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| 00:01 | [Music] foreign [Music] Elli is WFLA News Channel 8's chief meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff is an incredible climate Communicator connecting the dots for the audience between the extreme weather events that are happening you know every day it seems like and the warming Planet Jeff welcome back to the climate pod yeah I'm glad to be here thanks for inviting me well it seems like we've been inundated lately with climate news but one thing that really stood out to me over the last couple of weeks was the spike in |
| 00:41 | ocean surface temperatures before we get into you know what caused it what did scientists observe with global ocean surface temperatures yeah it's pretty astonishing what we're seeing and I think there are a lot of scientists who are in disbelief I will say that I think I think even scientists with the most experience who study this kind of stuff they expected it but it's still and it's not surprising but it's still remarkable to see because ocean temperatures are not just record hot but they're way |
| 01:12 | above record hot just way above record heat the departures from records make this occurrence globally probably almost a once in a million type of event without human-cost climate change right so if this would have happened 100 years ago uh and in the North Atlantic um at least in the tens of thousands types type of event one in the tens of if not hundreds of thousands type event because actual North Atlantic ocean temperatures are about a degree Fahrenheit above normal the whole ocean on average is a degree Fahrenheit A book |
| 01:48 | not normal above records not above normal three to five degrees above normal in the main development region so it's pretty crazy yeah I mean the the visualization that graph that has been floating around social media over the last couple of weeks where you where you see that 2023 line you know it does start out higher than average when I say line the the measurement of the the ocean temperature but then it just like shoots up well beyond I mean it's it's crazy and I I know that Twitter isn't real life but |
| 02:21 | when this graph was first circulated and still today I see a ton of people commenting about this being evidence that we've passed the Tipping Point man the climate models were wrong and we're already beyond the worst case scenarios a lot of uh climate doomerism what did you make of the reactions to this graph um well first let's address whether or not this we've reached a Tipping Point and the and the answer to that is we can't be sure right but tipping points don't happen overnight they don't happen |
| 02:52 | in weeks they really don't even happen in months they happen it happens over the course of time so you think of Tipping Point you think you're going to fall off a cliff that's not exactly what we mean by Tipping Point in the climate system although a Tipping Point is a point at which you you push things so far that they become irreversible and things start to snowball but it doesn't necessarily cause a spike like that straight up in temperatures so it's likely a lot of things going on at the |
| 03:17 | exact same time compounding on top of each other if you've looked at any kind of climate science lately a lot of scientists are examining this compounding effect uh in terms of not just extreme weather but in terms of all other kinds of things related to climate change so is it a Tipping Point what could we have passed one sure we could have passed one but the Tipping Point itself if we had passed one wouldn't have caused that Direct uptick in temperatures uh but I mean it shows us what the potential is |
| 03:47 | right even if it's not a Tipping Point even if doomers are going crazy and it's not really directly related to something that we didn't expect in the climate system which it probably isn't something that we didn't expect in the climate system but the point is made right that we can expect the unexpected now we can expect things to happen that below our minds even though we study this day in and day out nor thousands and thousands of papers that are published on this kind of thing so that's how I would kind of |
| 04:15 | quantify it put it into perspective and you did a fantastic job of summarizing exactly what is causing this and it's really important to get that information out there so people have a good sense of of what's happening so I would like to just talk about some of the factors that are at play here and causing this I want to start with the the big one El Nino we've heard a lot about El Nino this year what does it mean that El Nino is back and why does that matter right so we typically see the warmest |
| 04:50 | temperatures on Earth during the strongest El ninos so most of the record-breaking temperatures that we saw happen back in the 2016 uh El Nino uh that was that was the strongest one of the strongest on records we saw strong 182.83 we saw another strong one in 1997. um now the last few years we've been in La Nina so la nina is a cooling of the tropical equatorial Pacific ocean waters and that cooling means that less heat is is actually being fluxed into the atmosphere from the oceans uh that's been three |
| 05:24 | years triple dip La Nina and so during that whole time the ocean's been storing up a bunch of heat it's kind of like a bunch of TNT just like you taking a warehouse and just stuffing it with TNT and every day you put more in and at one point it's just ready to explode well when La Nina let up and El Nino took over which is a warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean uh all that heat now is in contact with the surface of the ocean and in contact with the atmosphere and so it's a lot more of a flux going into the atmosphere and once |
