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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.
Transcript
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

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