Climate in the News, Oct. 25

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss top headlines relating to climate change.

Transcript

00:00We've got a couple interesting climate stories to cover today. Our first is from

00:04Bloomberg and that climate change is killing buildings in

00:08slow motion. We'll bring in Brett to talk about this here and it's really

00:11interesting to see how the impacts of climate change and extreme weather is

00:15really widespread and how it impacts the built environment we have as humans

00:18across this world. Yeah, we're seeing extreme heat causing a lot of problems

00:22worldwide now, especially to roofs, which you know most roofs last maybe 25-30

00:28years, but with extreme heat you tend to see more warping, especially with

00:32shingles, so they're not lasting as long. So again, much more costly because you

00:36have to replace it more often. HVAC systems having much more strain on them

00:41breaking down more often. Pavement issues, I see cracking of pavement due to the

00:46heat. Same with rails, not cracking but warping rails for railroads, so that

00:50causes big delays for railroads. So those are big problems there with the heat.

00:53Extreme temperature change is also very notorious for potholes that we see

00:58during the winter time. Yeah, absolutely and AccuWeather actually works with a

01:01lot of different customers, different organizations for the short-term impact

01:05of weather and how the extreme weather events impact their operation, their

01:09assets, their infrastructure in the short term, and then also how climate change

01:12may impact that same infrastructure many years in the future. I think another

01:16interesting part of this article is the just like the lifetime of parts and how

01:20that has been reduced by some of these different extreme weather events and

01:22that obviously compounds with higher maintenance costs and also just

01:26degradation of materials, so there's a really compounding effect here. Yeah, just

01:30last year we saw a 30% increase in U.S. repair costs and that's due to climate

01:37change. That's very significant obviously, so we need to adapt and adapt to these

01:42the climate change and how it impacts infrastructure. Yes, upfront costs can be

01:48high but the long-term savings are certainly very beneficial. Yeah, adapting

01:53is certainly important that ties well to our second story from the New York

01:56Times here where Americans have been moving into disaster-prone areas and

02:01this really looked at where the different areas of the United States are

02:04that are more prone to different extreme weather events and natural hazards and

02:07those really tie in well to where a lot of people have been moving lately. Yeah,

02:12we're seeing a big a lot of people moving to southern areas, they want to

02:15escape the cold winter of course, you know, and cost of living tends to be a

02:20little bit cheaper farther south you go sometimes, but places such as Arizona,

02:24Nevada, Texas, extreme heat. We saw that this summer, big problems here with

02:29record heat, record sustained heat for consecutive days over 100 degrees.

02:33Florida, the Carolinas, floods, major hurricanes becoming a bigger threat due

02:39to warming waters. California, extreme heat again, drought, also the fire risks and

02:45again that's been a big problem with large fires taking up a lot of land and

02:49the smoke issues as well. Yeah, and that certainly drives up the insurance cost

02:52as well with more people in these markets that are being more impacted by

02:55weather events and although most places have some hazard, there are a lot of

02:59places in the in the U.S. where there's overlapping weather hazards. You can get

03:03more climate stories and information at www.acuweather.com slash climate.

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