00:00Yeah, so today NASA provided its annual temperature update and 2024 was the hottest year on record.
00:27It was about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1951 to 1980 average and collectively the last
00:3410 years have been the warmest since modern record keeping began. We're not just seeing
00:39changes in global average temperature, we're seeing impacts to people and ecosystems all around the world.
00:44So one of the drivers of the trend we're seeing towards warmer temperature, the primary driver,
00:59is an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and so how much warmer it gets in
01:04the future depends on future emissions of greenhouse gases. As long as the level of
01:08greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise, we will see an increasing trend towards
01:13warmer world. That doesn't mean that every year will be record-breaking because still things like
01:17El Niño and La Niña may lead to slightly cooler years on occasion, but with increasing levels of
01:24greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we'll see an increasing trend towards a warmer world
01:28and that warmer world brings with it more an increase in impacts.
01:43So what we're seeing is we're seeing impacts from increasing temperatures around the world
01:49and they go beyond just changes in temperature that impact people, but the impacts we see depend
01:53on where you live. So in coastal regions, there's sea level rise, it's affecting storm surge and
01:58coastal flooding. We're seeing extreme heat events across the country. We see changes in the water
02:04cycle, which means more heavy precipitation events and in some regions more droughts. So the
02:10impacts we're experiencing them now, we understand that they will continue to increase in the future
02:14with future warming, but what specific impacts you feel depends on where you live.
02:25Yeah, so the fires in LA are truly devastating and my thoughts are with everyone in LA right now
02:30and I think the focus is on containing the fire and helping the people that are there,
02:35but as scientists, we do try to understand fires and how they're changing so that we can help
02:39provide that information to prepare and plan for the future. Fires are very complex and there's
02:44multiple factors that contribute and we're still learning about these fires, but in general,
02:49what we know is that climate change does increase the risk and severity of fires.
02:54For example, climate change can increase fuel for fires, the amount of dry vegetation
02:59that can catch on fire.
03:05Yes, we do. Scientists both at NASA and around the world are studying links between a warming
03:10planet and hurricanes and some of what we see is that climate change tends to lead towards
03:15a higher proportion of strong storms, so higher maximum wind speeds and more water associated with
03:21it. So more rainfall and precipitation that is coming from hurricanes and a lot of that
03:26precipitation is truly damaging, particularly in the hurricanes. So we're still learning about
03:30coming from hurricanes and a lot of that precipitation is truly damaging, particularly
03:34in the hurricanes we saw this year. We do try to better understand hurricanes. Our sister agency,
03:40NOAA, has the responsibility of forecasting them, but we do work to do research on hurricanes and so
03:45we have some satellite mission called Tropics that's helping us better understand how hurricanes
03:50evolve very quickly so that we can help hurricane forecasters better predict them in the future.
03:55So for the temperature update that we released today, we're relying on surface weather observations.
04:22So these come from thousands of surface weather stations on land as well as millions of
04:28observations in total, including the ships and buoy observations that we have. So it's measuring
04:32the temperature at the surface and we have all of these different point sources of that information
04:37and we can use that to construct regional and global average temperature and look at that
04:41and how it changes over time. There are other ways to measure temperature, so we also have the ability
04:46to measure temperature from satellites. We have a shorter record of that because the satellite error
04:51doesn't go back as far as the surface weather error, but when we compare the record over the
04:56satellite error with the the surface measurements that we see, we see the same trends and the same
05:01move towards warmer and warmer world.
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