CCNow Basics: Climate Science 101

Transcript

David Dickson: Welcome, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you might be joining us. My name is David Dickson. I’m a meteorologist and TV engagement coordinator here at Covering Climate Now. For those of you that might not be familiar with us or might be new to our work, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of 500 plus news outlets that reach an audience. Global audience, at that. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help us all do better coverage of the defining story of our time, these local impacts that play out in our communities across the entire world. You can head to our website coveringclimatenow.org to see a list of our partners, apply to join this collaboration, participate in our annual awards program, sign up for newsletters and newsrooms trainings. All of which are completely free of charge.

Now, let’s go ahead and dive in because we got a lot to talk about for today and a lot to kind of just really jump into. Today, we’re talking about Climate Science 101. We’re building that solid foundation of understanding that is so important for reporting on this topic, which to be honest can pretty much be daunting. There’s so much going on across the world and it seems like it’s very deep and heavy into the science, but we believe that you can do this. In fact, you’ve done it before if you spent any time reporting on COVID. So it’s that sort of understanding that we are kind of diving into.

Even though I’m a meteorologist, I don’t consider myself an expert in all things climate, but I am knowledgeable enough to convey these basic concepts to you and I want you to build that same climate confidence that I have to be able to explain this topic to your audience. So it’s so important for us as climate journalists to understand some of this basic science, so that your coverage can be both accurate but also effective. Whether you’re new to the climate beat or a veteran reporter just aiming to refine on how to explain climate to your audience, this session is for you.

Just a quick note to say that we are recording this session. We’ll go ahead and follow up with resources and you’ll have all the information that we cover in the next hour and 15 minutes provided to you in an email, so don’t feel like you have to write everything down or absorb everything. This session will also be available as a recording, again, for those of you that are here right now in case you want to review it at a later point.

What are we going to do today for the next hour or so? We’re going to start with some basic concepts and then go into a bit more detail with some of these subtler facets of this global issue. Since we’re going to be covering quite a bit of a lot today, feel free to use Zoom’s Q&A function tool at the bottom of your screen. If you have any questions, we should have some time at the very end of this session to explain anything that might be unclear.

Let’s start off by going over some basic vocabulary. You’ve likely seen any of these terms, likely all of these terms, if you’ve spent any time on the climate beat or even just explored a little bit about science. Greenhouse effect, global warming or global heating, climate change, and climate crisis, at first glance, some of these essentially seem to be one and the same, but what we’re going to be doing today is showing that these have little differences and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. And we’ll explain why in a little bit, more so in a moment.

But simply put, the greenhouse effect is the process in which heat is trapped near the Earth’s surface by these substances that we call greenhouse gases. We’ll go into more detail into what exactly they were and how this process works in a moment, but in general, imagine these gases like a blanket enveloping our planet helping to maintain a warmer temperature than it would have otherwise if we had none of these in our atmosphere.

Then we head into global warming or global heating. This is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface absorbed since the pre-industrial era, which begins between 1850 and 1900 due directly to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, which increases those heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. We’ve also seen this be referred to as global heating used instead. However, global warming or global heating shouldn’t be used interchangeably with climate change. We’ll touch on that a little bit later on.

And then finally, climate change. The term climate change encompasses both global warming but also refers to the broader changes that are happening to the planet as well as a result of this added warmth, including rising sea levels, melting glaciers, increasing frequency or the intensity of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, tropical cyclones, extreme heavy precipitation events, and shifts in flower and plant-blooming times. Global warming and climate change are two sides of the same coin with global warming just explaining one of the many problems that arises from climate change.

Finally, we have “climate crisis.” In fact, there has been some studies and some surveys that show that the term “climate crisis” invokes a stronger emotional response by conveying a sense of urgency and conveying a sense that we can solve this. Consider potentially using this or “climate emergency” when applicable to emphasize the threat of global warming to Earth’s natural environment and to humans and to urge aggressive climate change mitigation. In other words, change can be positive or negative. The term crisis invokes a completely different response.

Over the next hour, we’re going to be going into much more detail into each of these four topics, not only further explaining each one, but also providing analogies and answers to some of the more common questions that you will likely encounter whenever you start to talk about climate change.

Let’s begin first with the greenhouse effect. To better understand the greenhouse effect and climate change, we first have to understand what’s going on in our atmosphere. It’s always been there, so why do we really even think about it and what’s exactly going on in it? This protective bubble which surrounds the Earth and is actually pretty thin compared to the actual diameter of the Earth holds all the air we breathe and is primarily made up of three gases, which make up nearly 99% of our atmosphere. Of these, it might be surprising to know nitrogen is the top making up 78% of the dry composition of our atmosphere. It’s important that we have this much nitrogen though because it dilutes oxygen and prevents the rapid burning at the Earth’s surface. If we happen to have too much oxygen, we would see likely rampant wildfires throughout the majority of the Earth like we saw millions and millions of years ago.

Next up though is oxygen, which is incredibly important as we all know. It is essential for life. Percentage-wise, it comes in around 21%. Finally, we have argon taking up that last 1% or so of our atmosphere to make up that 99%. It really doesn’t do all that much as it’s inert. It doesn’t react with other oxygen or other gases and doesn’t contribute anything to the greenhouse effects. In fact, those three main gases, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon aren’t really what we’re looking at when we talk about climate change and the greenhouse effect. It’s rather that final 1%, which is made up of trace gases including neon and helium along with those greenhouse gases we just talked about, which include carbon dioxide, methane, carbon nitrogen dioxide, and some more as well. It’s these gases that we care most about when talking about climate change, but understand that they take up a very small portion of our atmosphere. That’s why we often see them measured in parts per million.

