Short Wave - Oof! 2020: A Hot Year For The Record Books

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

Nearly tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record, 2020 was hot, hot, hot! NPR climate reporters Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Sommer explain why more heat trapped in the atmosphere means longer heat waves, less ice in the Arctic, bigger wildfires, and more powerful hurricanes. For more reporting on the hottest decade, check out this story. You can follow Rebecca on twitter @rhersher and Lauren @lesommer. And, as always, email us at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, M. Quick question. Okay. Do you know what I love most about this time of year? Uh, I don't know. Bacon cookies, dressing up your dog. Oh, buying me presents. I do love giving prezies, for sure. But no, Emily, my favorite thing about this time of year is crushing the competition.

Well, you're in luck, Maddie Safaya, because we've still got some time to pull ahead and drive the most donation referrals of all NPR podcasts. for member stations all around the country. That's right. We are just behind the podcast up first. And sure, that podcast has been around for a couple more years than us. And yeah, they do have one of the biggest audiences in the country. But who do you trust to report on weird mold that grows on Twinkies or the tiny mites that live on your face? Is it up first?

I don't think so. We are Santa people. And Santa cannot win this competition alone. Okay, you've taken it too far, officially. Okay, shortwave listeners, you heard it here first. We are Santa, question mark, and we need your help. Help us by supporting your local member station. They make everything we do possible.

They're the best, seriously. So head over to donate.npr.org slash short and give whatever you can, because I don't know what Maddie's going to do if we lose. Well, we won't ever have to find out, Kwong. Again, that's donate.npr.org slash short. Thank you so much. You are the best. Okay, love you, bye.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, climate reporters, Lauren Summer. Yes, hello. Good to hear your voice. And Rebecca Herscher. Hi, yeah. Hi. So what do you two have for us today?

Okay. What we have for you are a lot of superlatives. And they're not like the happy popularity kind. It's going to be things like dryest, hottest, most extreme, because it's the end of the year. And there were a lot of climate change records broken. Right. Tis the season to find out if the Earth broke its own heat record again. Yep. And it is a squeaker this year, a real race to the finish line, if the finish line were a place that you did not want to go at all. So right now, 2020 is basically tied with the hottest year ever recorded, which was 2016.

The first 11 months of this year came within. 200th of a degree Fahrenheit of the average temperature in 2016. So it's basically the same. And we'll find out what you won next year when all the numbers are in. Yes. But what Becky said, it actually doesn't matter. I'm here to tell you. Okay, good.

Thanks, Lauren. You know, the last five years, they were the hottest five years ever recorded. So no matter how you slice it, whichever year ends up winning this title, it's just bad overall. And we all lived with the effects of that extra heat this year. Every night this week, we've started the news with wildfires growing and burning out of control, and tonight is no different. The notches cloud of smoke and ash choking the West Coast. So here we are two years in a row, August 14th, bringing us record high temperatures.

The poles, they're melting. Scientists say the Arctic has been warming up for years. The result, warmer oceans, fueling extreme. weather events. So today in the show, 2020 was a hot, hot year. We'll talk about four ways that all the extra heat trapped in the atmosphere affected people's lives. Longer heat waves. Less ice in the Arctic. Bigger wildfires. And hotter ocean water. I'm Maddie Safaya, and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, so first up on the list of 2020's greatest climate hits, and I mean hits in a bad way. Number one, it was hot.

Yeah. And if you happen to catch a weather report in the southwestern U.S. this year, you heard one number over and over and over again. Death Valley, California, yesterday broke a record of 125 with a new temperature of 130. 112 expected for today. Kingman at 102. Courtsite 114 for today, Tucson 107. Heelabin around 113. Yep. 100, or temperatures above 100, because it was over. that a lot this year. So it wasn't just the heat wave that comes and goes, Lauren. It was like people really didn't get a break.

Yeah, exactly. It just stuck around. Like, for example, in Phoenix, the city saw 145 days that were over 100 degrees. Yikes. That broke the record. And then there were 15 days that were over 115 degrees, which is double the previous record. No. That's too much.

That feels like too much, even for Arizona. Yeah. I mean, you talk to people there and, you know, they're They're used to heat there. It was still shocking to them. Like I spoke to meteorologist Marvin Percha at the National Weather Service in Phoenix. Not only how warm it got, but how persistent the warm weather was is what was so remarkable about this year. I've lived here a long time. I grew up here in the 70s, and I've never seen anything quite like this. Boy, when a Phoenix meteorologist is surprised at heat, you know it's serious. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And one important thing to point out here is night.

time temperatures, which maybe don't seem as important, but they are, because they were hotter than normal. And that's a big problem, especially in cities, because cities experience worse heat than the surrounding area. You know, you've got all that concrete. It heats up. It retains heat really well, and they need to cool down at night. Right, because extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable. For people who live through it, it can be dangerous. Yeah, exactly. And Phoenix saw a record number of heat-related deaths this year as a result. It's sad to say, about almost 300. people. And those are people who die directly because of the heat. And the long-term trend, of course, is that this kind of heat is only going to get worse with climate change. Yeah. And one of the things,

just to wrap your mind around as you're hearing numbers like that, the planet has already warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit because of climate change. Yeah. And that feels like a small number, but that is on average. Right. That's the global average. And when you shift the average, You can kind of imagine this in your mind. There are a lot more really hot days that are now in the range of temperatures that people experience. And the other thing is that super hot weather happened in places that have not been historically hot. Like Alaska had a really hot year. Yeah.

When I think of Alaska, I don't think hot. But then again, obviously climate change is affecting the Arctic in a really big way. Yeah. Cold places are warming the fastest, right? Yeah, exactly. I was looking at the temperature data from this fall, and in October, a lot of Alaskan towns were a lot hotter than normal, especially on the coast and especially really far north. Like Ukiavik, the town that's formerly known as Barrow, eight and a half degrees hotter in October than the average. I mean, that is a lot. Eight and a half degrees is a lot.

And, I mean, that can be the difference between one season and another depending where you're at, you know? Yeah, exactly. Or the difference between having snow and ice or not having snow and ice. And this is the second way that all the extra heat in the atmosphere affected people's lives this year. There was so little sea ice up in the Arctic because the air and the water are getting hotter and hotter. And so the ice on the surface of the Arctic Ocean melts earlier in the spring and then refreezes later in the fall. So this year in October, there was less ice on the surface of the Arctic Ocean than ever before in October. That is wild. I mean, I can kind of imagine what that means in literal terms, like less.

ice around the North Pole, basically. But what did that mean for people's lives? Well, meant all kinds of things. I mean, I talked to scientists who did research in the Bering Strait this year, and they told me they saw giant blooms of algae off the coast of North and Alaska. That's something that only happens in the summer, usually. Abnormally warm water, they saw that went all the way down to the bottom of the Bering Strait. So that meant things like clams, for example, that live on the bottom. They're also being affected. Okay, but bottom feeders do matter, right? Because those are the species. that other animals eat, right?

Bigger animals. And humans depend on some of those larger animals, right? Lauren, thank you for standing up for bottom feeders, first of all. Of course. But, okay, so I imagine that less sea ice also affects how people hunt for those larger animals that depend on the smaller ones. Yeah, exactly. So I talked to a woman named Melissa Johnson about this. She runs the Bering Sea Elders Group, which organizes representatives from communities that are all along the coast of Alaska and actually all the way out in the Aleutians.

like near Russia. So she and the people that she works with are some of those people who are the most affected by what's happening in the Arctic. Yeah, exactly. That's why I called her. So I asked her, what's it been like? And she was like, listen, we are seeing this more and more. You know, climate change for indigenous people is not anything new.

It's maybe new for science to say, oh, yeah, the Arctic is warming. There's a lack of sea ice. And she says a lot of people have been living in this rapidly warming Arctic. for decades, right? And they have adapted already in a lot of ways to the point where some people are teaching new ways of hunting, like with less ice, to young people. The other thing she said, and this was kind of surprising to me, is that those adaptations were really tested this year because of the pandemic. Okay, so walk me through that. Like, how does, you know, what does the pandemic have to do with it? So she said the pandemic made it harder to restock grocery store shelves in some

places, which makes sense. And it's strained family budgets, which is true in a lot of the U.S. And that has changed how some people are getting their food. In the past, maybe there was more reliant on store-bought goods, you know, like the luxuries of maybe canned foods or maybe frozen meat. Huh. So it sounds like they're relying more on catching and gathering things this year and those kind of techniques that they've relied on. Yeah, exactly. Those techniques that accommodate climate change are extra important to some people this year. Okay, okay. So hotter Arctic affected a lot of people's lives directly this year. Which can bring us to climate impact number three, something that affected millions of people this year, wildfires.

