AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss top headlines related to climate change in the Nov. 29 edition of Climate In The News.
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00:00Today we're covering a couple of interesting climate stories. We'll start
00:03with an important milestone related to greenhouse gas emissions and then we'll
00:07transition to a lesser known impact of climate change and that's landslides and
00:12how they can be quite deadly unfortunately. We'll start though with an
00:16article from NPR about the rate of the increase of greenhouse gases. Those are
00:21obviously important, Brett, with how much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and
00:25how much we as a society are emitting to continue to further the impact of
00:29climate change. Yeah greenhouse gas emissions obviously have been increasing
00:33rapidly over the past two centuries but in recent years we've leveled out and in
00:37some places decreasing. Globally though we're still not quite at the peak yet
00:42but that may occur actually in the next year or two actually which is good news.
00:46Unfortunately we're at a real high peak and we really need to come down quickly
00:51by 2035. We need to cut these emissions by half just to limit the warming to the
00:56goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's quite a lot of a reduction that needs to
01:01occur in terms of how much we as a society are emitting into the atmosphere.
01:05It's good news that the rate of increase has slowed but we are at a
01:08very high peak sort of in that danger zone still, right Brett? Yes we are at the
01:13danger zone so we've taken the foot off the gas as the article noted but we have
01:17not put the brake on yet which we really need to get that brake on quickly
01:21actually an emergency brake might be appropriate. Yes so an important
01:24milestone but still a lot of work yet to do and we'll transition then to a
01:29specific impact of these greenhouse gases and how they contribute to
01:32climate change. Ones that we don't talk about that much an impact of landslides
01:36which I was surprised to see that over 4,000 people unfortunately have been
01:42killed this year Brett by landslides caused by usually heavy rain events. Yeah
01:47it's the extreme rainfall events which are a product of climate change which
01:52are leading to more and more landslides that we're seeing. So far this year we
01:55have nearly 700 landslides globally which is obviously a big problem.
02:00Factoring in also fires so we're seeing bigger fires not necessarily more fires
02:05of bigger fires and so bigger fires means more land that is scarred and burn
02:10scar areas are notorious producing deadly landslides when that heavy rain
02:15comes down there's nothing to hold back the soil just coming down the hill. Yeah
02:19so more wildfires and those burn scars and then obviously more extreme rain
02:22events combining together to cause these landslides obviously with sort of timely
02:26in the news here with the recent atmospheric rivers that have impacted
02:28the Pacific Northwest and Northern California and it also seems like that a
02:32lot of the US at least in terms of land area is potentially impacted by
02:36landslides. Yeah a total of 44% supposedly is susceptible to landslides
02:41and I believe most of that is unpopulated areas but that's still a lot
02:45of area. Another impact homeowners insurance will not cover in most cases a
02:52landslide. Very interesting and the clearly impacts from landslides are just
02:56as important as some of the other impacts from climate change that are
02:58more well studied such as hurricanes tornadoes etc so thank you Brett for
03:03that. If you're interested in more of these stories and other information you
03:07can find that at AccuWeather.com slash climate