| 05:53 | that starts happening you're adding so much energy to that system that interface between the ocean and atmosphere now we're leasing all that energy into the atmosphere you're changing wind patterns not just regionally but globally including the Atlantic Ocean let me just explain one more time kind of what La Nina and El Nino is so essentially we have trade winds so winds that blow from the Eastern Pacific towards the Western Pacific and you might think about it as simply as this those trade winds are |
| 06:19 | strong enough that they pile warm water up on the western side of the business literally pilot literally you could measure a mound of water physically that's higher in the Western Pacific than in the Eastern Pacific Ocean but when those Trade Winds slacken off and it's a combination of dynamics that causes them to slack in that causes the ocean to kind of start working in the opposite direction it's it's all interrelated right chicken and egg kind of thing chicken egg we don't know but it all happens simultaneously |
| 06:46 | and when the trades weaken and there's nothing pushing that warm water up into a mound in the Western Pacific that kind of rolls back downhill and spreads across the Pacific Ocean and then spreads all that warm water into the Eastern Pacific and then it starts to interact with the atmosphere and voila you end up with some extreme weather and extreme ocean conditions too and are those trade winds or the weakened Trade Winds is that what's causing the the lack of Saharan dust to to be in the atmosphere above the oceans |
| 07:19 | it's a great question so I was speaking of Pacific Trade Winds not Atlantic Trade Winds but you are correct we have seen a slackling of the Atlantic Trade Winds to some degree uh partly due to a weaker High weaker what they call an Azores high but it's really a high that kind of steers tropical systems on its southern side it's this semi-permanent feature during you know tropical Cyclone season during hurricane season in the Atlantic ocean that is really weak and when that weakens the wind flow around it weakens pressure pressure |
| 07:49 | gradients weaken um and yes as a result of that you're going to be kind of scouring a little bit less sand off of this Aaron desert and thus less dust into the atmosphere you have less dust you have less uh particles to obscure the sun more sun gets through it heats the blue ocean we hear about blue ocean events it heats the blue ocean and it warms it up even more so there is an aspect to what's happening in the tropical Atlantic that is due to this weakening High weaker Trade Winds less Saharan dust so there are natural components |
| 08:24 | it's not just climate change but of course we know that climate change is a significant part of it now one of the more bizarre conversations that I saw um around this graph this you know the spike in ocean temperatures um was was people calling for the shipping industry to put sulfur back into their fuel to make it dirty again I'm thinking what in the world are they talking about how does less polluted shipping fuel cause these ocean temperatures to to rise right so that's a part of it right so any kind of |
| 08:58 | pollution that we emit into the atmosphere be it from ships and it was a law passed in 2020 so we've seen a 85 dip in the amount of sulfur dioxide that's been pushed into the atmosphere over the last two years so that has some effect scientists trying to quantify some say it's less than a tenth of a degree but there are other people who surmise it maybe more James Hansen actually Dr James Hansen the famous James Hansen thinks that it may be more significant but if we're going to talk about aerosols and pollution we need to look |
| 09:26 | back much further than that the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s and that really cleaned up our act in the United States now on prevailing winds in the northern hemisphere where we're located and below from west to east and so that takes the pollution into the Atlantic Ocean more pollution over the Skies of the Atlantic would obscure some of the Sun and actually cool the oceans so this reduction in aerosols is not just the last couple years due to sulfur dioxide from ships it's also a progression over |
| 09:54 | the past few decades and the Atlantic has indeed warmed some of it is indeed due to the reduction in aerosols and pollution and some of it is greenhouse warming but in general the oceans as a whole globally have warmed around two degrees Fahrenheit and that's true of the Atlantic Ocean as well now what we've seen and I'll just be quick about this is we've seen an uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1980s so starting in the 1990s that could be due to a natural oscillation that we call the Amo |
| 10:24 | um it could be due to greenhouse gases and and the warming due to that and it could also be due to the reduction in aerosols and a lot of studies are finding it may be almost a greater proportion aerosol reduction in the North Atlantic so but it's probably all of us things right it's not it usually is all those things or at least a couple it's not usually one Smoking Gun if you will so getting back to your question at the offset yes if we were to start spewing more pollution into the atmosphere we would cool the atmosphere |
| 10:53 | and there are a lot of people who want a Geo engineer climate change to try to use that shooting particles into the stratosphere obscuring the Sun and cooling us down artificially by a degree or so we don't know what the repercussions of that would be it could be very dangerous we could be playing God if you will um but but one thing I should say and you know this because you study this and you and you and you talk about it a lot Ty is that air pollution causes eight to nine million deaths per year around the |
