decrease in intensity at night. We're not seeing that as much, unfortunately.
01:11Also, an earlier spring snow melt and less rain during the summer, so a wide variety of factors, and obviously, these wildfires have significant impact on people, not just, obviously, from the destruction of buildings and other properties, but air quality with the smoke.
01:26Yeah, we're getting a lot of smoke already so far this year, of course. We've been covering that. These fires have gotten off to a fast start across central Canada, a lot of smoke and haze already into the central and eastern U.S.
01:38Certainly a good reason to download the AccuWeather app, where we have air quality information for all parts of the globe, and it can tell you when the best time it is during the day to get outside in places with poor air quality.
01:48Our second story from the World Meteorological Organization, showing how temperatures are expected to remain at or near record levels across the globe when you're averaging across the world over the next five years, Brett.
01:59Yeah, unfortunately, 80% chance that we will exceed 2024, which is the record warmest year on record, I should say, globally over the next five years, 70% chance that the next five years will exceed the 1.5 degree mark that the Paris Accord set above the 1850-1900 average.
02:21And obviously, any small amount of increase continues to have significant impacts on the entire global system. What parts of the world are seeing the most change right now?
02:29Yeah, the Arctic, of course, has been warming at about two to three times the rate of the remaining rest of the planet. The projections, though, unfortunately, are getting worse. Over the next five years, that could be 3.5 times higher.
02:40Yeah, so sort of reinforcing what we know, the last 10 years were the 10 warmest years on record globally. It looks like this confirms that we'll continue to go in that direction here as we head through the next decade.
02:51Thank you, Brett, for that information. For other information and stories about climate, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.