AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the Jan. 31 edition of Climate In The News.
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00:00Today we'll cover two different climate stories. The first, a key reason why 2024 was the hottest
00:06year on record. And the second story, a new area of study on how clouds are contributing
00:10to climate change. The first year from the BBC and discussing, Brett, CO2 and how that
00:15gas has risen at an increasing rate in 2024. And again, sort of just reiterates the importance
00:21of reducing emissions, right?
00:23Yeah, absolutely. What they found was in the study that CO2 levels rose more quickly last
00:29year than any other year before, which is actually surprising. The United States has
00:34actually seen it level off a little bit and decrease, which is good news, but worldwide
00:39that's bad news. So what does that mean? It's the highest levels of CO2 in the atmosphere
00:43in 2 million years, 50% higher than pre-industrial times. What is contributing to this? Partially,
00:51of course, large fires. What they found, ocean water temperatures were record warm. Warm
00:57oceans do not absorb CO2 as well as cooler oceans. So those are the two things to look
01:02at.
01:03Yeah. It also seems like that El Nino may have contributed a bit to that increased rate.
01:07Do we think there would be less of an increase in 2025 with more of a La Nina pattern emerging?
01:12You would think it would be. Cooler oceans, certainly that would help out a little bit.
01:17I also mentioned earlier the war in Ukraine, a lot of smoke and fire from that also contributing.
01:24So I have some hope for 2025. Hopefully things start to level off a little bit.
01:29Yeah, we've got to level it off and then decrease those emissions, obviously. So moving from
01:32that to a new area of study about cloud cover, this from Science Advisor, about how earth
01:38clouds are shrinking. And clouds play a really important role in sort of the entire earth
01:43process, right? Because they both absorb and reflect incoming solar radiation.
01:47Yeah, it depends on the type of cloud you have. Darker clouds absorb more of the earth's
01:53energy, more of the sun's energy. Lighter colored clouds reflect it. And what they're
01:57seeing as these lighter colored clouds, especially in the middle latitudes and along the equator,
02:02the area of those clouds is shrinking. And that may be explaining some of the surge in
02:07warmth we've seen over the past recent years, because some of that's been unexplained. So
02:13that's creating more of an energy imbalance. We already have an energy imbalance due to
02:17increased CO2, but this is creating more of an energy imbalance.
02:20There's been a previous study on sort of the impact of pollution on clouds. This seems
02:24to be more driven by the circulation patterns of the earth, right?
02:27Yeah, that's what they're finding, though there's still a lot of questions with the
02:29study, but they did not see anything related to pollution. Now, increased pollution actually
02:35leads to more reflectivity in a cooler scenario. Right now, we have less pollution than we
02:41did 40, 50 years ago. So that's led to an increase in more energy being absorbed by
02:47the earth.
02:48That's certainly a complex system, Brett, and how all these things interrelate in terms
02:51of our earth climate system. Well, thank you, Brett, for that information. We'll check back
02:56on those areas of study here as we get more research on it. For that information and other
03:00climate stories, you can find it at accuweather.com slash climate.