Yeah, I mean, I felt like they just kept coming this year. There was those photos of California covered in a, you know, creepy dystopian, orange smoky light. I mean, Lauren, you live there. Talk to us about it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I can say it was definitely full-on mordor, blade runner. I mean, that's exactly what it looked like living here. And, you know, here's some more numbers because this is another area where a whole bunch of records were broken. More than 9 million acres burned in the West. More than 17,000 homes and buildings were destroyed. And three states, California, Oregon and Colorado, they saw their largest wildfires ever recorded.

Wow. Yeah, I just remember seeing over and over how fast these wildfires were moving and how people had to kind of flee their homes. And that was really striking. And, you know, on the other hand, the Western U.S. needs fire, right? The ecosystems that are there are accustomed to fire. And those fires help clear out overgrown brush and vegetation. Yeah, that's definitely true. And I think it's, you know, we like to focus on records.

But this is actually an area where focusing on the number of acres that are burning is kind of problematic, actually, right? Because we want some fire on the landscape. You know, it's helpful. But what you don't want to see are the fires that are really extreme. You know, they move fast. They burn hot. And that's what we saw this year. Talk to me a little bit about how big of a role climate change played in that.

Yeah, it's not the only thing, but it's a really important thing that played a role. I mean, because other things matter. You know, like we mentioned, many ecosystems are overgrown, and that boosts the risk of an extreme fire. And you've got millions of people who have moved into these fire-prone areas. So they're inherently at risk. But hotter temperatures, you know, have a really big effect on fire danger. And that's because it makes the atmosphere. thirsty. What do you mean by a thirsty? I mean, like, it's thirsty. It actually acts like a giant

sponge because it's so dry. It pulls the moisture out of plants and soil. Everything dries out. And dry vegetation is just really flammable, which causes those explosive fires. And this year had some record dry conditions. And those really high fire danger days are expected to rise a lot in a warming climate. So, I mean, Lauren, can we really change things on the ground, like in terms of how we prepare and fight those fires, or are we kind of stuck? Yeah, it means evacuation plans are more important than ever. You've got to get people out. It also means doubling down on the kinds of preparations that have been shown to make a difference.

Like, using fire proactively is key. That means setting these low-grade fires in the winter that clear out the brush. And there are ways to retrofit and build homes with better materials because we know that building with fire-resistant materials can improve the chances that a house will survive. And California requires that, but many other Western states don't. Got it. Okay. So that's the third way that extra heat in the atmosphere affected people this year.

Becky, what's the fourth way? The fourth way is hurricanes, which I won't dwell on too much, not because it's not important, but because we talked about how climate change affected the 2020 hurricane season, the Atlantic hurricane season, in-depth on this podcast earlier this month. Yeah. If you haven't heard that episode, I highly recommend it because it is. really awesome and really great, and I am very biased. Yeah, you wrote it, just to be clear to our audience, you wrote that entire episode. Yes, yes, I did. But I do want to say one thing about hurricanes this year. The underlying issue was abnormally hot water. And that is where a lot of the power for

hurricanes comes from, heat in the water. Abnormally hot water, it didn't just affect the Atlantic. It affected other places this year. So there were some really destructive storm. that formed in the Indian Ocean, in the Pacific, and they also formed over abnormally hot surface water in the ocean. Right. I mean, it is called global warming for a reason. Right. Okay. So as usual, you have sufficiently depressed me.

But does all of this, you know, add up to changing people's mindsets about climate change? Like, is there a tiny pearl of optimism here in some way? Yeah. I mean, that's the question after this year. And I asked climate scientist Christina Dahl about. about that. She's with the union of concerned scientists. She says, yes, we tend to have short memories after a single disaster, but maybe this year it will be different. For me personally, I think that there's not going to be one wake-up call that spurs the public in the U.S.

and our policymakers into action. It's more the accumulation of all of these events and all of the heartache is incurred because of them. An accumulation of heartache, it's like the definition of climate change. Okay, okay, Becky. But remember, climate change is a choose-your-your-own-adventure situation. You know, humans will decide how much hotter the Earth will get by how much we emit. So there is some power here. True. Thank you, you too. Thanks, you too. Happy holidays, Maddie. This episode was edited by Giselle Grayson, produced by Thomas Liu and fact-checked by Ariel Zabidi. The audio engineer for this episode was Dennis Nielsen. I'm Maddie Safaya. You're listening. You're listening, to Shortwave from NPR.

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