Now a quick note, these percentages for atmospheric gases that you’re seeing on your screen right now are for a completely dry atmosphere. And if you’ve ever stepped outside in the summer in most areas, you know that there’s a bit of humidity. The lower layers of our atmosphere hold up to 4% water vapor, which in and of itself is a greenhouse gas, but understand those percentages do shift a little bit when you talk about our actual atmosphere compared to a completely dry atmosphere.

So let’s dive a little bit deeper into these greenhouse gases because once again, even though they make up less than 1% of our atmosphere, greenhouse gases are pretty mighty. They’re powerful. They absorb or trap a significant amount of heat reflected by the surface of the Earth, which without them would just escape out into space. Now, some of these like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide do exist naturally in our atmosphere, but human activities are vastly increasing their concentrations through the burning of these fossil fuels.

There are other greenhouse gases with much more complicated names. In fact, try pronouncing hydrofluorocarbon five times fast, that are purely manmade and don’t exist in nature. Each of these greenhouse gases is not equal to the others. Some of them have a much stronger or much larger influence on our climate and ultimately the impacts that we experience in the form of extreme weather and sea level rise. The degree of that impact really depends on three main factors: how strong, how long, and how much.

This resource from NASA that I’m going to show you right now is really great as it goes into detail about all the major greenhouse gases from today’s global warming, their sources, and their average lifetimes in our atmosphere, as well as their potential added heat or global warming potential over a 20 and 100 year period. That text is a little small for me to actually read, but at the top of that is carbon dioxide.

You can also explain a little bit further down as we head into methane where there is some natural sources, but again, it all goes back into the amount that we are adding up into our atmosphere. And the powerful nature of these greenhouse gases allows them to trap a significant amount of heat, which we’ll dive into in just a moment. But you can also see at the very bottom those long names that we just condensed down into CFCs. Those are the purely manmade chemicals that we have released into our atmosphere, thankfully much less so than carbon dioxide. They’re mainly used in refrigerants, but they are much more powerful than carbon dioxide.

But again, we have to think about how much and for how long and just know that any and all emissions that we have exerted, whether it’s from our early ages to whenever we pass away, know that our emissions will outlive us and will remain in our atmosphere impacting our climate for generations. In fact, roughly half of the CO2 emitted since 1850 still remains in our atmosphere today and we’re continuing to add to it further warming our planet.

Now that we know what these greenhouse gases are, let’s go ahead and take a closer look at how exactly they trap heat. So let’s go back to this thing called the greenhouse effect. It’s actually a natural process. In fact, it’s one that we desperately need here on Earth in order to support life. Without any naturally occurring… Again, that’s the important word, naturally occurring greenhouse gases. Earth would be very similar to Mars, a frozen, potentially lifeless planet with an average temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 18 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, this isn’t really the case as we have these gases that trap heat through the greenhouse effect.

Now, the science behind this really isn’t too complicated. You can quickly understand it and you can explain it to your readers, to your viewers if you really need to, to build that foundation and point to go into much deeper and more complicated topics. But here it is essentially and you can see it in this diagram. Solar energy from the sun passes through our atmosphere and warms up the Earth. Some of this heat is going to be radiated back upward. A small amount gets lost into space, but the overwhelming majority, nearly 90% of that radiated heat is absorbed by greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and then that heat is redirected back towards the surface, trapping it and further warming our planet. So that’s how it works out on a global scale, but you can kind of imagine these gases once again as a cozy blanket enveloping our planet, helping to maintain a warmer temperature than it would have otherwise.

You’ve done this on a cold day. You wrap a blanket and you feel yourself getting warmer, but you’ve also experienced this global phenomenon on a much smaller scale. If you’ve ever gotten to a hot car on a sunny day, remember even if the temperatures are 90 degrees Fahrenheit or even upwards of 40 degrees Celsius, if you’ve ever stepped in a car, you notice just how significantly warmer that is. Well, it’s because those sun’s rays pass through the glass of your car heating up the interior, especially if it’s a darker color interior, but then that radiated heat gets trapped inside. It can’t go back through the glass, so that really does warm up the vehicle far faster and much more so than the outside ambient temperature. That’s the greenhouse effect, that extra blanket that you see playing out on a global scale.

So if this blanket is natural and we need it, so what’s the problem? Well, when we dig up and burn these fossil fuels, we’re pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide and those other heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere effectively wrapping a second blanket around the planet that it really doesn’t need. The second blanket is trapping too much heat, that heat that would normally otherwise escape out into space. As we pump more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, the second blanket becomes thicker and thicker. Think of a little sheet, becoming a fleece blanket, becoming a wool blanket, and that is why our Earth is further warming and has been. And we’ll show you the science that shows that and the data that shows that in just a moment.

So now that we understand the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, let’s examine the human activities that have made their concentrations skyrocket through the use of fossil fuels. Now, from the onset of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s, humans have used fossil fuels to obtain energy. These fuels and even some other traditional fuels such as wood produce CO2 when they burn. Essentially combining a hydrocarbon and oxygen gives you CO2, a little bit of water, and more importantly, energy.

These main types of fossil fuels are coal, oil, or petroleum and natural gas, which is comprised mostly of methane. These are the byproduct of the decomposition of vegetable matter and the remains of ancient marine organisms in the Earth’s mantle for millions of years. And they contain a great amount of carbon combined with a varying amount of hydrogen, thus the name hydrocarbons. That’s where you likely have seen that name before and that’s where it gets its name from.

Now, these fossil fuels simply in terms of producing energy, ignoring all of their disadvantages to our climate and our environment and the land that we live in and the health of the people that live near the refineries and even these cities that have a pollution, fossil fuels actually do a great job in producing heat, electricity, and powering machinery. That’s why it’s become such a part of our system, our industry for, well, centuries. For hundreds of years, they’ve been a cornerstone of our society and economic system because they’re easy to store, transport, can be used on demand, and have a very high energy density. In other words, you get a lot more energy by burning a pound of coal, compared to burning a pound of wood. Now, traditionally, they were also much more economical compared to other sources of renewable energy. However, most importantly, this is changing and it’s something that we need to highlight as journalists.

Now, in order to reduce the worst impacts of climate change, we have to change our habits and our industries as each year, the world emits around 50 billion tons of these greenhouse gases. To determine how we can most effectively reduce these emissions and what emissions can or can’t be easily eliminated with current technologies, we have to better understand where our emissions come from and that’s where this giant pizza slice comes from or this giant pie.

This diagram comes from explanations from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and breaks down the range of sectors and processes that contribute to global emissions. From this graph, it’s pretty easy to see that there’s no simple or single solution to tackle climate change, just focusing on energy in red or transportation or deforestation or agriculture, and that green is likely not sufficient.

To achieve net-zero emissions and further address the impacts that we know are going to happen in the future and only get worse as we continue to add more carbon into our atmosphere, we need innovations across many sectors. And again, the largest slice of the pie that adds to our global greenhouse gas emissions is energy, but it goes into a lot more detail than just that. It includes energy use in buildings, again, both commercial and residential, transportation, and even manufacturing. The next largest emitter is agriculture and land use which directly accounts for nearly a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a lot of detail in the slide that you can really dive into in case you’re wondering, well, what does it mean or how much does, let’s say, commercial flight add to our global greenhouse gas emissions? You can dive into it there. Livestock and manure or agriculture or wastewater, landfills, it’s all in there. I really recommend further diving into this. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and look into it at your own time. I’m going to paste the link to this in the chat for you. There you go. So once again, something to bookmark and come back to, especially if you have questions about what exactly is our energy use leading to this greenhouse gas emissions.

It all comes back to us though. In fact, it can be simply summarized by global warming. It’s us. Unfortunately, we really don’t like to have the blame pointed at us anytime, whether it’s making a mess or causing the impacts that we’re seeing play out on a global scale. Don’t be swayed by falsehoods that try to argue that it’s not us, that other natural causes are perhaps behind this global current phenomenon because scientists universally agree that unfortunately the blame lies with us in our human activities that have added heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere.

It is true that in the past, Earth’s climate has changed due to natural causes, including fluctuations in energy from the sun, massive and sustained volcanic eruptions, and even shifts in the Earth’s orbit. However, scientists have examined causes like this to see if they could be behind this current phenomenon in global warming and the answer unequivocally is no. As a meteorologist, I’m very often asked about these natural cycles and this phenomenon and other potential ways that we could argue against our unnatural warming of our atmosphere. So before we kind of move on into some of these finer details about the warming that we’re seeing on the global scale and some of these impacts, I want to tackle two of those most common questions or two of those most common, we’ll call them, I guess suspects that people ask about.

Okay. Let’s begin with the big one. It’s the one that is in all of our skies right now, depending on where you are in the world. It’s the sun. What about it? Could that potentially be the cause of this warming? I mean, we get nearly all of our energy from the sun. We stand outside and get warm because of the sun, but remember, the reason the Earth is livable, habitable is because of the heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. Remember, without these heat-trapping gases, the Earth would be frozen, so it’s mainly these greenhouse gas emissions. But even ignoring that, scientists know that the sun’s energy tends to fluctuate, so could these potential fluctuations be a part of why we’re seeing today? No, unfortunately.

Take a look at this graph from NASA, which plots global temperatures in red compared to solar irradiance, or we’ll call it solar energy, in yellow since the 1880s. That 1880 mark is an important one, which we’ll touch on in just a moment by the way. But you can see here, while solar output has increased slightly through most of the 20th century, it’s actually been decreasing since the 1970s. During the same time frame, we’ve seen global temperatures skyrocket. Again, it’s us unfortunately and it’s not the sun because of various reasons and you have this data from NASA to support this.

So what about something else, something, well, pretty dramatic? That’s one suspect. Well, what about another one? What about volcanoes? I’ll go ahead and let renowned climate scientists and fellow science communicator and colleague, Katharine Hayhoe, go ahead and tackle this one.

Katharine Hayhoe: Volcanoes can affect climate in two ways. First of all, when they erupt, they can spew enormous amounts of soot and dust and ash into the atmosphere. If the volcano is powerful enough, that dust and ash can reach all the way up into the stratosphere where the particles can circle the globe for months and even years. But volcanic ash and dust doesn’t warm the Earth. Instead, it acts like a giant umbrella reflecting the sun’s energy back to space, making the Earth cooler, so clearly volcanic eruptions can’t be responsible for the warming. What’s the second way that volcanoes can affect climate?

Well, in geologically active areas like Sicily or Yellowstone National Park, powerful heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane can seep out from deep inside the Earth’s crust. This can occur during volcanic eruptions, but the majority of it actually happens through what they call mud volcanoes or mud domes. We know that these gases are an important part of the Earth’s natural blanket that keeps us nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit or over 30 degrees Celsius warmer than we would be otherwise, so are the heat-trapping gases that are seeping out of the ground in these areas responsible for our current warming? Well, no. It turns out regular volcanoes, little mud domes, and other geologic activity produce around 1% of the carbon dioxide and less than 15% of the methane that we humans produce every year.

