Complete Transcript
Narration:
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.