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in this climate genen bulletin I speak with Dr Jennifer Francis about her new work looking at weather Whiplash events that she and colleagues have been studying in the North Atlantic and Europe we also discussed the outlook for
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2024 as climate impacts worsen and world leaders from across the world are doubling down on expanding the root cause of the problem fossil fuels if you want to find out more about the failing cop process and why we urgently need to
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hold those delaying structural change directly accountable you can pre-order my book cop out on Amazon or any other bookstore thanks for supporting the podcast I will be resuming interviews again next week and fully appreciate
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your support Jennifer it's great to see you again thank you very much for taking the time over the holiday period great to see you too Nick thank you when we last spoke back in may we discussed all kinds
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of things that ocean heat waves the likelihood of the El Nino adding extra heating and your sort of summary slogan was expect chaos as we look around us
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now how much of what you anticipated has been realized well it's always hard to say whether the the weather events that have unfolded already this winter are
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weirder than normal because winter is always a volatile season and the fall too um it certainly has been odd we've had some serious flooding events just
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last week along the east coast uh some very heavy rain fell in especially the Northeast part and did some unprecedented flooding in Maine and New Hampshire we've seen unprecedented
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heat as well in the middle of the of North America ongoing right now a severe lack of white Christmases all across the Northern Hemisphere so you know it's been plenty
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extreme but whether it's alino or specific ocean heat waves or or whatever I would say it's uh consistent certainly but you can't pin it on that as you look
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forward to 2024 the scientists I've spoken to have said it's going to be worse I mean from a European perspective I'd say the last six months or so have been pretty bad I mean we've seen some
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horrific things in Europe in the summer and then flash flooding across Italy Spain all over the place basically so I mean from this perspective it it seemed pretty raw in terms of extreme events
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what's your thoughts what's your thoughts on 2024 yeah so I mean we fully expect El Nino to continue to remain strong for at least a few months um that always tends
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to create some some weather Havoc of various sorts in various places ocean heat waves are still raging out there the Atlantic is still mostly very warm the Arctic is very warm as well well
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we're expecting to see the stratospheric polar vortex undergo major disruption probably in mid January or so and that always brings some severe winter weather
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conditions often brings cold down into Europe and and Northern Asia even Central Asia and eventually also to North America so there's a lot of reasons to expect this crazy weather to
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continue through 2024 um and we're seeing of course the Earth on average is continuing to break records for the temperature globally and
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especially the oceans so we're in Uncharted Territory in terms of what the Earth is doing um what the oceans are doing and you know these extreme events
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are certainly being exacerbated by that okay and we'll come back to that in a second but I just wanted to ask you about a recent p paper that you published and you talk about weather Whiplash events and I think you focus on
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North Atlantic and Europe can you give us a quick overview of what that means and and how it actually affects us yes so weather whiplasher is a term that's become kind of common lately and
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it generally describes uh when weather switches from kind of one extreme to another very abruptly um what we tried to do was kind of generalize that idea
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and and come up with a new way to measure it so we instead of looking at specific locations and looking for times when the weather shifted abruptly at that location whether it be temperature
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or going from drought to flooding or something like that we tried to take a much broader look and look at the overall circulation pattern over a region and we can track things like that
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by looking at the jet stream and the the pattern that the jet stream is in and what we did was we looked for these characteristic patterns of the jet stream and we looked for cases where the
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atmosphere got stuck in one particular configuration for at least four days in a row and we know that the Jetstream controls the weather so depending on what that jet stream is doing it's going
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to be dry and warm here wet and stormy there that's generally you know we know that the jet stream controls the WEA so when it gets stuck in one place for several days and then abruptly shifts to
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a very different pattern of the jet stream this is what we defined as weather Whiplash and we were able to go back in time through um observations
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that have been incorporated into a global weather forecasting model actually so we have this information going back to the late 1940s so you know 72 years of data every
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single day and uh we looked for these cases where the atmosphere gets stuck in in one of these uh patterns for four more days and then when it abruptly shifts to a very different pattern and
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so this is what we were tracking and we were looking not only at the real atmosphere and data observations from the real atmosphere but we also looked at projections for the future uh based
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on climate model simulation and what we found was that when these patterns in the atmosphere look like a very warm Arctic situation so the Arctic
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is much warmer than normal um we found that these weather Whiplash events happen more often and that they're going to increase in frequency more in uh in they're going
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to increase much faster in those patterns when it gets stuck when the Arctic is very cold so there seems to be this correspondence with the Arctic warming much faster than the rest of the