| 11:20 | world so we might solve one problem and we may make another problem even worse oh yes and just so it's on the record I am definitely not a proponent of of adding silver dioxide back to uh to shipping emissions that's for sure um just one other you know there was another Factor as I as I read through your summary of of what could be contributing to these warmer ocean temperatures another Factor jumped out to me that that was pretty surprising the fact that last January an underwater volcano erupted in Tonga and scientists |
| 11:55 | are saying that this is actually causing global temperatures to rise I thought that volcano Ash caused temperatures to decrease why why is this one different well of course you're asking the right questions but I know you already know the answer to this but it's okay uh because the viewers may not and the listeners may not so um hungotonga when it erupted it was under the water it's not an over land volcano it's it's underneath the water so instead of spewing dust into the atmosphere it spewed tons and tons of water Vapor |
| 12:25 | directly up into the stratosphere where it still is so we have all this residual extra you know water vapor H2O sitting in the um Stratosphere and it's a greenhouse gas uh water vapor is a greenhouse gas in fact it's a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so when you put all this water vapor into the atmosphere you end up spiking temperatures as well so a lot of remember it's not now again it's not just one thing right climate change is a big part of it uh Greenhouse forcing is is over the longer term gonna |
| 12:56 | be the biggest force that dictates our future there's no doubt about it but there are a lot of layers to this layer cake and it just so happens that everything is layering on top of each other at the same time we don't know which what how to quantify each discrete part of it yet somebody could do a study on it a couple people could do a study and try to figure out okay what portion is the Clean Air Act what portion is SO2 from ships what portion is greenhouse forcing what portion is you know the reduction of Saharan dust and the |
| 13:27 | lessening of the trade winds you know and what portion is the hangatanga volcano we don't know what portion is which a lot of the craziness that's going to go on this year is going to be due to the switch between La Nina and El Nino natural variation is still a somewhat stronger forced in climate change but climate change is getting stronger it's more powerful it's at the gym all the time lifting weights and pretty soon it will start dictating and actually being in some cases more influential than even natural |
| 13:59 | sub-seasonal patterns I don't think it's going to happen in the next decade or two but sometime we just keep letting climate change loose if you will it is going to start dictating weather patterns it's not doing that right now the way I like to look at it is climate change is piggybacking on the prevailing natural pattern so if a certain pattern is going to evolve it's still going to evolve nature wants a certain pattern with a strong jet stream or a weak jet stream to evolve during one particular |
| 14:24 | winter it's still going to happen based on natural variability and oscillations but climate change is going to piggyback on it it's going to add more energy and therefore it's going to bolster whatever pattern is actually in most cases at least whatever pattern is is prevailing in that particular season at some point in the future climate change may may be able to interfere and kind of stop the natural flux of things and start taking over uh but right now I look at it as very much kind of like weather patterns |
| 14:54 | on steroids climate change Greenhouse forcing being the steroids okay so shifting uh slightly away from the ocean warming conversation but back to one of its causes he talked about El Nino earlier um are some El Nino's stronger than others and if so do we know what kind of El Nino we're seeing in 2023 yeah some El Nino's a week some elements are strong the definition of El Nino is a couple things that one of the hard and fast definitions is that the water temperature in the uh equatorial Pacific Ocean in the what we call Nino 3.4 |
| 15:32 | region has to be 0.5 degrees Celsius above normal okay that's it that's the that's the hard and fast criteria after that there needs to be some talking or interface at the ocean atmosphere interface meaning there has to be some connection between the oceans and the atmosphere that the oceans there's evidence the oceans are forcing the atmosphere at that point and they're talking and communicating and interacting and once that starts happening where we start seeing changes in weather patterns due to the |
| 15:58 | underlying water temperatures we know that it's a coupled system and thus El Nino has been born uh yes there's been some really strong ones 8283. um in fact at the Galapagos Islands we end up with tremendously warm water sometimes 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more above normal and that um that unfortunately depletes a lot of the nutrients from the water and a lot of the fish and and marine life that normally live there will leave well the Penguins can't really go anywhere the Galapagos penguins so during the 82 83 |
| 16:30 | El Nino and then during the 97 during the 83 82 83 something like 80 to 85 percent of the coopcos Penguins die because they were starved they couldn't find food this is these meaningful impacts here and then uh in 1997 uh El Nino uh something like another 65 of what was remaining died so it takes its toll these are natural oscillations however they can be spiked by El Nino and La Nina what we don't know yet is exactly what the impact will be there's been a lot of research on El Nino and how climate change may impact |
| 17:05 | it it's been back and forth back and forth there seems to be a little bit more consensus over the past few years that there that it's likely that climate change may make both El Nino's and La Nina's stronger so there's certain episodes that will end up being stronger than they otherwise would have but there's not necessarily evidence I think that there'll be less of them or that they'll be or there'll be more of them it's just the intensity of them which kind of goes hand in hand |
