2025 was the second hottest year on record

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AccuWeather Vice President of Forecast Operations Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the Jan. 8 edition of Climate In The News.

Transcript

00:00Well, today we'll look at a couple of drivers of the recent surge in climate change and global warming,

00:06and then we'll take a trip to the Arctic.

00:08Brett, our first story from Yale Environment, a summary of 2025 and how that compares to the last several years

00:15in terms of how warm the world was.

00:17What do we say about 2025 with this preliminary data?

00:20Well, not surprising.

00:22Once again, about the second warmest year on record, according to their data.

00:25The last three years have been the warmest on record, which is quite incredible.

00:30The last three years.

00:31So why is that?

00:32So they looked at four potential drivers of the recent surge, and they found some interesting results.

00:39So the drivers, some of them include the water temperatures in the Pacific through El Nino,

00:45volcanic eruption in the South Pacific.

00:47What did the study find in terms of how these factors have influenced this recent surge in warming?

00:51Okay, so the volcanic eruption of 2022, which was underwater,

00:55sent a tremendous amount of water vapor up into the upper atmosphere.

00:58Water vapor basically traps heat near a surface.

01:01So that's one, uptick in solar output, which is a natural phenomenon, but we did have that.

01:07The formation of a super El Nino late in 2023, not early 2023, late 2023,

01:14also likely had an influence, which is normal.

01:16And then a decline in sulfur dioxide emissions, especially through shipping.

01:20Again, when you reduce that, this allows more of the sun's energy to reach the surface.

01:25And reduction in solar dioxide emissions is good overall for the planet, but it does increase the warming,

01:31or at least reduces the cooling effects that these emissions have in the atmosphere.

01:36So certainly more research to be done on why this warming surge has occurred, but four key drivers detailed there.

01:45Our second study today from Penn State Research just published that discusses the feedback loops in the Arctic.

01:53The Arctic, Brett, has been warming, as we've talked about here many times, warming the fastest of anywhere on the planet.

01:59What does this new research find?

02:00All right, so they looked at the oil fields, especially the large oil fields up in Alaska,

02:04and they're producing a chemical process, which is leading to, which is quite interesting,

02:10chemicals that are released through the oil fields are interacting with snowpacks, which contain saline,

02:16and this is increasing the amount of bromine into the atmosphere.

02:19Bromine is not friendly towards ozone, and so when we deplete the ozone,

02:24we're allowing more of the sun's energy to reach the surface.

02:27That's interesting.

02:28Also, they found that there's more openings in the sea ice, which also contribute.

02:31Yes, the opening of sea ice, which is allowing more convective clouds and plumes,

02:36more water vapor to get up into the atmosphere.

02:39Water vapor, again, heat trapping is heat trapping.

02:42So, again, another influence of warming.

02:43Yeah, the Arctic, a very important part of our planet.

02:45It's one of the ones that needs to be studied more with climate change.

02:48Another really interesting finding from this study was that some of the gas plumes from the oil fields

02:53are producing smog that, in some cases, can be just as bad as urban areas like Los Angeles, for instance.

02:58Unbelievable.

02:59So, a pretty pristine environment being transformed into something more like a city.

03:04Thank you, Brett, for that information.

03:05Other stories about climate, you can find those at accuweather.com slash climate.

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