David Dickson: So another suspect gone. We in Covering Climate Now definitely recommend checking out her other climate explainer videos for additional insight. They’re really great. In fact, some of our recommendations of this Climate Science 101 comes directly from those recommendations from her.

I want to just take a moment just for a second, as we’ve covered a lot in the past 30 minutes or so, just to further highlight that we do have that Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. If you have any questions about what we have already covered so far or things that you would like us to potentially highlight further, go ahead and drop it in the Q&A function and we do have some time once again at the very end to potentially answer some of those. But once again, thank you for joining and thanks for staying involved in keeping an eye on this.

So if it’s not volcanoes and if it’s not the sun, how do we know it’s us? Well, scientists have tracked Earth’s temperature in modern times due to thermometers and other scientific instruments at weather stations, ocean buoys, and satellites all across the world. We know this. There are thousands upon thousands of these that are all used to calculate global average temperatures. While you might have individual temperature for your area, whether it’s here in the Southeast United States where I’m joining you from or India or South Africa or Europe, we put these all together, these climate scientists, and come up with a number that is scientifically backed that we can attribute for our global average temperature year after year. This instrumental record of our global temperature goes back to 1880.

Now, while the temperature of readings and the record of land surface temperatures goes back even further with this, with scientists taking temperature records even as far back as the 1700s and recording them, the level of uncertainty in this instrumental record before that year goes up considerably as there is just going to be less people taking measurements and more importantly, less frequently. But still 1880, it’s a long time ago for us, far outliving likely all of us, but when it comes to the Earth’s age, overall, a very young data record when you consider that.

But thankfully, our global temperature record extends much further than the 1800s as Mother Nature records the weather herself. By examining these natural thermometers such as tree rings or ice cores, coral reefs, stalactites, lake bed sediment, climate scientists are able to use this proxy data to provide insight into climate long before these dedicated temperature records, and are accurate because each kind of play off at another. Now, each one does have a different timescale and does look at a different potential thing. Some look at carbon dioxide or atmospheric composition, while others primarily look at temperatures, but this proxy record even goes back nearly 800,000 years.

I want to highlight our colleagues at Carbon Brief. They did a great job in explaining all of these different types of proxy data. Give me one moment. I dropped it in the chat for you right there. But it goes into these different types of proxy data, which we just don’t unfortunately have enough time to go into further detail of each of these because it’s fascinating, but it gets a little heavy on the science. And recommend you go ahead and explore it for yourself. It highlights not only how climate scientists however take these measurements, but also how long ago each can tell us about our past climate. This proxy data has been invaluable for climatologists to better understand our current and future warming. As astrophysicist Carl Sagan put it best, you have to know the past to understand the present.

Give me one moment. I will put that scientist Katharine Hayhoe’s climate explainer videos. I see a few of you asking for the link in the Q&A. It is coming up in the chat for you right there.

Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about global warming once again. We’ve covered global warming pretty extensively, but we need to talk a little bit about the combination of carbon dioxide and our Earth’s average temperature. The burning of these fossil fuels along with other activities, such as intensive agriculture, has caused an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. This in turn has triggered a rise in global average temperatures, which is at least 1.3 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 was the warmest year on record since record-keeping began, again, back into the 1800s, with temperatures 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, breaking a record that was only set a year before. As we understand even firsthand, every year is hotter than the last and the current summers and the current life that we live is not the same ones as we grew up with. And we’re seeing the impacts play out in our communities across the world.

Now, this 1.55 degrees Celsius or 1.3 degrees Celsius, if we look at the average rise in global temperatures, that might not seem a lot of global warming, but we know that even small changes in the Earth’s global average temperature can cause major changes for us all across the world. Consider when you are running a slight fever. That elevation of just a few degrees makes a whole lot of difference in how you feel. I know if I’m running a fever of let’s say just even 100, 101, I feel awful. Now, we’re seeing that also play out on a global scale with the consequences of a warming planet all over, monster floods, rampant wildfires, longer and more deadly heat waves, which by the way are the number one weather-related killer not only in the US but across the world, and more intense tropical cyclones as we head into a new Atlantic hurricane season just at the end of this month.

We’re seeing this play out on a global scale like I said. And you can see this relationship between the Earth’s surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 in this graph from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the United States. And notice the correlation there. That black line is going to be just the trend line with the departure from average in terms of that temperature and then you can see those CO2 concentrations on that vertical scale, especially seeing a jump as we see over the past 50 years.

Now, you might ask yourself, why is this not linear? Why is it not a straight line? Well, you probably aren’t going to be surprised to find out that it’s complicated. We’re not likely going to see global warming evolve now or likely ever at a constant pace. Our planet’s temperature is in delicate balance, so while the greenhouse effect warms up our atmosphere, there’s other processes which cool it down, but there’s also some processes which further warm this. If there were no significant changes to the system, this planet would be able to self-regulate, but as soon as some significant changes are introduced, this whole system goes out of whack. I wouldn’t say fully collapses, but it certainly seems to be that way.

Once again, it should be no surprise to hear that Earth’s climate system is complex and dynamic and I mean that’s part of the reason why you’re here today for this Climate 101 session, with numerous factors in processes that interact with one another. Just off the top of my head, for example, snow and ice are some of these naturally found substances on Earth that really reflects sunlight very well because once again of the color. If you go outside and have a white T-shirt on in the sun, you’re not going to be as hot compared to if you’re wearing a black or navy blue shirt. This is called the albedo effect for white substances on Earth. Namely, that’s going to be ice and snow and even clouds to a degree. As temperature increases though, we see less ice, so the Earth’s surface absorbs more heat, warming up faster. This type of process has caused a positive feedback loop.

