Global Heating Coming Pushing Global Temps Off The Chart!

5 min read

Hi everyone, I’m Rick Barron, your host, and welcome to my podcast, That’s Life, I Swear

Warnings of unprecedented heatwaves such as El Niño are set to return in mid-2023. Scientists say this phenomenon coupled with growing climate crisis is likely to push global temperatures ‘off the chart’

Let’s jump into this 

The News

I know, people get annoyed at the sound of someone saying climate change is coming. Ok, fair enough. Let’s go with ‘inconvenient climate change.’ That said, climate change isn’t coming. You see, its already here.

No need to beat around the bush. If you thought the deadly heat waves that have impacted many nations around the world in recent years were bad, well, they’re about to get worse. In early May of this year, the World Meteorological Organization announced that data and models show that planet Earth is on track to have its hottest year ever during one of the next five years — and that the planet will likely surpass a major climate change threshold.

Now, these global temperatures that will jump to record highs over the next five years, will be driven by Human-induced warming [the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane and nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere] and a climate pattern known as El Niño, as forecasters at the World Meteorological Organization stated.

Background on some weather data points:

·       Earth’s hottest year was set in 2016 

·       During the next five years, 2023 to 2028, its a 98 percent probability that the 2016 record will be broken

·       The next 5 years will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment

·       The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet

·       Sea levels have risen by about 8 inches since 1880 

Why It Matters 

Every degree of change in the heat brings new risks, even a fraction.

The constant drumbeating of this inconvenient climate change bears repeating. Why? While most people think climate change is an important issue, they’re not seeing it as an immediate threat, so getting people to “go green” requires policymakers, scientists and marketers to look at psychological barriers to change and what will lead people to action.

The climate impact menu is getting longer, such as heat [and we’ll get to that in a moment], pollution, increased droughts, more severe storms than usual, insufficient food production, and so on.

Just as the cost of living goes up, so does the danger of this inconvenient climate change.

But, let’s get back the topic of this episode.

Scientists say even small increases in warming can exacerbate the dangers from heat waves, wildfires, drought and other calamities. For example, elevated global temperatures in 2021 helped fuel a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that shattered local records and killed hundreds of people.

Again, early forecasts suggest El Niño will return in 2023 and continue until 2028, exacerbating extreme weather around the globe and making it “very likely” the world will exceed 1.5 Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The hottest year in recorded history, 2016, was driven by a major El Niño. Such changes can cause further turmoil by shifting global precipitation patterns. 

The World Meteorological Organization also called out that should we exceed 1.5 Celsius during the next five years, that does not mean the world will have officially breached the aspirational goal in the Paris climate agreement of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. When scientists talk about that temperature goal, they generally mean a longer-term average over two decades to root out the influence of natural variability.

Protesting For Saving Our Climate. Courtesy of: MSNBCNEWS

The meteorological organization forecasts increased summer rainfall over the next five years in places like Northern Europe and the Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa and reduced rainfall in the Amazon and parts of Australia.

Yes, weather patterns change over time as Mother Nature is allowed to do, but society tends to screw it up continuously.

Any decrease in agricultural production could further spike food costs and exacerbate the state of food insecurity across the country.

Many world leaders have insisted on the 1.5-degree limit to keep the risks of climate change to tolerable levels. But nations have delayed, as usual, in making the monumental changes necessary to achieve this goal, such as drastically cutting fossil-fuel emissions, that scientists now think the world will probably exceed that threshold around the early 2030s.

Background: La Niña, a cooling influence, is on the way out.

Global average temperatures have already increased roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, largely because humans keep burning fossil fuels and pumping heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But while that upward trend is clear, global temperatures can bounce up and down a bit yearly because of natural variability. For instance, a cyclical phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, causes year-to-year fluctuations by shifting heat in and out of deeper ocean layers. Consequently, global surface temperatures are cooler during La Niña and hotter during El Niño.

The last record hot year, 2016, was an El Niño year. By contrast, La Niña conditions have dominated for much of the past three years: while they’ve been unusually warm, they were still slightly below 2016 levels. Now, scientists are expecting El Niño conditions to return later this summer. Combined with steadily rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that will most likely cause temperatures to accelerate to new highs.

At Columbia University in New York, Prof James Hansen said recently: “We suggest that 2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record. It is unlikely that the current La Niña will continue a fourth year. Even a little futz of an El Niño should be sufficient for record global temperature.”

Damage control

One thing to know is the coming El Niño won’t be cheap. The one in 1997-98, one of the most powerful in history, led to $5.7 trillion in income losses in countries around the world according to a study published earlier this month in the journal Science.

Even if every country met its existing pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate change, El Niño events could lead to $84 trillion in economic losses by the end of the century, according to the Science study.

What can we learn from this story? What’s the take away?

El Niño conditions are starting to form in the Pacific and are looking increasingly likely to take hold in late June and July. This could be the first significant El Niño since 2016. An El Niño would greatly increase the chance of breaking the year’s record high global average temperature, particularly in 2024.

Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General. Courtesy of CBC

It’s a fair bet that nobody is going to be untouched by these changes that are coming.  Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General, said during a U.N.  press conference , and I quote, “Regardless of what comes within the next few years, there's no return to the climate that's persisted in the last century. That's a fact." End quote.

Yes, Mother Nature has a bone to pick with us, and it won’t be kind.

Well, there you go. That's life, I swear.

For further information regarding the material covered in this episode, I invite you to visit my website, which you can find on either Apple Podcasts/iTunes or Google Podcasts, for show notes calling out key pieces of content mentioned and the episode transcript.

As always, I thank you for listening. 

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