00:00We'll cover both the cold and hot side of climate change today.
00:05Our first finding in this case, Brett, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
00:09They every year look at the amount of sea ice both in the Arctic and in this case the
00:12Antarctics or the Southern Hemisphere and they found that once again we have a very
00:17low amount of sea ice at the time of year where the maximum sea ice occurs in the Southern
00:21Hemisphere.
00:22Yeah, no surprise here.
00:23This is becoming a yearly event here pretty much.
00:26But yeah, across the Antarctic, our annual sea ice maximum was the third lowest on record
00:34here behind 2023 and 2024.
00:37Actually going back 10, 15 years or so, things were fairly flat.
00:40We didn't see much of a trend, but now we're suddenly seeing a significant decrease in Antarctic
00:45sea ice here.
00:46So, we talked about the Antarctic, the Southern Hemisphere.
00:48What types of trends have we seen in the Arctic recently?
00:50Well, the Arctic has been steadily declining for the past 20, 30 years or so.
00:55The 10th lowest on record, the annual minimum, which occurred on September 10th.
00:59So that's pretty significant in itself.
01:01But however, what's more important, the last 19 years have been the lowest 19 years on record
01:05across the Arctic in terms of sea ice extent.
01:08And the trend from 1979 to 2025 is about 12% decrease per decade of sea ice.
01:14So some clear signals here.
01:16And why does sea ice matter from a climate standpoint?
01:18It matters because the Arctic and the Antarctic are warming more rapidly compared to the rest
01:22of the planet, especially the Arctic region.
01:25And why is that?
01:26Well, because the loss of sea ice is opening up more water.
01:29Water is a darker color than snow and ice, therefore it absorbs more of the sun's energy
01:33and it heats up quicker.
01:34So certainly a feedback loop happening there.
01:36We'll turn now to our second story on the hot side of things from the International Institute
01:41for Environment and Development.
01:43They looked at the 40 most populous cities around the world, Brett, and they have a pretty
01:47striking finding of how much more frequent the hot days have been in recent decades.
01:51We've seen an increase.
01:52The number of days over 95 degrees, which is considered extreme heat, we've seen a 26%
01:58increase, Dan, since 1994.
02:01Washington, D.C. was one of nine cities last year that had their highest number of extremely
02:07hot days.
02:08And this seems to really span the whole world.
02:09There's some good statistics in here about places in Brazil like the capital, Brazil, Brasilia,
02:13about how they only had three days like this in the 90s into 2000s, but 40 of them in
02:18the last decade, same in parts of Europe like Madrid.
02:22What else stood out to you in this?
02:23Yeah.
02:24We saw that the top three years for extreme heat have all occurred in the past six years,
02:28so that's 2024, 2023, 2019, so that's very impressive there.
02:33So this obviously leads to the question about what should we do to adapt to this continued
02:36increase in number of hot days?
02:38What types of strategies are suggesting?
02:39Yeah.
02:40Well, of course, the heat makes it hard to sleep, of course, and then when we're tired,
02:43we don't, our production, our energy is lost.
02:45So what can we do?
02:47What can cities do?
02:48Well, we can plant more trees, which provides more shade, that's one thing.
02:52We can also try changing the color of our asphalt to more white color.
02:57The rooftops, more white color, that reflects more of the sun's heat, cools it.
03:01Another reason to really understand the impact of heat on your body, another reason to use
03:05the AccuWeather real fuel temperature, which includes not just temperature, but humidity
03:08and many other parameters.
03:09So certainly some significant impacts of heat and cold here on our climate.
03:14Thank you, Brett, for that insight.
03:15For other stories on climate, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.
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