| 17:31 | with everything that we say about climate change climate change makes the extremes worse so in answer your question yes some can be stronger some can be weaker this one right now odds are it's going to be a strong one or at least a borderline moderate strong one and there's some chance it will be a super El Nino meaning that water temperatures will be somewhere around a degree and a half Celsius above normal in that particular Zone so what could that mean for extreme weather for the rest of 2023 the more |
| 18:03 | energy you put into the atmosphere the more extremes you get we're going to see extremes that we have never ever experienced in the history of modern man and woman uh on this Earth that there's no doubt in my mind that's not even conjecture or a guess because our base temperatures are the highest they've ever been because of climate change climate change is that Foundation the Baseline which keeps rising and rising and then put a super El Nino or a strong El Nino on top of that now you're |
| 18:29 | reaching Heights you've never reached before and we're seeing that with the oceans right now so what we're seeing right now even though it's not just forced by greenhouse gases and by global warming and climate change whatever you want to call it what we're seeing right now is evidence of just how high the potential can be how far we can force the climate system out of the bounds that we've ever traditionally seen I mean and that's that's happening right now today there's a heat wave that's |
| 18:55 | hitting Mexico and Texas right now it's off the charge yes how unlikely are the temperatures in Houston right now you know given that it's it's still June it's very rare uh I can't evaluate it on the surface I can evaluate it in the mid-levels so we call it like 500 millibars but looking at the 500 millibar Ridge which is what we call a heat Dome when you see a say heat Dome is what we mean um the sigma is somewhere around four a little bit more than four Sigma so what are the chances of a four Sigma event |
| 19:24 | well you know .00 whatever so it's so the chances are some somewhat like one in tens if not hundreds of thousands meaning there the the the the historical statistical chances of a heat wave that's occurring in Mexico uh right now to occur without climate change without human cause warming would be one in a hundred thousand or possibly even more the numbers become very they change very quickly when you get to such high Sigma or standard deviations from the mean the bottom line is it's basically impossible |
| 19:56 | without climate change that's that's the bottom line the strength of the heat Dome surface temperatures I would have to evaluate separately and we're seeing uh other anomalies having weather-wise and we're seeing right now potentially a hurricane coming out of the Atlantic again it's June 20th uh this is unlikely is is this being caused is this a result of El Nino is this a result of climate change both well what's happening in the Atlantic shouldn't be a result of El Nino El Nino |
| 20:27 | usually works to kind of bat down you know and and Destroy hurricanes although usually that's a little closer to the U.S not so far out in what we call the main development region um so this is the development out there has likely little due to El Nino but water temperatures are three to five degrees above normal in the main development region and and far above records and actually normal for Peak hurricane season in September so two months ahead of time uh so that's what's one of the contributing factors and also we talked |
| 20:57 | about the other contributing factors less the hair and dust less dry year and a better uh more conducive uh atmosphere to kind of incubate these storms um so uh we'll probably end up seeing more and more of that in the future as we continue to warm the oceans even at times when the natural variability in the Atlantic is such that it should be cooling down and it will cool down but the Baseline will be so much higher that it'll only cool to normal it won't include to two degrees below normal get it |
| 21:26 | another climate and weather related event that made headlines recently was the Wildfire smoke that hit New York City another Northeastern cities a lot was made by how unprepared local official officials were for such extremely bad air quality conditions and and some pointed to the difference between what was forecasted and how bad the smoke and air quality actually were as part of the problem for meteorologists how hard is it to forecast the direction and the intensity of wildfire smoke well that's decently |
| 21:57 | easy for us we have computer bottles that tell us you know based on the prevailing winds where that smoke is going to go so we we can tell you within a day or two where it's going to go but remember some of these events are unprecedented at least in modern times or at least in the past several decades so no one remembers the last time it was that bad and so meteorologists can stare at a screen and say oh that Smoke's coming at us but until you're actually in a sky that looks like New York City looked like a week or two ago you can't |
| 22:23 | believe it you would never believe it could happen even if you have the scientific training so we're starting to see these unprecedented things that although we kind of know they're going to happen it's still it's still shocking when they do happen um what I would say about the Canadian fires is you know this year it's not California why is it not California because it rained like like crazy over the over the winter and snowed like crazy out there so at least for right now we're okay but Canada has been under a heat dome |