In climate science and you might have seen this referenced elsewhere, we also call these tipping points. These are some of the major challenges that we’re going to find in global warming as each event influences the other adding on top of it. These positive feedback loops, you can find them even outside of the climate system. More income means more savings. More savings means more investment, which means, well, you have more money to have, which means more income. Or if you have potentially a greater population, that means more births. More births means more population. You see this cyclical cycle?

Let’s go ahead and take a look at some of these climate tipping points that are critical thresholds that could leave for irreversible consequences if go ahead and left unchecked. The first one and it’s a common one and we’ve seen it all, the sad polar bears on shrinking icebergs. Putting aside those marketable visuals, there is a reason why climate scientists in coverage has highlighted polar ice cap melting extensively in the past. It’s not only just the amount of water going into our ocean basins and further adding into that sea level rise, but it also is the places, the northern and southern poles of the planet that are warming faster than any other area on Earth because of this positive feedback loop that you can see highlighted there.

Essentially increasing temperatures means less ice coverage. Less ice coverage mean more heat being absorbed by darker surfaces, not only soil, but also the ocean as well. This increased heat absorption leads to warmer temperatures, which puts us right back at the beginning. Do you see how this loop kind of amplifies these impacts? This is the reasoning behind the polar amplification effect and goes to explain exactly why polar regions are heating up at least twice as much as the rest of the planet.

Next one I kind of want to look at is also in these polar or sub polar areas and it’s all about permafrost. Now, permafrost is a type of soil typical in what we see in the arctic tundra which stays frozen all year long. It’s important to highlight though because it contains a lot of trapped greenhouse gas emissions mainly in the form of methane as plant matter decomposes. And that’s eventually where you see this methane really build up. And we can see the same cycle play out here as well. Rising temperatures lead to the thawing of permafrost. This permafrost thawing leads to more methane being released, which increases methane concentrations. Remember, it’s a potent greenhouse gas and that therefore leads to more warming as more heat is trapped.

These are just a few of the many, many tipping points over these positive feedback loops in climate change. I encourage you to explore some others including some that you probably have heard about, including the slowdown of the Atlantic circulation and even wildfires. To go ahead and explore where each of them stand today and go ahead and see how they are all connected as well, I’m dropping in a resource that really explains all of them in better detail for us in a moment.

Okay. Now that we’ve reviewed global warming, that was all that first little topic that we talked about. Remember, it was the greenhouse effect which we’ve covered and now global warming. We still have yet to talk about climate change or even the climate crisis. This has all been just about what has been playing out in our atmosphere and this added warmth, but before we touch on climate, I have to do my duty as a meteorologist to quickly review the difference between climate and weather as they are not the same. And I’ve seen reporters, I’ve seen especially audiences be confused about the two. I can’t tell you the number of times where it is a little bit warmer in the winter and someone comes up to me and says, “Hey, what about climate change? How’s that working for you?” Again, it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about the differences between weather and climate.

In a nutshell, weather refers to atmospheric conditions that exist at a given place at a given time. We’re talking about the weather when I say it’s a little bit cloudy outside today or it’s about to rain or it really was quite hot yesterday. Now climate is the long-term pattern in weather conditions over time. We’re talking about climate when we say that Dubai is typically hot in July. One analogy that I like to make is weather tells you what clothes you should be wearing today. Climate tells you which clothes you should have in your closet. Another one that I’ve heard mentioned is weather is like your mood today, while climate is your personality. Feel free to steal either of those in your reporting to explain this fundamental concept, but there is a link between the two.

Think about that extreme heat that we all faced this summer. We saw it play out in the Mediterranean. We saw it play out in the Olympics. We definitely saw it here in North and South America and we’re likely going to see it play out also this summer. That’s weather, right? We’re talking about the weather and temperatures just over a few days, but there is a climate connection here because these heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense and lasting longer year after year, a direct result of climate change. In fact, climate science has progressed now to a point that scientists are able to examine climate change’s influence rather on individual weather events, analyzing and examining its fingerprint on this, examining and determining whether it made such an event more likely and/or more intense, looking at extreme heat waves, looking at tropical cyclones, drought, even extreme precipitation or flooding events, this is called attribution science.

We have a lot of different resources available on our website including a different webinar that we had recorded at a previous time. If you want to explore this further, I highly recommend to do so because it is a fascinating field, but it is also a field that directly links an experience that is playing out in these communities that you’re seeing your audience experience. Whether it’s a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Helene impacting the Southeast United States or an extreme heat wave, they’re seeing the effects of that firsthand, but attribution science allows us to quantify and examine climate change’s fingerprint on this and make that connection because while the global majority of people 80 to 89% believe in climate change and want their governments to do more, that number does drop off fairly significantly when it comes down to asking that same question of have they experienced these impacts of climate change firsthand.

I can say that across the world, likely the overwhelming majority of people have experienced the impacts of climate change firsthand. In fact, I would argue pretty much everyone. But the problem is connecting this global phenomenon that we’re talking about today with these local impacts and this is just one potential way that we can do this. We’ll talk a bit more why this is so important and give you some recommendations from Covering Climate Now a little bit later on.

