Complete Transcript

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Transcript:

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2023 was the year of finding

out, right?

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We have been juicing the climate

with our fossil fuel emissions

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for centuries now, and we have

seen this rise of temperature

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over two degrees Fahrenheit

since the 19th century, which is

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a really big deal when you

compare it to other temperature

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changes that the planet has

seen. The last ice ages were

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only about 10 degrees Fahrenheit

colder, and so we've already

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warmed two degrees Fahrenheit, a

fifth of an ice age, but in the

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other direction. And so, so

these are really large changes

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for the planet, and we are

seeing the impacts of those.

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We're seeing those impacts in

heat waves, in intense rainfall,

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in sea level rise, and those are

having clear effects, and people

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are being impacted very directly

by these changes that are tied

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to this large scale climate

change. So why was 2023 special?

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It was just the year when all of

those things kind of all came

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together, right? The natural

variability, perhaps the

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volcanoes, perhaps the changes

in in aerosols, but most of all,

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the changes in greenhouse gasses

that are pushing us into a world

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that we have not experienced

before.

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So, El Nino, La Nina, are

natural ocean atmosphere

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phenomena, and we know that they

have an impact on the global

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mean temperatures, with the El

Ninos causing it to be slightly

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warmer, La Ninas slightly

cooler. And that sits on top of

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the long term trends.

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So the way that we keep track of

what's going on is we use

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temperature anomalies. And it

turns out that if you are if you

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have a weather station that, say

here in New York City, and you

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compare it to a weather station

in Washington, DC or Montreal,

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they tell very different stories

about the absolute temperature,

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right? So Montreal is colder,

Washington, DC is often warmer,

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but when they move up and down,

when there's a month that is

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warmer or colder, it's this.

It's basically the same in all

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three locations. And so by

looking at the anomalies, how

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much warmer it is than normal

for that particular point, and

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then you look at those anomalies

at all those different points,

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and you can average those, it

turns out that you can fill out

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the gaps much more effectively.

The key thing to take away from

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all of this is that the long

term trends are pretty much

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relentlessly up. We are very

interested in, you know, the

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weather of any particular year,

the extremes of any particular

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year, because those are the

things that impact us. But the

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key difference between, say,

this decade and the decade

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before and the decade before

that is that the temperatures

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have been rising because of our

activities, because of

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principally the burning of

fossil fuel. And we're going to

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continue to have records be

broken, because that baseline is

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moving all the time, and then

the weather is sitting on top of

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that. And so when the weather is

warmer than normal, then we're

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going to get these records. But

even when it's cooler than

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normal, we don't go back to what

it was, right? We're still,

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we're still on that higher

baseline. So we have lots of

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ways to assess how warm the

planet is, right? In recent

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decades, we have satellites. We

have lots of weather monitoring.

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We have the buoys in the ocean.

We're actually pretty well

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instrumented right now. As you

go back further in time, we have

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the weather stations, the

history of those that goes back

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effectively to the mid 19th

century. Before that, we have a

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few weather stations the early

adopters, for instance, in New

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York and London and Paris. But

we have to rely on more indirect

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measures. So we keep track of

historical movements in mountain

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glaciers. We can measure things

like tree rings that give us a

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sense of how warm, cold, dry,

the climate was when those trees

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grew. We can look at ice cores

in Greenland, in the Alps, in

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Antarctica, that tells us

something about how the climate

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was then. And there's other

there are other proxies. There

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are corals have have rings just

like trees. And, you know, there

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are cave records that have very

high resolution records as well.

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We have pollen records that tell

us what kinds of plants lived

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where, and that's a reflection

of the climate changes as well.

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And with all of that, we can

piece together records of

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climate that go beyond the

instrumental record, that go

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through, you know, the last 2000

years, through the through the

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Holocene, back into the ice

ages. You know, 20,000 years

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ago, 100,000 years ago, and we

can build a picture of the

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changes in climate and why they

changed that stretches back

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many, many hundreds of 1000s to

millions of years. And so we

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when we say that, you know

what's happening now is special.

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It's we're not. We're not just

saying that because it's

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happening to us, we can say it

with that full context of all

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the other things that we've seen

happen in the past.

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So the work that we do here at

GISS involves observations and

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keeping track of all of those

things. It involves explaining

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what the observations are coming

from. You know, how do we, how

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do we know why things change?

And that involves modeling. So

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we do a lot of climate

simulation here, and then we

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have other, other sources of

information that can we can rely

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on to evaluate that, those

models, to evaluate those, those

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conclusions from remote sensing,

from, you know, the the airs

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product or the or the changes in

in sea ice that we get from

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microwaves, or the changes in

the ice sheets that we get from

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from grace, and the other the

other instruments, like ICESat,

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all of those things give us a

picture of what's happening that

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we have to evaluate, and we have

to explain why that's happening.

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We do that with models, and then

once we have models that we have

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demonstrated as skillful at

telling us why things are

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happening, why things are

changing now, we can then use

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those for projections, and we

can help then people work out

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how things are going to change

in the future, depending on what

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we do about how things might

change in the future, what we

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might expect, what we might need

to be planning for, and how we

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can make better decisions about

energy, About climate and about

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our place in that climate.

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The Goddard Institute for Space

Studies here in New York was set

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up in an in the early 1960s to

provide a connection between

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NASA and the academic community.

And so it was very much an ideas

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shop. And so we spent a lot of

time with, you know, new

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postdocs and workshops on topics

associated with, you know, the

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formation of galaxies and black

holes and and the planetary

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program and Voyager and we were

involved very early on in some

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of the missions to Venus and

Jupiter, and then as a lot of

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the planetary work kind of wound

down, and NASA kind of pivoted

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towards its mission to planet

earth. We used our expertise in

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understanding, literally, the

clouds of Venus and the clouds

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and dynamics of Jupiter, and

then we took that and we started

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to think about how you would do

the same thing for the Earth.

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And that was the birth of of

GISS as a climate modeling

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institution. And then, you know,

we started, we started doing

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that in the late 70s. And then

it was important to say, well,

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well, what are we going to

compare these models to? Right?

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Where are the data sets that we

need to validate these models.

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And then, at the time, there

wasn't a global mean temperature

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record that existed. There were

there were weather stations,

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there were efforts that people

had made to put together

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European or maybe northern

hemisphere records, but there

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wasn't a global record. And so

we were the first person— we

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were the first people to to put

that together in the late 1970s

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and 1981 I think, was the first

time we we published that, and

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we've been keeping track of

what's been happening to

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temperature since, since the

early 1980s and so that's that's

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now over 40 years that we have

been keeping track of that, and

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the estimates have got better.

We have more data now. A lot

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more data has been digitized. We

have longer time series, and we

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have a better understanding of

how that all.