00:00We're covering two interesting stories today on Climate in the News.
00:03We'll cover both water and fire and the impact of climate change on each.
00:08First, Brett, on the water side of things from CNN, our story focuses on sea level rise
00:13and how a new analysis of other studies has found that they may not all be taking into account
00:18all the different parameters that contribute to sea level rise
00:20and therefore have underestimated how much sea level rise is happening.
00:24Right. We're seeing sea level rise, obviously, from the warming of the oceans,
00:27thermal expansion, also the melting of land-based glaciers.
00:31So what the study looked at was that coastal sea levels generally were estimated by calculations
00:38involving gravity and the rotation of the Earth.
00:41But this study is saying that is oversimplified.
00:44And it seems like there needs to be other parameters taken into account.
00:47What are those parameters and also how do they use satellite data to back that up?
00:50Yeah, so the other parameters that they were looking at here, winds, ocean currents, tides,
00:55temperatures, and the salinity of seawater, which may lead to different results of sea level.
01:00And also they're then using satellite data to validate that.
01:04And they found that in some cases there could be an underestimate here of a couple of feet,
01:07it sounds like.
01:08Yeah, a couple of feet, 385 published studies.
01:1299% of those did not look at real-time sea level levels, which is hard to believe, actually.
01:19So they're corrected calculations by a study found that places such as Southeast Asia were three feet higher than anticipated.
01:26So the result of this is we take that into account, push it forward.
01:31We could be dealing with 37% more land, 68% more people being under sea level by the year
01:372100.
01:38That's a significant change in the estimates and obviously more research needed here to validate these going forward.
01:43We'll turn from water to fire, our second article from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography about California wildfires.
01:50And this for the first time, a study that looked at not just the smoke, but the sort of the
01:53clean air windows or the gap in the smoke between wildfire events, Brett.
01:58Right.
01:58And California has seen a significant increase in the large fires and the intensity of wildfires, not so much the
02:05number of fires.
02:06So this study looked at the gap between these big fire events, the smoke gaps, and they shrank by 60
02:12% from 2006 to 2020.
02:15So that's a big problem.
02:16And what about wildfire smoke and this finding really causes concern about the impacts on people?
02:22Yeah, increased risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, premature death, and again, short-term exposure to wildfire smoke may contribute
02:30to 40,000 more deaths each year in the United States alone.
02:33Wow.
02:34So certainly, again, more research needed in this area as well to fully understand the cumulative nature of these impacts.
02:39Where across the state of California were the effects most noticeable?
02:44Okay.
02:44So in Northern California, where we have much more wooded terrain, there's been more fires, of course, more smoke, but
02:51no distinct shortened recovery period between these events.
02:55However, in Southern California, a much greater population, not as much smoke, but the events have become much closer, and
03:03this is causing a big problem.
03:05So certainly a lot of impact in California and also across the entire Western United States.
03:09Thank you, Brett.
03:10For other stories and information about climate, you can find those at AccuWeather.com slash climate.
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