What temperatures of the summer show is that we are losing the fight against climate change, and not only that, we are choosing to lose the fight against climate change because we are not embracing the things that we know will reduce emissions and ultimately reduce temperatures.
You might say, the devastating heat that's crippling so much of the globe right now is climate change once again screaming at us at the top of its lungs. And it's not just scorching temperatures, but floods, wildfires, and hurricanes all happening with alarming frequency. Bloomberg's John Ainger, Eric Rostin, and Zara Hirjee report on why extreme events like this are intensifying. They say it's not a phase of crazy weather.
It's the start of a new normal that will only become more dire and destructive the longer we insist on clinging to fossil fuels.
This year, the heat index at sixty six point seven c or one hundred and fifty two degrees fahrenheit. That is just too hot for humans to really survive on a regular basis.
Poor countries, which have contributed the least to the problems that are causing climate change. They're the ones that have been dealing with the kind of impacts that we've been seeing in developed countries over the last couple of years, when many many years now.
But hold on, this isn't just another sky is falling conversation about global warming. There's some good news to be found here because rapid advances in technology not available only a few years ago means the warming of the world can be slowed if we decide to do it.
And that's what makes this the greatest story in the world. Like the stakes could not be higher. We have most of the solutions we need, many people are actively deploying them. So every day is just this incredible race against time to see if we can place dirty machines with clean machines.
I'm West Kasova today on the Big Take, How to Beat the Heat.
Eric.
If you're not living in a part of the world right now that isn't really hot, you're certainly hearing about it. The heat is just about anyone is talking about this summer. Can you paint us a picture of why it's different this year? Because I mean, it's July, it's warm.
It's supposed to be hot in July, and as promised, it is. It's useful to think about climate change as the long term trend and weather as a fluctuation from year to year. Weather changes every year, climate change doesn't really change every year. There is an important distinction between climate and weather. Climate is the long, often thirty year trend in a region or the world that scientists used to sort of average all the weather. It's the boundary
of the weather. So what's happening this year is something called an El Nino in the Pacific, and when the eastern part of the tropical Pacific heats up, it just blows heat into the atmosphere, changes weather in many different parts of the world in many different ways, and it raises global temperatures. So anytime there's an Alnino year, you're probably going to get a heat record because it's coming on top of climate change.
Zara, we have El Nino, we have summertime heat that all comes together to make things hotter.
But that's not really the whole story, is it.
I've been talking with a lot of researchers about what is actually happening this summer, and the al Nino is certainly playing a role. But this is also just started. Like the al Nino was only officially declared in June, and it's expected to ramp up as the summer and as the fall in the year progresses.
We ended up having the hottest June on.
Record kind of globally when you look at global average temperatures, a little bit of that with them, a lot of that was climate change. And then we had the hottest July on record, and now we're anticipated to have hot August and we'll see how that plays out, but we're on track for the hottest year on record.
John, in the story, you write about how scientists are really closely tracking this difference between al nino and climate change.
How do they do that and what are they finding?
Yep, So we spoke to many scientists during the process of writing this story. We spoke to Climate Action Tracker. Now they analyze all the different pledges by countries around the world, So the US, the EU, China as part of their global commitments to try and keep global warming to below one point five degrees. Now that's the one point five degrees is the political target that was agreed at the Powis Agreement in twenty fifteen, and all our actions are basically.
Judged off that barometer.
So now climate action trackers looking at how we're going towards those targets, and currently puts us on course for around two point seven degrees of global warming. By comparison, where we're at currently is one point two degrees of global warming. And we're already seeing these kind of really extreme weather events taking place across the world. And just to give you a flavor from Europe as well, recently in Greece, we had one hundred and forty six different
forest fires across the Greek islands. You saw almost apocalyptic scenes of tourists and people working in the tourism industry having to evacuate from these islands. And that's not just alone in Greece. I mean we've seen record breaking temperatures in Sardinia and outside.
Of Europe of course as well.
We highlight in the story in China they're also seeing temperatures above fifty degrees. Right now, this is what global warming at one point two degrees looks like. And if we're heading to two point seven, the fear is among scientists that these kind of extreme weather events are going to get much much worse and more regular.
So the goal has been to try to contain the rise in global temperatures to one point five degrees celsius. What you're saying is that what we're seeing is two point seven is what we're going to hit. Has the goal just been entirely abandoned?
Now, whether we've abandoned a fight or whether we never embraced it is a matter of opinion. It'd be hard, given the political culture in many democracies, to acknowledge something that has been scientifically in different ways going back to the fifties, right, which is that fossil fuel emissions warm the atmosphere, and so as we see year after year,
temperatures creep, higher, storms become stronger, coastlines increasingly challenged. It's just a simple fact that as long as we're still burning fossil fuels and letting the emissions go into the air, climate change is always going to be in its opening act.
Reminding you that we are at one point two degrees of warming now. We are not guaranteed to get to two point seven. That's just the track that our world is on based on the policies that are in place. If you actually look at kind of the goals that people have set. We are potentially on a lower track, but you have to assume that people are actually going to meet the various bold goals that they've made.
Humans are controlling this.
We're in the driver's seat, and so we can make changes over the next couple of years and decades to prevent, hopefully the two point seven. That's just where we're headed right now.
John.
Not so long ago, there was a lot of optimism around the Paris Treaty, which you mentioned that a lot of countries were going to embrace less fossil fuel use and other ways of reducing climate change.
What happened?
Why are we seeing this acceleration now despite big efforts by a lot of countries.
Well, I think, just to make clip to start with, I mean, progress is already being made. Right Since twenty fifteen, since the Paris Agreement, around eight billion metric tons of CO two that would have gone into the atmosphere hasn't and that's as a result of things like scaling up renewables, massively, electric cars, even changing some of the things we do in our day to day lives. So there has been progress there. The problem is we still haven't turned the tide.
Emissions are still rising, and really we need emissions to fall by forty five percent this decade, so when emissions are still rising, the windows really getting a lot smaller in order to do that. I mean to be clear, we're not going to get this done in the summertime.
It's likely to take a generation. But we have done this kind of thing before through the scaling up of renewables, through boosting electric vehicles on our roads, and that is really what's going to have to be accelerated as we move forward this decade.
Zarah, especially for Americans since we're the last country on Earth that refuses to use the metric system. When you hear something like two point seven two point nine degrees celsius, it doesn't sound like that much, but actually talking about very large leaps.
Yeah, So with the warming that we've had, we often talk about how we've risen in temperatures one point two degrees see compared to pre industrial times. That translates to closer to a little over two degrees fahrenheit. When we're talking about two point seven degrees, you're right, that's closer to four or five.
Degrees fahrenheit and heating.
But I think the other thing to remember is that's just the global average or the global mean. It actually also means that you're getting a lot less cold days and you're getting.
A lot more very hot days.
And one great example of this is what's been playing out in Phoenix, Arizona, where the entire month of July, all of July, they had hit one hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit for every single day. That is what we're talking about when we say that you're starting to get extreme heat more frequently and more intensely, and that's only going to grow as the temperatures continue to rise.
The last nine years are the hot end years in the one hundred and eighty year record. Twenty two of the hottest twenty three years in the record have occurred in this century. In every decade has been hotter than the prior decade since the nineteen sixties.
I will also add, like right now, one of the things that's been playing out all summer has been the temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are extremely hot. And we're specifically talking about how the temperatures off the coast of Florida have hit ninety five and then also up to at least one hundred and one degrees fahrenheit. So that's literally the temperatures that fishes and corals, or if you're
going snorkeling, you are going to feel. People have described that as the bathtub type temperatures to me, very uncomfortable, very hot.
Normally, this is water that.
Would be in maybe the high eighties to low nineties, So we're talking ten degrees fahrenheit above what's usually seen there.
And can fish living water that hot?
John No, I think over thirty degrees celsius, which is around eighty six degrees fahrenheit. That's when you start to get coral bleaching. And coral bleaching is this phenomena which is a very visual phenomena. You know that coral is full of vibrant colors, purples, reds, oranges, greens. It's when those colors completely leave and you're left with this dull white color on the coral, which is basically a sign
that the coral is dying. And as that takes place, we're already seeing huge bleaching events taking place off the coast of Queensland in Australia, the Great Barriery for example, and in other places too, you're seeing real undermining of some crucial ecosystems globally.
When we come back, climate change hit some countries harder than others. Eric Zara mentioned some of the things that happens when you start to see rising temperatures across the globe. And it's not just heat that global warming causes. There's a lot of other kinds of people that you write about.
When oceans are as hot as they are today and they're only going to get hotter if we don't change our ways, that produces much more intense cyclones different countries. Low lying countries, often poor countries are most vulnerable to those kinds of storms. It's almost hard to just make a list of the things we're expecting. Yes, there'll be more drought, Yes there's more wildfires. And we've built bridges and roads and shipping lanes and airports with the understanding
that certain things never change. Those things are changing.
So what are some examples of that.
Tarmac on airport runways melts. Places flood that have never flooded before because sea levels rising. Miami frequently gets flooding when there's no rain because the ground is just kind of porous and so ocean which is rising just kind of seeps in and then seeps up. One study from a couple of years ago found that by two point five degrees of warming, New York City could face three once in a century floods every year.
Some other examples we've seen play out this summer is there was this intense flooding event in Vermont, and one of our colleagues had done this great story about how parts of Vermont were hit by this intense Hurricane Irene about a decade ago, and then the state spent a lot of money really trying to prepare itself because it knew that inland flooding, even just not on the coast,
could be very damaging. Even still, there were major cities across the state that experienced really just like record levels of flooding and damage to really show that our preparedness isn't enough. Other things that we see with heat, train tracks buckling, you can get cracks in roads, You start to see crop failures. So in Europe we've been hearing about how some of the fruit and vegetable crop has
been suffering. I know there was one agricultural group that mentioned that cows actually produce less milk when it gets really hot. There are just a cascade effects that impact everything from industrial processes. So if you have nuclear power plants that are situated on water, if the water gets too hot for them to use for cooling, they have to reduce or even shut down. That's been playing out
in France and other parts of the world. Also, when the temperatures get too hot in the water, you can have jellyfish blooms, and then that blocks the water that's used for all sorts of industrial processes.
John One thing that Eric mentioned is that horror countries often suffer more from the effects of climate change than richer countries, and you write about that quite a lot in this story.
Yes, exactly whichever way you splice climate change its inequality. Obviously, poorer countries which have contributed the least to the problems that are causing climate change, they're the ones that have been dealing with the kind of impacts that we've been seeing in developed countries over the last couple of years. They've been seeing that for many, many years now. Those kind of things can be ranging from desertification, which has a whole host of knock on effects when it comes
to food prices. Desertification is basically where fertile arable land that's used to grow crops becomes increasingly dry, increasingly arid, and that soil starts to blow away in the wind and turns into desert basically, so it becomes no longer fit to harvest crops that are vital in so many parts of the world. We're seeing that at its most extreme in sar Hell, that band of green across the top third of northern Africa, and that's where the problem
is really taking place most dramatically. But then you're also seeing that in a three degree world, for example, forty percent of people in developed countries will be inoculated against those impacts. That's what developing countries are already feeling now, and we're not even at one point five degrees. So this is really a problem of inequality and that underpins many of the international climate negotiations that take place around the world.
John, Why is it that richer countries are inoculated whereas poorer countries don't. I mean, if it's hot.
It's hot.
Well, obviously money is what comes into play. Most of all, the cost of finance is way way cheaper in richer countries. That helps from everything to mitigation. Mitigation is the building of new solar farms, new wind facilities that help to actively lower emissions, but also adaptation. Adaptation is much more difficult to finance, especially from the private sector. But that's things like sea walls, that's things like growing trees in cities which can help cool the temperature of cities down.
That's things like air conditioning as well, which can really help lower the temperatures that people face on a day to day basis.
Of the countries that are really seeing the biggest effects of this inequality, so.
It sort of depends on what the extreme is that we're talking about. If we're talking about rising sea levels, it's island nations that are the ones that are really
in the danger zone. As you know, even just getting to one point five degrees of warming could mean a matter of additional feet of extra sea level rise, and so that's why you'll often hear from countries like Barbados or Trinidad or others along the Caribbean at these annual meetings saying one point five degrees is a death sentence for us, because they could see much of their islands,
the places where they live inundated with water. Looking at places like Pakistan, which last year had already experienced just absolutely extreme and devastating floods and then having to see those potentially year over year.
Eric At some point, do places that are just really hot now simply become uninhabitable? Are we going to start to see places that were just people that are no longer able to live.
We already see it Southern Louisiana, for example, parts of Alaska, the low lying islands that Zara mentioned, Many millions of people are no longer going to be able to live where they're living in coming years and decades, and they're going to go somewhere, and we don't know where.
John.
This question of inequality, how climate change hits countries differently, has become a big source of discussion and kind of tension among nations in global discussions about climate change.
So for the last two years I've been at the U and COP summits. That's Conference of the Parties, and those are where countries one hundred and ninety six countries from around the world get together to try and thrash out climate progress. And a key part of that is the mitigation, which is the cutting of emissions. But the main kind of thing that poorer countries have been pushing for is more finance to help them deal with the impacts of climate change.
After the break, how we can start to turn things around.
The airline industry announced a goal of net zero airline emissions by twenty fifty.
PEPSI pledges to be net zero by twenty forty.
Amazon is looking to achieve net zero carbon by twenty forty.
Now Show wants to be net zero by twenty fifty.
Net zero is a pledge that you won't increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Eric.
Of course, all this sounds pretty dire, but one of the things you write in the story is that there are solutions if we want to embrace them. So what will it actually take to slow or possibly reverse these effects?
Here we bring some relief. The fact is as dire as all the things we talked about are at the top of the podcast. It is phenomenally in to watch people making the twenty first century economy by deploying solar and wind power and electric vehicles. The price declines we've seen in the last ten years and those three technologies are unprecedented. The price of solar is I think eleven percent what it was in twenty eleven. Accordingly, solar power
is cheaper than coal in most of the world. That economic fact is avoiding emissions and changing the way societies power themselves.
Most of the tools that we need for the next thirty years already exist. You mentioned solar and wind. Those are already super super cheap, and probably the prices won't come down that much more. So how do you accelerate those going forward at the end of this decade? And that's where we really need to see big changes in investment in things like battery storage to help these kind of technologies work around the clock.
As one of our.
Guests in the article described the predicament, So that's going to be where the real technological changes need to start taking place.
Jan can you talk a bit more about batteries. Why are batteries so important.
In a twenty to fifty scenario, will be almost all renewable energy, so solar, wind and these are things which
are intermittent by nature. So solar works best obviously when there's sun in the sky, wind, when there's wind happening, and when those things don't exist, that's when you need to store that electricity using batteries on the grid so that we can use power at all times of the day, depending on our uses and needs, and that's one of the areas which needs to accelerate really really quickly, especially this decade.
So right now, our economy is largely being run on fossil fuels, even as we've been slowly ramping up our reliance on cleaner energies and renewable energies.
But then we're also seeing that there are.
Just a lot of industrial processes where fossil fuels or emissions or sort of like baked in. And yet there is change research. Tons of money being dumped into this, oftentimes their solutions, but they haven't been proven yet a market level scale that we know we'll probably get there if enough money and support continues, could get there in the next decade. So examples of this are like sustainable aviation fuel, so having jet fuels and plane fuel that
is greener. It's making cement and other types of construction material in a greener way. We're not just wanting to continue our energy use as it is today but powered explicitly by cleaner energy sources. But it's also increasingly finding ways to kind of reduce that overall powerload and adding in efficiencies as much as we can.
John, Even though it seems like all these technologies are there if we want to use them, the price tag is still pretty eye popping.
So from our research, the total cost of getting to net zero by twenty to fifty is going to cost a whopping one hundred and ninety six trillion dollars.
Now that sounds like a lot of money.
But that's actually quite a low price tag given the cost of not acting and possibly seeing these kind of tipping points creating exponential costs to try and cope. But we're also going to have to see things like, by the end of this decade, a four fold ratio of investment in renewables to that on fossil fuels, and then that's even going to have to climb up to a ratio of ten to one, So that means every dollar we spend on fossil fuel infrastructure will have to be
spending ten dollars on renewables. As we get towards the middle of this century, these kind of amounts of money are already going in. I mean, we've seen from the US Inflation Reduction Act that's a huge package of incentives of tax credits to kind of boost electric vehicles to boost hydrogen production, and other parts of the world are
trying to catch up with that as well. We've seen in the EU just less than seven months after the IRA was passed into law, that the EU had to come up with its own package to try and stimulate these kind of new technologies that will really help speed the transition.
We often talk about how there can be a positive feedback in warming where processes happen and then you get more warming, kind of in this spiral which we're in now, but there's also a positive feedback when it comes to putting investment into these solutions. So part of the reason why solar costs have dropped so much is because we had invested a lot of money early on into research to kind of figure out ways to drive it down
and to deploy it more. And now that's sort of what we need to do for a lot of these other technologies, and it's happening now with electric cars, so a lot of money was put in. We're kind of getting at this point where more people are buying them year after year, they are cheaper.
They are cheaper. There has to be the huge cost.
Absolutely, and the more money we put into it and kind of build out those technologies the cheaper it's then going to get in the future.
So I guess that brings us to the big question, will governments, will citizens embrace these changes and actually do what's needed to be done before it's too late.
It is all hands on deck. This is a problem we've known about for decades. We've put off many changes that we could have put in place some time ago. Interestingly, many of the changes we need we didn't even have available for the last few years. Do technologies appear when we need the most.
John, is it foolish to be optimistic at this point?
It's definitely not foolish.
I think we're definitely in a stage where we're taking two steps forward one step back, depending on the government of the day in the US or in various countries of the EU, depending on what the government of China decides to do in the years ahead. I think there is progress being made. As we've said in this article, we have the tools to do it. It's just going to be a case of the political will and drive to make sure that those costs are shared evenly across society.
John, Zarah Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Mow Barrow and Michael Falero. Raphael i'm Sely is
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