Is cleaner air accelerating global warming more than expected?

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AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the Feb. 21 edition of Climate In The News.

Transcript

00:00Today we have two different climate stories. The first, the recent events, the

00:04coldest January in many years across the United States, but in fact the warmest

00:09globally. We'll talk about that in detail. And then second, dive into cleaner air

00:13and how that actually has caused potentially more warming across the

00:18world with less air pollution. Brett talking about this first article from

00:21ABC News that dives into the coldest January on record in the U.S. since 1988.

00:27So it's been close to 30 years, or more than 30 years I guess, since that

00:32milestone. But as a planet, as a whole, has been, it was the warmest January on

00:37record. Yeah, which is not surprising. We've had many months now, their warmest

00:41month on record now, so that's not surprising globally. But yes, the U.S. was

00:44the coldest winter for the lower 48s since the late 1980s, which is kind of

00:49unusual. Many of our winters now have been fairly warm, but it's not uniform

00:54everywhere in the United States. Alaska, for instance, was actually quite mild

00:58during January, but it was also very wet in January, during the month of January.

01:02It's the wettest January on record for Alaska, while back down the lower 48, it

01:07was the sixth driest January on record. Yeah, so it really shows the extremes

01:11that we have been experiencing and we should continue to experience with the

01:15climate change, right? Exactly. Climate change equals more extremes, and that's

01:18certainly what we saw in January, no doubt about that. Yeah, so as we've been

01:21shivering here in the U.S., Alaska has been relatively warm for their standards

01:25in January. We will move to our second story here from New Scientist, where it

01:31discusses the cleaner air that we've been experiencing, less air pollution,

01:36Brett, especially due to less aerosols, which is good, obviously, we're not

01:39polluting as much, but that comes at sort of its cost with what seems to be

01:43more warming, potentially, because of that clean air. How is that possible?

01:47You just can't win. I mean, it's just very frustrating. You want to clean the air, but

01:51when we clean the air, we're allowing more of the sun's energy to

01:55reach the surface, because aerosols from air pollution reflect more of the sun's

01:59light, so we decrease that, more of the sun's light gets to the ocean. Now,

02:02another interesting thing that we read in this study was there was a 2020

02:07regulation for shipping that changed the fuel. It took out the sulfur in the

02:12shipping fuel, so sulfur does create a lot of aerosol pollution, so you take

02:17that out with all the ships traveling over the oceans, that's leading to a lot

02:21more sun's energy reaching the oceans, warming the oceans rapidly. Yeah, it really

02:25shows how complex the Earth system is. They even looked at shipping corridors

02:29in this study as to really understand the impact on shipping and how that

02:33impacts the climate around these shipping corridors. Yeah, absolutely, and

02:38again, we're seeing record spikes in global temperature 2023-2024, so yeah,

02:43that's just a small piece of the pie here, and we'll have to see what happens

02:47in the next 10 to 20 years or so, but yeah, it's very alarming.

02:50Yeah, plenty of more time to study it. Unfortunately, actions probably should be

02:53taken in addition because of the data we have so far today. Thank you, Brett, for

02:58those insights. For other stories about climate, you can find that at

03:02AccuWeather.com slash climate.

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