I see a few people raising hands. If you go ahead and just ask that question in the Q&A, I’ll come back to it likely in about 15 minutes or so as we wrap things up, but I want your audience participation now. We’re going to make this a little bit fun. I want to take what we just learned, the difference between weather and climate, and I want to see if you can determine whether something is weather or climate in this short exercise. Let’s go ahead and use those reactions that you’re seeing at the bottom of your screen here in Zoom, whether it’s a clapping hand or a thumbs up, but let’s go ahead and use this thumbs up reaction if you think it is weather and if you think it is climate, use heart. We’ll go ahead and go one by one. Does that sound good for everyone? Okay. Let’s go ahead and start. Once again, thumbs up if you think it’s weather. Heart reaction if you think it’s climate.

This snowstorm left us with an over a meter of snow. Is that weather or climate? I am seeing a tons of thumbs up. It is great to see that we have a ton of people here joining us from all over the world. I’m not seeing a single heart. I’m not feeling the love, but that’s okay because that is weather. It’s exactly right. It’s playing out on a daily basis. All right. What about this one? Remember, thumbs up for weather. Heart for climate. Storms are more and more powerful each and every year. Is that weather or climate? Now I’m feeling love. Great to see. Yes, that’s exactly right. That is climate. What about this one? Last October, a typhoon caused floods in my hometown. Is that weather or climate? Love to see that. Exactly right.

Finally, that thing I mentioned at the very beginning, it’s so cold today. What happened to climate change? Is that weather or climate? Ooh, I’m seeing a little bit of a mix there. I’m seeing thumbs up. I’m seeing some hearts. Now that overall statement I would say is weather because it’s talking about the day-to-day temperature trends, but again, we are seeing a climate connection there that you can make. So overall, while I would say that statement is about weather, there is a climate connection to be explored there further and I recommend you do so to your audience.

Talking a bit more now that we got that out of the way, about climate change, one of the most immediate ways climate change affects people is through weather extremes. As our world warms, climate change is essentially loading the weather dice against us, making adverse and catastrophic weather events both more likely and more intense. Many of the effects that scientists had predicted long ago that would result from global climate change are happening right now, especially including intense prolonged heat waves. These include not only record-breaking ones that we’ve seen all across the world in recent years from Asia to Europe to North America, but also daily high temperature records.

I would argue that you don’t have to break any records to examine whether climate change has been changing temperatures in your region. In fact, our colleagues at Climate Central definitely argue that to be the case as well through some of their attribution tools, but also a lot of their resources available online as well. But going back to that attribution I told you about, in fact, climate science has found now that every heat wave in the world is now made stronger and more likely to happen because of human-caused climate change. It’s a pretty powerful statement, but it is a statement that you can make and feel backed up with climate science because again, it’s science. It’s data that supports this.

It’s not only heat waves though. It’s heavier rainfall. Our atmosphere is like a sponge. If you’ve been in some of our other sessions, we talked about how the atmosphere is like a sponge. Science and physics show that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, around 5% or so, and therefore will lead to heavier downpours. Again, it’s a sponge. As our planet warms, there’s now a bigger sponge that holds more moisture filled with that water that can bring more devastating downpours and flooding.

We also see this play out with stronger hurricanes, tropical cyclones, and typhoons. Not only can the atmosphere hold more moisture that these storms use in the form of rain, but also our oceans absorb nearly 90% of the Earth’s excess heat. As such, when storms form and pass over this warmer water, they absorb more heat and water vapor, supercharging them and boosting the damage that they cause upon landfall. I like to imagine and I like to liken these tropical cyclones, these hurricanes, these typhoons like a fire. They need a spark to ignite, but they also need fuel and that fuel is warm water. And unfortunately the warming that we’re seeing play out on a global scale and especially in our ocean basins, especially last year, is like adding lighter fluid to that fire, further increasing its damage.

Climate change’s impacts though are extensive and far-reaching. We just don’t have enough time today to talk about all of them. In addition to stronger storms, there’s deeper droughts, more intense and more frequent wildfires, and sea level rise. It’s a huge story with huge consequences. And though it might be daunting to look at this giant mountain of content, mountain of stories, mountain of all of these impacts, take it one at a time. What is a mountain but just a giant pile of smaller rocks? Take a look at a smaller impact that’s playing out in your area. Tackle that first. You don’t have to do everything everywhere all at once. You can highlight these impacts that are playing out in your communities and then dive deeper in further coverage because what’s important to highlight is not only this change itself that we’re seeing play out in our communities, but also the speed at which it’s happening as it has no precedent. It’s that speed that doesn’t allow us or really any other species to adapt in time.

Today’s rapidly increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are already making it difficult for many species to adapt. 2019 report that I’m dropping in the chat right now highlights this. It’s from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. That’s a handful or mouthful, I should say, but it warns that 1 million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction due to climate change and the destruction of habitats.

Human civilization, our cities, our infrastructure, our agriculture, and how we allocate our water, energy, food, and other resources all develop during a time of relative climate stability. The changes that our climate is currently undergoing is faster and unlike anything humankind has ever lived through and it’s unfortunate to know that we’re simply not prepared. Left unchecked, climate change will come at a great cost, at massive amounts of death, illness, destruction, widespread food and water shortages in all forms of global unrest.

It’s important to note that no matter where we live, we will be touched by this climate crisis, but crucially, some will bear a much worse burden than others. Worldwide, often due to systemic exploitation as well as inequality, climate change hurts first and worst indigenous groups, communities of color, and the poor. This is why that term climate crisis is so applicable. It not only includes the unnatural changes that we’re seeing play out in our planet and our climate, but also includes the human impacts of climate change.

