When will greenhouse gas emissions finally peak? Could be soon

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss top headlines related to climate change in the Nov. 29 edition of Climate In The News.

Transcript

00:00Today we're covering a couple of interesting climate stories. We'll start

00:03with an important milestone related to greenhouse gas emissions and then we'll

00:07transition to a lesser known impact of climate change and that's landslides and

00:12how they can be quite deadly unfortunately. We'll start though with an

00:16article from NPR about the rate of the increase of greenhouse gases. Those are

00:21obviously important, Brett, with how much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and

00:25how much we as a society are emitting to continue to further the impact of

00:29climate change. Yeah greenhouse gas emissions obviously have been increasing

00:33rapidly over the past two centuries but in recent years we've leveled out and in

00:37some places decreasing. Globally though we're still not quite at the peak yet

00:42but that may occur actually in the next year or two actually which is good news.

00:46Unfortunately we're at a real high peak and we really need to come down quickly

00:51by 2035. We need to cut these emissions by half just to limit the warming to the

00:56goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's quite a lot of a reduction that needs to

01:01occur in terms of how much we as a society are emitting into the atmosphere.

01:05It's good news that the rate of increase has slowed but we are at a

01:08very high peak sort of in that danger zone still, right Brett? Yes we are at the

01:13danger zone so we've taken the foot off the gas as the article noted but we have

01:17not put the brake on yet which we really need to get that brake on quickly

01:21actually an emergency brake might be appropriate. Yes so an important

01:24milestone but still a lot of work yet to do and we'll transition then to a

01:29specific impact of these greenhouse gases and how they contribute to

01:32climate change. Ones that we don't talk about that much an impact of landslides

01:36which I was surprised to see that over 4,000 people unfortunately have been

01:42killed this year Brett by landslides caused by usually heavy rain events. Yeah

01:47it's the extreme rainfall events which are a product of climate change which

01:52are leading to more and more landslides that we're seeing. So far this year we

01:55have nearly 700 landslides globally which is obviously a big problem.

02:00Factoring in also fires so we're seeing bigger fires not necessarily more fires

02:05of bigger fires and so bigger fires means more land that is scarred and burn

02:10scar areas are notorious producing deadly landslides when that heavy rain

02:15comes down there's nothing to hold back the soil just coming down the hill. Yeah

02:19so more wildfires and those burn scars and then obviously more extreme rain

02:22events combining together to cause these landslides obviously with sort of timely

02:26in the news here with the recent atmospheric rivers that have impacted

02:28the Pacific Northwest and Northern California and it also seems like that a

02:32lot of the US at least in terms of land area is potentially impacted by

02:36landslides. Yeah a total of 44% supposedly is susceptible to landslides

02:41and I believe most of that is unpopulated areas but that's still a lot

02:45of area. Another impact homeowners insurance will not cover in most cases a

02:52landslide. Very interesting and the clearly impacts from landslides are just

02:56as important as some of the other impacts from climate change that are

02:58more well studied such as hurricanes tornadoes etc so thank you Brett for

03:03that. If you're interested in more of these stories and other information you

03:07can find that at AccuWeather.com slash climate

Category

Transcript

Recommended