Alejandra Barunda
Appearances
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Yeah, glad to be here.
Up First from NPR
Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
So the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and NASA just announced their official numbers on Friday. And they both say that 2024 was about 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was back in the 1800s before people started burning tons of fossil fuels. For reference, that's about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. And 1.5 C, you might have heard of it.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
It's kind of a symbolic number because back in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, most countries tried to pledge to keep global warming to less than 2 C and ideally less than 1.5. And I want to be clear that being past that number for just one year, that doesn't mean those goals are breached, but it's not a good sign.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Yeah, 2023 and 2024 were both off the charts hot. Here's how climate scientist Zeke Hausfather describes some of the temperature records from 2023.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Very descriptive. And so the last two years, they were about two-tenths of a degree Celsius hotter than scientists even expected. And that might not sound like a lot, but Hausfather says it's equivalent to about a decade of global warming. And that really matters because it's important to know if this extra heat represents a permanent change to the climate or something else. And why?
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
That is definitely the question. Scientists have looked at so many things. They looked at stuff like the solar cycle. That wasn't it. They looked at dust in the air. That wasn't it either. And then there was this other idea about a volcano that erupted in 2022. And that volcano shot water vapor into the atmosphere, which could theoretically heat up the planet. But that didn't pan out either.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
So the next idea was El Nino, which is part of this natural climate cycle. And during El Nino years, the planet is generally warmer. But when it first got unexpectedly hot, El Nino hadn't even started yet. Gavin Schmidt is a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
It turns out that El Nino probably had some effect on 2024's numbers, but overall, scientists were still scratching their heads.
Up First from NPR
Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Yeah, they went to one other place, Scott. The next thing they looked at were these weird kinds of clouds.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
That's Andrew Gettleman. He's a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Ships burn fossil fuels, and the pollution from that actually creates these cloud trails behind them that cool Earth. And in 2020, that ship fuel actually got cleaner, and that meant smaller ship track clouds and increased in turn, a hotter planet.
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Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
And that could actually make up about half of the mystery heat. And scientists think decreases in other clouds that were also formerly caused by pollution might make up another chunk.
Up First from NPR
Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Yeah, it's not ideal. But scientists like Schmidt say that that just means cutting fossil fuel emissions is even more important to get at that main driver of climate change.
Up First from NPR
Palisades Fire Expands, 2024 Hottest On Record, TikTok Arguments Pro And Con
Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks.