00:00Today we'll look at two different stories focused on global policy and how
00:04we work together as a world to combat climate change. Brett, our first story is
00:09from the conversation, a bit more hopeful maybe than some of the stories we've
00:12covered here before, and it focuses on the different scenarios of how many, of
00:17how much emissions will cause then or result in warming. What has this study
00:22found? Yeah, some good news for a change, Dan. Seven new scenarios have been
00:27proposed the highest emission scenario, which is the bad one, has been removed,
00:31which is great news. Under that high previous scenario it was based off of no
00:36cutting of emissions, also the expanded use of fossil fuels, and with that CO2
00:42levels would triple across the globe by 2100 and we'd see a warming of 4.5
00:47degrees Celsius. So that's obviously one bad scenario that has been taken off the
00:51table, which is great news, and that's because of some progress that we have
00:56made. What are the reasons for that, and then what do we have to be worried about
00:59still going forward? Well, yeah, this is based off the expansion of solar, wind,
01:03and electric vehicles globally, has slowed the emissions growth. But again, as we
01:08mentioned, policy is very important and we have a lot more work to do. But again, the
01:13good news is the new highest scenario is 3.5 degree warming compared to 4.5 by 2100.
01:21The lowest right now is 1.9. So 3.5 Celsius, though, that's a lot of warming. It's a lot
01:26of
01:26significant impacts. At least we've taken the 4.5 off the table. We'll obviously keep
01:30refining these as we get more and more data and as the facts change in terms of
01:34what we are emitting as a society. We'll turn to our second story, this from the
01:39Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And it is a
01:44really interesting look at how critical ocean data is to our entire monitoring
01:49system and how fragile it can be because it's not done by one organization. It's
01:54really a patchwork of groups from different nations monitoring our ocean
01:58spread. Exactly right. And this is called the Global Ocean Observing System, or GOOS,
02:04they call it. It's based off of real-time ocean data, very important for weather
02:08forecasting and climate. So it's basically a network of robotic floats, research
02:13vessels, and more buoys taking all these observations. And we're going to look at
02:17ocean heat content as a key metric here. So the new study is basically looking at
02:22how quickly politics, budget cuts, just general policy, can quickly disable this
02:28whole system. And they found that there was a significant reducing or a
02:32significant reduction, rather, of accuracy. What were the numbers on that? Yeah, just
02:37removing 20% of the system here would reduce accuracy of annual ocean heating estimates by
02:4433%. That's a third. That's big. 80% removal. Well, the global warming signal becomes basically
02:51indistinguishable. Wow. So there's certainly broad implications here. It's not just about
02:55the ocean temperature. That's obviously critical. But that is used for weather forecasting. It's
03:00used to understand fisheries, fisheries, fish movement, food prices. It's all really interrelated.
03:05It's sort of summed up well by one of the co-authors of the study who said, quote,
03:08no single country can monitor the ocean alone, but no nation can afford not to.
03:13Great quote. Thank you, Brett, for that information.
03:15Other insight and stories about climate can be found at accuweather.com slash climate.
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