Once again, change can be good or bad. I changed jobs. Do you congratulate me with that or you guys say I’m sorry? But a crisis is inherently negative and implies that an intervention or action is required and this is also why the climate story is one that is inescapably one about justice as well. This climate crisis is a huge challenge and there’s a lot of bad with it. I mean just that past couple minutes or so, there is not a lot of positives in there, but science has established beyond all doubt that we already have the solutions that we need to address this.

There is a catch though. Even if we could flip a magic switch today to stop all fossil fuel use, we’d still see continued warming and associated climate impacts from the carbon emissions that we’ve already pumped into our atmosphere. Remember what I said earlier. Remember our emissions and our contributions to climate change will outlive us. The good news is that we can still change. In fact, the sooner that we do so, we start to mitigate the worst consequences and we can potentially avoid some of them.

Specifically, the sooner that we replace traditional or dirty fossil fuel energy with cleaner and more renewable sources, such as wind and solar especially, the less temperature rise and fewer disasters that we will see over time. As you may recall, our last CCNow Basics session was actually completely dedicated to exploring these climate solutions and tips on how to report on them critically. If you want to go ahead and if you potentially weren’t in that session or want a refresher, you can go ahead and watch a recording on our website. I just dropped the link in there for the chat for you all.

But very briefly, there’s two different types of climate solutions, both big and small, that can be classified under two main banners. That is mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation efforts directly address the main causes of climate change, namely fossil fuel emissions, adding greenhouse gases to our atmosphere. These include solar panels, wind energy, and overall reducing those heat-trapping emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and other sectors. It’s a big slice of the pie that we showed you earlier.

As we’re already aware, we’re already seeing these impacts of climate change in our communities, in our lives. Whether it’s more frequent fair weather flooding, stronger storms, more rainfall, stronger heat waves, deeper drought, even things playing out that you might not have even thought of about allergy seasons or shifting temperature patterns and growing patterns, or how much more you’re spending now for food as farmers see some crop losses because of increased drought, as well as extreme rainfall, as well as heat, and even just the price you pay for home insurance, there’s a lot of different avenues and different lenses to the climate story that you can examine. But these impacts are likely only going to get worse, so we need adaptation solutions that will address these consequences.

By creating more robust buildings and other infrastructure to keep us safe from storms and heat, and creating resilient agriculture that can handle increasing droughts and floods, it’s important to know that these adaptation solutions don’t have to be huge. They can be small. They can be related just to your smaller communities or cities or nations. These solutions often make big headlines, but I encourage you to be extra critical of reporting on these potential solutions as they are often marketed as this one thing that will save us from climate change. You can see that on a big billboard, but there’s often and likely never will be a single solution, a silver bullet that will save us from climate change. We need solutions from across those three main categories of all levels of society: global, national, regional, local, and even personal lifestyle choices.

We’ve talked a lot and covered a lot here today. From how climate change, the greenhouse effect, and global warming and climate crisis are four related but different concepts to exploring what is ultimately behind the impacts that we are seeing here in our communities, the markets we report in, and simply in our backyards. So to leave you with today, I want to share with you all a 10-word mantra developed by scientists, used by Covering Climate Now that summarizes a lot of what we talked about today that can help guide you forward as you cover climate change. Or even if you are an experienced climate reporter, this is a good mantra to kind of think in case you have any questions from your audience, and I encourage you to share it with others in your newsroom.

Let’s break it down really quickly. Scientists agree it’s real, it’s bad, it’s us, there’s hope. Scientists agree. As I said before, over 99% of scientists agree that climate change is happening due to human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels which release greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. That’s more or less the same level of scientific agreement as gravity, which as we all know is quite real if you’ve ever fallen down.

It’s real. Climate change is here right now and you don’t have to be a scientist to know it. You just simply have to look outside your window. Every year is hotter than the last, indeed hotter than pretty much every year in recorded history. Every year also seems to bring more extreme weather, more extreme heat waves, stronger storms, deeper droughts, and we’re seeing this all over the world.

Again, it’s us. Scientists also overwhelmingly agree that the main cause of climate change is the burning of oil, gas, and coal. When we burn such fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere where it traps heat, wrapping a blanket around the Earth. This not only makes the Earth hotter but also supercharges our weather.

Finally, next up, it’s bad. Today’s human suffering economic damage will only get much, much worse if fossil fuels are not phased out pretty soon. There is also a critical additional point. While we’re heating the planet, again it’s especially punishing for those who are poor or live in places exceptionally vulnerable to climate impacts. Often, these people have only emitted tiny amounts of CO2 because they can’t afford cars or other activities powered by fossil fuels. Again, the fact that the people who have contributed the least to climate change suffer the harshest consequences is what makes climate change a story about justice.

Most importantly, there is hope. Scientists say that our civilization already possesses the technologies that we need to avoid the worst, but what has been lacking is the will to embrace those solutions.

We are just at the top of the hour. We did allocate additional 10, 15 minutes or so for some Q&A or just some follow-up questions and a little bit of buffer time as well, but I’d like to thank you all again for taking the time today for this session, which we hope is only the start of building your climate knowledge.

Now that you have a solid understanding of these basics, I encourage you to keep learning, keep exploring, and know that Covering Climate Now will be there to help you and support you however we can throughout the way, whether that’s through webinars like this or joining our Slack community where you’ll join hundreds of other journalists, potentially even thousands. I forget our exact number. But connecting, sharing story ideas, asking for resources, experts, and we have tons of resources also available on our website. We’re wanting to help you as we all work together to tell the story of climate change all across the world.

