We're talking about increases in sea level, both because the water itself is expanding as it gets warmer, but it's also because we're melting ice around the world.Īnd that's adding to the total mass of the ocean. When we have a drought, we're talking about ever-drier soils, because the air is taking out more moisture from the soils. We're talking about increased intensity of rainfall events. And so we're talking increased intensity and frequency of heat waves. And we have been talking about this, scientists have been talking about this for many, many decades. Every decade in the - for the last 50 or 60 years, the planet has warmed. Well, we have noise, the weather noise that has always been there, a function of atmospheric dynamics, a function of El Nino events in the Tropical Pacific.īut we have a shifting baseline. And we can see that in the statistics around the globe. But the frequency and intensity of these features is increasing. ![]() It's not that we have never had strong rainfall or droughts. It's not that we have never had a heat wave. It's not that these things have never happened before. They're being hit with higher temperatures, more intense rainfall.Īnd the structures that we have, the infrastructure that we have is just not being able to cope with that.īut what we're seeing now is that those things that were one-in-100-year events are now one-in-50-year, one-in-30-year, once-a-decade, and soon conceivably could be an every-year or an every-couple-of-year event.Īnd that's the difference. And that means that places that were prepared for a certain spread of temperature and a certain number of extremes are now being hit with larger extremes. We are moving out of society's comfort zone. We're seeing this kind of in the long-term trends. And we're seeing that this summer, particularly. We are pushing our living space into areas, into temperatures that we have never experienced. We have systems and infrastructure in place that help us deal with the climate that we had. I mean, it seems that we are making life on Earth increasingly hazardous in ways that we are not at all prepared for. There was a recent analysis by The Washington Post and CarbonPlan that indicated that, in just seven years, half-a-billion people globally will be exposed to extreme heat for at least one month a year, even if they can get out of the sun.Ī study in "Lancet" found that the number of heat-related deaths of elderly people rose by 68 percent in recent years. In addition to these extreme weather events we're seeing, we're also getting a better understanding of how a warming world is harming human health. Gavin Schmidt, very nice to have you back on the "NewsHour." He's the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For that, we are joined again by climate scientist Gavin Schmidt. So let's delve a little deeper into this extreme weather and its calamitous impacts. It reported that August was 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages. The U.N.'s weather agency says this is the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Just days ago, Greece saw the end of weeks of deadly wildfires, and Western Europe is in the midst of an unusual September heat wave. Older people, women and those living in Mediterranean countries were worst affected.It's all part of a larger pattern of meteorological extremes, disasters that climate scientists say are becoming more frequent and more intense as the Earth continues to warm. Last summer’s heatwaves contributed to 61,000 deaths in Europe, according to a recent study. How to stay safe during Europe’s heatwaves Around the Baltic Sea, Germany, Ireland, the UK and Scandinavia, a severe lack of rain could impact crops this summer. ![]() A further four per cent of land in the EU is under a red alert for drought, meaning crops are already suffering.Īlthough parts of southern Europe are starting to recover thanks to recent rain, a new drought is building up in Northern Europe. This increases the risk of wildfires - especially in Spain and Portugal - and crop failure. This means the ground has dried out due to a lack of rainfall. Spain, Italy, Portugal: Which European countries are most vulnerable to drought?Īlmost half of Europe is facing severe droughtĭrought is also sweeping across Europe, with 42 per cent of EU land under amber warning according tothe European Drought Observatory (EDO).
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