| 22:46 | for the past you know several months um temperatures have been very warm it's been very dry especially in Western central Canada and we're seeing those patterns develop not always over Canada though sometimes over Siberia they're always somewhere in the late spring and early summer these big blocking highs that kind of intensify and dry out the ground and make it hot and so when someone lights a match or lightning strikes those all you need is an ignition and now all of a sudden these fires burn out of control |
| 23:14 | so just because it's not happening in the same place every year doesn't mean anything it's not going to right the weather's still going to shift from place to place but we we start to see these bigger larger scale type heat domes that set up in high latitudes and are burning forests that are pristine these forests there's remember they're just it's just millions and millions of Acres of forest and there's nothing to stop them there's no way to fight these fires you know often Canada is off to its first fire |
| 23:42 | season ever again it may not be Canada in action maybe to be Siberian next time maybe it'll be Alaska next time maybe it'll be back in the Pacific Northwest in California but each and every year we're seeing this happen somewhere or multiple Wares and we know that human-caused climate change is contributing contributing to the intensity of those wildfires we know that the Earth has warmed drastically in such a short amount of time um basically since the Industrial Revolution as a result of human influence burning fossil fuels a |
| 24:18 | fantastic visualization of that warming are the climate Stripes created by Dr Ed Hawkins we had Dr Hawkins on the show a couple years ago talk about the ipcc report as well as the climate Stripes what I just found out today right before we got on the show uh was your role in popularizing the climate Stripes so I'd love to uh for you to just tell the audience that story sure you know back in 2018 I was a meteorologist in in Florida at the time I'm back in Florida again and I was um kind of plotting my next move and I |
| 24:55 | realized that there was this huge need uh to get climate change into the national media that so I started kind of working on that back in the middle you know 2015 16 17 range and in 2018 I happened to be looking for a simple way to communicate climate change to the masses I just felt like if we had some tools to kind of help communicate it would really help to educate people and I came across Ed stripes and I said wow this would look great as a tie if you've ever seen the pattern it's like a striped tie and I |
| 25:26 | said wouldn't it be cool if I got meteorologists all over the world to to Don ties or pocket squares you can kind of see this is it right here um and and try to spread Awareness on climate change and so we got hundreds of meteorologists from all over the world to do it that first year we called it Mech Unite and that and that kind of metastasized into show your stripes where myself Ed and Bernadette woods flacky from climate Central helped to organize it um but remember Ed Reserve deserves all the credit for this visual I had nothing |
| 26:00 | to do with the visual just simply organize the event and popularize the its use on clothing just to kind of get it out there and since then it's taken on a life of its own I mean the pope actually was presented with climate Stripes about a week and a half ago um it's been used as logos for the uh wmo World Meteorological motorization the AMS the American Meteorological Society the UN in in some respects which is the parent of the wmo uh even the U. |
| 26:26 | S House of Representatives climate committee was using it as their logo and I can go on and on Greta used it as the cover of her book so it really has become the international symbol of climate change and this episode this interview is being published on June 21st which is international show your stripes day so if you're listening to this uh share your stripes on social media uh for sure Jeff I was a fan of your forecast on the CBS Morning Show because you did just such a great job of explaining not just what was happening not just the weather |
| 26:59 | event but how it was exacerbated by a warming Planet you're still doing that at WFLA and on social media a fantastic follow truly I mean your your breakdown on what happened on this the ocean sea temperatures was super helpful to me and and now you've recently launched your own show in a podcast called Jeff's climate classroom right you just tell our audience a little about the show and how they can follow it yeah listen it's it's a way for me to vent and to educate the masses on on climate change so every |
| 27:30 | week we try something different today I interviewed it and we talked about you know the warming stripe show your stripes day which is tomorrow now and the 21st of June which is by the way every every first day of summer is is share your stripes day um and every week it's just a different subject uh I did one on hurricanes and climate change I did one on El Nino and hurricanes um I'm gonna do stuff on climate Solutions so it's just going to be probably to some degree what you do we do it on our website wflanow.com and we |
| 27:59 | also do it on our WFLA Facebook page and then we rebroadcast it uh when it's done you know recorded onto YouTube and apple podcasts and Spotify so just like everyone else I'm just trying to do my part to educate folks on the gravity of the situation and the fact that we can actually uh you can actually solve it we know what it is what's causing it we have the tools to solve it we just need the willpower well we will link to that show in our channel so our audience you can check it out I know there is a ton going on today |
| 28:28 | and you're super busy so I really appreciate your time and your ability to clearly explain what's going on Jeff bardelli thank you again for joining the climate pod you're welcome |