Know that naysayers and climate deniers that you may encounter are a minority. The vast majority of your audience, the vast majority of the world believes in climate change and wants their governments to do more to address it. That’s the core tenet of the The 89 Percent Project, a year-long journalistic effort spearheaded by Covering Climate Now, to explore this underreported fact. The overwhelming majority of the world’s people between 80 and 89% according to recent science want their governments to take stronger climate action.

We encourage you to get involved in this, joining hundreds of other journalists across the world who are doing the same thing with the hope that this coverage will help focus the world’s attention on this climate change’s silent majority. We’re already seeing a lot of different coverage of this topic since we launched it back in late April, but there is still time to get involved and still time to talk about this as we move into the remainder of the year. We’ve only just got started and I highly encourage you to explore not only exactly what the 89 percent is, but also explore how you can participate and join us as well. Of course, if you have any questions or if you think about anything that we covered today in this past hour or so after digesting all of this, feel free to send us an email. Once again, this entire presentation will be recorded and you’ll get a recording of that video, so you can reference at a later time.

With that, I think it’s time to look at a few of the Q&A. I think I covered quite a bit of it. I understand, as reporters across the world, especially as we look at lunchtime here in the Central and Eastern US, you might have to dip out. We completely understand. We have the explainer videos in the chat. We will also be able to provide some of those resources available on our website at the event page. We’ll kind of put those resources in there.

All right. Just going through really quick. Sam is saying, “Please share any links that you have for journalists on how to cover climate change and the best way to tell climate change stories.” There’s a lot of resources available on our website. All you have to do is go to coveringclimatenow.org. Go to the resources page. A couple of things I highlight, not only this Climate Science 101, reporting on climate solutions, but also if you’ll find there, there is one about three pillars. That one is especially important because it covers what we talk about a lot here at Covering Climate Now. It’s the three main pillars of effective climate reporting or just really effective reporting in general. And those three main pillars are offering solutions, localizing, and humanizing.

People care about the stuff that’s happening in their communities, in their neighborhoods, in their towns. That’s why it’s important to localize the climate story as much as possible, whether that’s using those attribution studies to talk about an extreme heat wave and how that relates to this global problem or reaching out to local farmers, asking are they paying more, what’s happening, or just any of the local impacts of climate change that we’re seeing play out in our communities.

It’s also very important to humanize the story. Understand that this was a science session and we talked a lot about numbers. We talked a lot about statistics, but it’s so vital for effective climate reporting to tell the human stories. We care about our neighbors. We care about our fellow citizens, our fellow humans, and we are seeing the impacts of climate change play out in heartbreaking or uplifting stories across the world, and it’s telling those stories, those human stories, which resonate with your audience, compared to just throwing out a number that, “Hey, the world was 1.55 degrees Celsius above average last year.” It’s very important. So once again, offer solutions, humanize, and localize as well.

Okay. Alexandria asking, “When we say pre-industrial levels, what do we mean? Is this Eurocentric? Are there other terms for it?” I guess in a way, it is kind of Eurocentric, but when we talk about pre-industrial levels, it’s that 1880 mark. It’s the start of the industrial revolution when we as societies across the world, especially again in Europe and Americas, I will admit that, and even portions of Asia, really started the burning of fossil fuels that have added that CO2 to our atmosphere. So again, it’s really looking at that time frame compared to what are seeing play out today. “Are there other terms for it?” I would look into that. Off the top of my head, I don’t really have any. All right.

“Do we have a good piece or pieces on attribution science that you would recommend?” That’s from Noela. Yeah. I’d definitely recommend checking out our website coveringclimatenow.org. I think my colleague, Elena, who… By the way, a round of applause for Elena. She not only helped with the slides for this session, but has also helped do training like this all across the United States and across the world. So a round of applause for Elena and all of our colleagues here at Covering Climate Now.

But definitely dive into our resource, guide all about attribution science on our website and look at the webinar. There;s folks from Climate Central, which I mentioned has some attribution tools, but also has some resources and some great guides from World Weather Attribution. They are kind of a huge name in this field of climate science and more importantly, on their website is probably one of my favorite pieces of climate change resources for journalists. They have a guide that’s around 30 pages long, but there is a one-page quick reference guide at the very end. But more importantly it’s available on their website and it is available in over a dozen different languages, which talks all about attribution science, how to use it, what language to use, and what has it told us about climate change’s influence on extreme weather events.

Just going through real quick. Bridget’s asking, “What is the effect with warming on ocean life?” We’re seeing that play out in our ocean basins all across the world. Remember what I said. The ocean absorbs nearly 90% of the Earth’s excess heat. That is not only supercharging hurricanes, but is also vastly causing problems to ocean life. I think the largest of which or the most dramatic of which you’ve likely seen is the loss of coral communities across the world. I forget the exact numbers. If you head to our website, I think we’ve talked about it before, but coral reefs and coral communities are very much at risk and we’re seeing that as a direct result of not only the warming in our oceans, but also ocean acidification.

All that excess CO2 gets mixed up and through some science and chemistry adds more acidity to our oceans. And we’re also seeing that play out with other different ocean ecosystems and ocean life. If you’re by the coastline or you do coverage of our oceans and our waters, definitely reach out to fishermen, to shrimpers, to crabbers, to anyone in agriculture, especially as they’re seeing the effects of this play out especially in their communities.

Let’s see. Yep. I think that’s just about it. Thank you again, everyone, for taking the time today to stay involved, stay engaged. We hope you enjoyed it. Once again, we will likely see a recording of this kind of a little bit later on, but we encourage you to stay engaged with Covering Climate Now. Whether that’s joining us through our newsletters, as well as joining our Slack community, there will be some more information on how to do that a little bit later on. But with that, I hope you all had a great time today and have a great rest of your week.