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world uh leading to more of these weather Whiplash events so this is a feature of Arctic warming would you say and it's going to get more pronounced would would you say you're going to get
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increased frequency or intensity as the Arctic continues to warm well that's what our results suggest yes so and we know the Arctic is going to continue to warm as long as we
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continue to belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which um there's really no sign of that going down yet so yes the idea is that we should see more of these very abrupt and often destructive
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um shifts in in weather patterns from things like a drought for you know days and days that then becomes a flooding situation like what happened in Greece the summer as an example yeah and from
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just what you're discussing and from what we've seen this year in terms of impacts loss of life loss of you damage to property loss of Agriculture I mean yes it's been quite pronounced everywhere how would
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you rate the level of urgency that policy makers should be considering regarding these risks um I'd say right now that they seem to be at a level two and they need
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to be up at a level 10 they it is you know is that's not everyone obviously but um in terms of what's actually happening on sort of national level and international levels
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that urgency needs to be ratcheted up substantially that said I would say there are communities and smaller government organizations that are doing a lot and we're seeing a lot of progress
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we know that this is a possible feat we can um we can make this problem much less less bad than right now the trajectory we're on but it needs to it needs to happen much faster and you know
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International organizations need to take it much more seriously and you know we saw some targets coming out of this most recent cop un climate meeting just a couple weeks ago and there's a lot of
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you know progress but again it's it's way too little and way too slow okay I've just returned from the cup and one of the things that I noticed is that despite what everybody
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says the cop 28 president is going to continue to expand oil production in the UAE the US Canada UK Norway Saudi Arabia China Russia Australia among others are
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all expanding fossil fuel production that's the opposite I mean they they're literally doing the very thing that'll make all of these problems worse as someone who is diagnosing the problem
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and the the answer is becoming so obvious what do you actually think when you when you hear these kinds of things it's so discouraging um you know
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obviously we can't stop you know using fossil fuels immediately but this is exactly the wrong direction we need to stop investing in new fossil fuel
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infrastructure and and phase out what is already in place and as you say this is exactly the wrong direction it's very discouraging but as
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I said there are also some very strong glimmers of Hope at more local levels but um you know I think there's no way that we're going to avoid increased
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extreme weather events increased sea level rise um you know all of the things we're already seeing as you say it's also obvious now um and there's really no way that we're going to avoid these
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things getting worse at least the next few decades as we're on this trajectory obviously comes a point where communities can't recover because the these are getting you know repeated in
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the same areas Etc there's been some discussion as well between scientists whether we're accelerating the Earth's heating does
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your research indicate any of this and how would you characterize Earth Heating and Earth sensitivity to warming at the moment yeah so I mean clearly the
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warming has accelerated since the 50s the 1950s that is absolutely 100% for sure um the only controversy really is whether it's accelerated in say the last decade and I
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would say that is not that uh relevant um and it's also not that clear because over a decade time period there's so much up and down in the signal that it's
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really not that clear there's an acceleration or not and but you know it's going up that's the main point and if it goes up a little bit faster that's not good news obviously but I think you
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know it's kind of silly to focus on something like that when the real story is we've got to stop this going up and we've got to stop emiss from going up we have to get them to
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level off and then eventually start to go down because that's the only way we're going to make this blanket that we put around the earth this extra thick blanket right now that Blanket's getting thicker and thicker as long as the
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amount of greenhouse gases is increasing in the atmosphere but if we can at least level off so that it's not getting thicker then that will start to slow the warming gradually it sounds so simple
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but when in the world the world in which we live it's um it's obviously no one's paying attention yeah yeah the answer is simple but doing it
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is not okay well if the previous message was expect chaos as we head as we head into 2024 what would be the mantra for today do you
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think well it hasn't really changed um I don't know if chaos is the right word I would say surprises expect surprises expect more broken records expect more
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unprecedented weather events expect more destruction suffering um very high costs to these destructive events you know we're the
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worldwide we're spending billions of dollars recovering from these events and that's just going up it's a I think the world hit a new record this year on the amount of money spent on weather
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disasters so this is what we need to remember and expect not just 2024 but going forward it's just going to get worse okay well on that note I will say
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thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your Christmas break you too thank you very much
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