Good morning, everybody.
ABC 10 meteorologist Brendan Minchev here
with another look at the latest water
numbers here in Northern California.
We have not had any more rain since the
last time we did this video last week,
so we're still above average for the month,
but not by as much,
only about 1/10 of an inch,
just less than that for the season.
We're now about 3/4 of an inch
below where we should be.
This is at Sacramento executive,
but the water year started on October 1st and
ends at the end of this coming September,
so we still have lots of rain to come.
Fingers crossed.
There's a lot of rain to come
before the water year is over,
so still time to work on the drought.
Speaking of the drought,
the latest numbers are in all the
winter storm numbers are finally here.
So on this drought update,
everything that we saw at the start
of the month is now on this map and
we see some improvement right off the
bat with the exceptional drought category.
Now 13% of the state has is
in that exceptional drought.
That is an improvement.
We've seen a little bit of it,
especially South of Fresno between
Fresno and LA, just a little bit,
not a whole lot.
Extreme Drought category went up
a couple percentage points that's
because though. The downgrade.
So it went from exceptional to extreme.
So that extreme drought category,
28% of the state's 44% of the state
in the severe drought category,
that's that orange color had a
little bit of work done on it,
but near Los Angeles as well
because of that rain.
They saw a lot of rain down in Southern
California to start their water year.
We saw some rain up here too,
but again,
not a whole lot,
not enough to really make a huge dent in
that drought up here in Northern California,
but putting the map side by side and
this is where we were last week.
Out all the winter storm numbers
on the map and here's where we
are this week with now all the
winter storm numbers put in there.
So again not huge improvements
across the board,
but it is good to see that we've got,
we've got some work done and that
exceptional drought category again
it went from 17 to 13% and even
though the extreme category went up,
that's more because that exceptional
category went down.
So again that's a downgrade from 5 to
4 on you see that there on that map so.
Before we get any further into this,
this little climate update,
I wanna talk more specifically about
climate change because COP 27,
the United Nations Climate Conference,
it just wrapped up in Egypt at the
end of last week and there were
some some things talked about there
that really could make a big
improvement including starting a
fund for mitigating the impacts
of climate change and
helping smaller nations.
That that's a big deal and that's one of
the things that came about from cop but.
Before we talk more about COP,
why is a meeting like that important?
Well, because we are seeing the
effects of climate change right now.
It's not 10 years down the road,
not 50 years down the road.
It's right now what's happening
now when we're already seeing it.
And you can see that if we don't
do anything and we just continue
to put out a bunch of emissions,
again unmitigated,
it's gonna warm up significantly.
This is a map for Sacramento and you
can see that observed temperature
just continues to take up and
especially in over the last 50 years,
it's really climbed.
Right now,
that average temperature over the course
of the year is between 62 and 64 degrees,
so maybe about 63,
but by the end of the century, about 2100.
Again, if we don't do anything
that average temperature,
this is accounting for lows and highs.
All year round, the average
temperature would be over 68 degrees.
With significant cuts.
We could keep that below 66 degrees.
It's not just here, though.
In California.
It's across the map,
especially in the United States.
We can see these numbers with
continued emissions unmitigated.
We can see especially
that Upper Midwest region,
6 degrees or so of additional
warming by 2100 on average.
That's for your average temperature.
It's,
it's not good if we don't
see significant cuts.
Here's what a map with
significant cuts looks like,
and it's not nearly as bad.
We're seeing only about 2 to 4
degrees of significant warming.
So I don't know about you.
I'd rather have this map by the
time we get to 2100, then this map,
that one's a lot worse.
We can actually start to tie though
climate change to certain weather events,
and we can say that certain weather
was made worse by a changing climate.
And that's a big deal.
That's something we haven't been
able to do up until fairly recently.
And this is in large part thanks to
the work being done at climate central.
You can go to climate central
and at their website and you can
see all the information.
You can pull all of these maps.
These are. Straight from climate central.
I have not edited these in any way.
You can look at the exact map
that I've got here behind me.
You can read articles about it
if you want more information.
I highly recommend checking out climate
central if you want to know more.
But again,
talking now about how we can kind of
put some fingerprints that we can see
those fingerprints from climate change.
This is on a summer night time low,
so this is your low temperature
over this past summer and
areas that you see in the pink.
Purple colors the number of days,
so that's up to 70 days.
So, fingerprints of climate change,
how much can we see climate change?
Overnight time lows this summer?
Well, certainly over the
desert SW over 50 days.
Closer to 70 days for parts of Nevada,
most in Nevada in fact,
including Texas, the Gulf Coast.
We can see that here,
but we even see it in the Central Valley,
where 30 to 50 days of our summer,
our summer lows were made
worse by climate change.
Now climate central came up with
a method called the Climate Shift
Index to really see just how much
and to put a number on just how much
climate change is impacting things
such as the average high temperature,
the average temper,
the average low temperature.
And the way it works is with
the past climate,
you see that kind of in the
faded bell curve here behind it,
the extremes, well,
the extreme cold happened and
it happened less frequently than
your normal temperatures in
the middle of the bell curve,
and then your extreme heat happened even
less frequently but with climate change.
This is shifting.
So in the bell curve in front,
the one that's colorized,
you can see how that shifted.
So now the extreme cold events
are very rarely ever happening.
They're not inside that curve.
Warmer weather is much more common
compared to the past climate.
And then that extreme heat which
almost never happened in past climate,
of course it did,
but it's happening more frequently now
and that is because of a shifting climate.
So if a 90 degree day,
this is just a generalization,
not necessarily for Northern California,
but if a 90 degree day.
Maybe only happened once every
so often in the past climate.
Well now with that shift in the
climate change now we're seeing
well now that 90 degree day
happens three times more often.
So that gives the index a number of three.
