Andrea Thompson: Battling Extreme Heat Fatigue

Sea Change Radio

While you're shoveling snow out of the driveway this week, you may not want to hear about extreme heat - but then again, maybe you do! This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss the issue of a warming planet with Andrea Thompson, a science reporter and associate editor at Scientific American. We look at how people and policymakers are trying to cope with the rising temps, examine how different parts of the globe are being affected, and talk about the challenges of presenting this important information to the public in a fresh, engaging manner. Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise. Andrea Thompson (AT) | 00:19 - How much we decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by and how quickly we do it is going to greatly affect what kind of summers we have 20, 30 years from now. You know, like what summers my 3-year-old is going to see when he's my age. And it's something that we, we are very much in control on. We get to set the standard for what that's going to be in the future. And the decisions we make now will affect that. Narrator | 00:50 - While you're shoveling snow out of the driveway this week, you may not want to hear about extreme heat - but then again, maybe you do! This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss the issue of a warming planet with Andrea Thompson, a science reporter and associate editor at Scientific American. We look at how people and policymakers are trying to cope with the rising temps, examine how different parts of the globe are being affected, and talk about the challenges of presenting this important information to the public in a fresh, engaging manner. Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 - I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Andrea Thompson. She is an associate editor at Scientific American. Andrea, welcome back to Sea Change Radio. Andrea Thompson (AT) | 01:52 - Thanks for having me. Alex Wise (AW) | 01:54 - So, looking at the work you've done the last few years at Scientific American, it seems like there's a lot of focus on something that we all are very concerned about, which is extreme heat. Why don't we dive into some of these stories, unpack them for our listeners, and, and give them a better idea of where we are and where we're headed and what we can do about it? Andrea Thompson (AT) | 02:20 - Absolutely. Yeah. So I think, you know, kind of the , the high level headline was the 2023 was the hottest year on record and by a very large margin, um, it was about 1.15 degrees Celsius or about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the previous hottest year of 2016. And, you know, that doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not, you know, maybe day to day, but when you're talking on a global level averaging, you know, the whole world over a whole year, that is a really huge amount. It stands out very clearly in the records. And you know, these records, one of them is kept by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is, goes back 174 years. So that's a pretty substantial time and based on what are, what's called paleoclimate records, so using things like tree rings or cos taken from ice sheets or sediments, um, that can give us some glimpse of what the temperature was like before we have actual written records. There's a good chance this is, you know, the hottest it the earth has been since humans have really been around so a couple hundred thousand years, which is really remarkable. Alex Wise (AW) | 03:39 - And we, here we are in the midst of winter and there's headlines. I'm sure we can sniff them out of record cold temperatures in Norway or Alaska or wherever, but that does not necessarily correlate to the planet not warming. So why don't you, if you can pop some of those myths for our listeners who, who may have gotten some disinformation about how if it's cold outside the planet's not actually warming. Andrea Thompson (AT) | 04:12 - Absolutely. So the existence of climate change doesn't mean that winter does...