AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the Feb. 21 edition of Climate In The News.
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00:00Today we have two different climate stories. The first, the recent events, the
00:04coldest January in many years across the United States, but in fact the warmest
00:09globally. We'll talk about that in detail. And then second, dive into cleaner air
00:13and how that actually has caused potentially more warming across the
00:18world with less air pollution. Brett talking about this first article from
00:21ABC News that dives into the coldest January on record in the U.S. since 1988.
00:27So it's been close to 30 years, or more than 30 years I guess, since that
00:32milestone. But as a planet, as a whole, has been, it was the warmest January on
00:37record. Yeah, which is not surprising. We've had many months now, their warmest
00:41month on record now, so that's not surprising globally. But yes, the U.S. was
00:44the coldest winter for the lower 48s since the late 1980s, which is kind of
00:49unusual. Many of our winters now have been fairly warm, but it's not uniform
00:54everywhere in the United States. Alaska, for instance, was actually quite mild
00:58during January, but it was also very wet in January, during the month of January.
01:02It's the wettest January on record for Alaska, while back down the lower 48, it
01:07was the sixth driest January on record. Yeah, so it really shows the extremes
01:11that we have been experiencing and we should continue to experience with the
01:15climate change, right? Exactly. Climate change equals more extremes, and that's
01:18certainly what we saw in January, no doubt about that. Yeah, so as we've been
01:21shivering here in the U.S., Alaska has been relatively warm for their standards
01:25in January. We will move to our second story here from New Scientist, where it
01:31discusses the cleaner air that we've been experiencing, less air pollution,
01:36Brett, especially due to less aerosols, which is good, obviously, we're not
01:39polluting as much, but that comes at sort of its cost with what seems to be
01:43more warming, potentially, because of that clean air. How is that possible?
01:47You just can't win. I mean, it's just very frustrating. You want to clean the air, but
01:51when we clean the air, we're allowing more of the sun's energy to
01:55reach the surface, because aerosols from air pollution reflect more of the sun's
01:59light, so we decrease that, more of the sun's light gets to the ocean. Now,
02:02another interesting thing that we read in this study was there was a 2020
02:07regulation for shipping that changed the fuel. It took out the sulfur in the
02:12shipping fuel, so sulfur does create a lot of aerosol pollution, so you take
02:17that out with all the ships traveling over the oceans, that's leading to a lot
02:21more sun's energy reaching the oceans, warming the oceans rapidly. Yeah, it really
02:25shows how complex the Earth system is. They even looked at shipping corridors
02:29in this study as to really understand the impact on shipping and how that
02:33impacts the climate around these shipping corridors. Yeah, absolutely, and
02:38again, we're seeing record spikes in global temperature 2023-2024, so yeah,
02:43that's just a small piece of the pie here, and we'll have to see what happens
02:47in the next 10 to 20 years or so, but yeah, it's very alarming.
02:50Yeah, plenty of more time to study it. Unfortunately, actions probably should be
02:53taken in addition because of the data we have so far today. Thank you, Brett, for
02:58those insights. For other stories about climate, you can find that at
03:02AccuWeather.com slash climate.