So now we're looking at climate shift
index plotted onto a map of the globe
and so this is a 365 days to climate change.
This is your average daily
climate shift index for the globe.
And you can see areas in red
have a much higher shift index.
Well no surprise.
Here desert SW even into the Mountain West.
Parts of California are in that red color.
Deep red colors for Mexico,
Central America, for Brazil and the Amazon,
that's a big deal.
The Saharan Desert, the Middle East,
deep red as well.
Australia.
But you also notice Antarctica
is all shades of red.
Same with Greenland.
And that's that's a problem
because we store a lot of ice in
both Antarctica and Greenland.
There is some hope though, and it comes both.
From cop, which we'll get to in a second,
but also from something that
happened earlier this year,
the Inflation Reduction Act was passed
here in the United States and in it,
it contains over $300 million
to help towards climate change.
And so some of the cuts that
we're going to
see here due to the Inflation Reduction Act,
a lot of that's going to come from power,
from electrical grid,
from transportation, non CO2,
greenhouse gases, all things like that.
We're going to see cuts in
thanks to funding coming from
the Inflation Reduction Act now.
To to give more on climate central,
the work that they're doing,
what cop is and all about.
I actually went straight to the source.
I talked to chief meteorologist
at Climate Central,
Bernadette Woods plaque.
She just got back from Egypt
and here's what she had to say.
I I think so much gets
lost in the cop process of.
Some of the headlines,
you know this is the worst ever.
This doesn't, but.
It's a couple of things at once.
It's. It's moving things forward,
but it's not enough yet.
And that's where I think that it is.
It gets messy because people want a simple
answer and it's not a simple answer.
The reason that this is important
is because we have this global
issue of climate change,
but we don't have a global government.
So we need to have a framework or
a system that can bring everyone
together to move this topic forward.
And what's critical at this meeting
is that all countries have a voice.
It slows down the process and
it is imperfect in some of the.
Practices and policies it works through
however it brings everyone to the table.
the United Nations Climate Change
Conference of Parties Cop is exactly the
place to try to find answers to difficult
climate change related questions.
A change in climate that we are seeing
appear in more ways in our everyday weather?
The science has gotten to a point,
combined with the ability to advance
our technology and computing capacity,
that we're at the point where we
can attribute daily temperatures now
everywhere around the entire globe.
To climate change and climate central is put
out what's called the Climate shift index.
This is a tool that looks
at the globe everywhere,
every day and can look at the the role of
climate change within our daily temperatures.
And where there is good news with all
of this is solutions to our climate
change challenge are advancing rapidly.
We are.
Producing so much more renewable
energy now than we ever were electric
vehicles and our ways of moving people
around are changing right in front
of our eyes from month to month.
The way we get our food and move
our food around is changing.
The way we build our buildings,
it's changing,
and so we are seeing great
advancements in our solutions.
However,
the warming is still happening faster,
So what we need to do is really scale up
these solutions at a pace we've never seen.
But that's what's needed to keep
us to that 1.5 degree goal.
So it's not all bad news,
but significantly more
work needs to be done.
Does that mean it's too late?
That's a loaded question.
And the reason I say that is because
how do you view too late, unfortunately,
for the people who've already lost their
lives to the wildfires in California
or the devastating hurricanes that
we've experienced across the United
States or the floods in Pakistan?
It is already too late for them, however,
when you look at the big picture,
the global goal is to limit warming
to two degrees Celsius with an
aspiration of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
We're at about 1.2 degrees Celsius right now,
so there's still a little bit of room there.
We have to factor in scientifically
that all of the greenhouse gases and
emissions that we're putting into our
atmosphere right now stick around in some
form for hundreds of thousands of years.
So what we're putting out today already
bakes in a couple of tenths of degrees.
Performing so when you put
all of that in perspective.
The conversation really is around that
1.5 degree target is it's still possible,
and it is technically still possible,
but the windows closing pretty rapidly if
you look at where we're heading globally.
When you factor in the new laws and
the commitments that have been made.
It's bringing us to about 2.8
or 2.6 degrees Celsius.
Now, there's a couple of different
ways to calculate,
but that's generally the range.
If you squeeze out all of the verbal
commitments and pledges that countries
have made around around the entire world,
but they're not really put
into policies quite yet,
you can bring down that warming
trend to about maybe 1.8 degrees
Celsius some of the calculations go.
So that brings down that warming real area.
Closer to the goal of 1.5,
however,
you still see a gap
here in California.
A solution implemented earlier this
year requires by 2035 that all new cars
sold are powered by renewable energy.
And that's a big deal because the
transportation sector is a significant
source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The biggest sector is transportation.
A very close second is in general power,
how we get our electricity and how we use it.
Those two sectors alone,
if we already have solutions in place between
the the the evolution of electric vehicles
and how they are growing so rapidly with
people really starting to implement them.
And then wind and solar and hydropower
and how that plays into this.
These are things that already exist.
And if we could scale those,
we can take care of 60 to 70% of our
emissions right now in the United States.
And that would buy us some time to really
learn how to do the harder things,
how to fly planes around,
how to transport things
by ship across the world.
So there's a lot that has to go into this,
but if we can scale what we know works now,
it buys us.
Extra time for the other things.
And so that's why it is really critical
to look at where our missions come from
and what we can implement right now.
So knowing all of this, knowing about
the work that lies ahead in the payrolls,
should we fail, how does our climate
change expert feel about the future?
I feel energized, and I'll tell you why.
It's the people.
It's the people that are in this work.
It's the people who are so committed
to trying to solve this crisis,
and it's the people that
we're trying to help.
That we're trying to keep safe and
prepared from our changing climate
and our changing weather and our
changing water systems and our rising
seas and our worsening air quality.
But it's really about the people.