this week we're taking a look back at
some of the events that helped to make
2019 a pivotal period for our planet's
climate so sit back grab our mince pie
and get ready for a rollercoaster ride
through twelve dramatic months in the
next 15 minutes hello and welcome to the
very last just have a think program of
the year so how was it for you then well
here in the northern hemisphere we
catapulted into January on the back of
an Arctic report card from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
that showed the Arctic continuing to
warm at least twice as fast as the rest
of the planets resulting in younger
thinner Arctic sea ice covering less
area than in the past now I told us that
the 12 lowest sea ice extent in the
satellite record had occurred between
2006 and 2008 een and that the increased
temperatures were continuing to drive
decreasing snow cover and increased
melting across the Greenland ice sheet
but ironically we also witness
record-breaking snowstorms in the heart
of Europe causing chaos and mayhem
even in well-prepared nations like
Germany in Austria where 12 people
tragically lost their lives meanwhile
over in South America severe flooding
dominated the first month of the year
with more than a third of the population
of six major regions in Argentina
getting evacuated to safer ground and
the state of Euro garner in Brazil
receiving 20 inches of rain in just 72
hours displacing more than 2,000 people
and similar numbers of casualties were
suffered in Sulawesi in Indonesia as
heavy rains strong winds and high tides
caused rivers to overflow the province
recorded over a foot of rain in 24 hours
damaging thousands of homes and
displacing at least 6,000 people back at
the start of the year Australia broke 17
temperature records in the first month
with Adelaide hitting 46 point six
degrees Celsius and Port Augusta
reaching an all-time high of 49 point 5
Celsius but even on the driest inhabited
continent on earth the floods still
arrived with 20 inches of rain in 48
hours up in
in Queensland forcing the state
government to declare a disaster
situation February brought the first
climate report of the year when the
United Nations release what they called
a roadmap to the December climate summit
stating that 2019 was the last chance
for the international community to take
effective action on climate change in
that same month Britain's Institute for
Public Policy Research published its own
major report simply entitled this is a
crisis their message was quite stark
mainstream political and policy debates
have failed to recognize that human
impacts on the environment have reached
a critical stage potentially eroding the
conditions upon which socio-economic
stability is possible and then as if to
reinforce that argument and meandering
jet stream and collapsing polar vortex
caused the worst cold period in the
United States for decades effectively
dumping the Arctic's winter weather
straight across the Midwest at least 21
people were killed and 90 million
injured temperatures of minus 17 degrees
Celsius with some regions dropping as
low as minus 40 degrees Celsius making
them colder than the North Pole almost
everywhere else on the globe a theme was
beginning to take shape that would
arguably come to define the entire year
as weather patterns and that theme was
severe flooding February brought major
floods and landslides to Peru killing 51
and injuring 79 Brazil Ecuador and
Colombia all got battered by rains and
landslides causing at least 20
fatalities and displacing thousands and
over in Pakistan almost three months of
flooding began on the 21st of February
with 25 fatalities in the Balochistan
province as we pressed relentlessly on
into March a teenage clime activist by
the name of Greta tunberg
came to global attention for the first
time when her climate protest strategy
of bunking off school every Friday and
sitting outside the Swedish parliament
holding a strike for climate placard
caught the imagination of millions of
other schoolkids and inspired the global
school strike for climate movement that
went completely viral all over the world
in the Renewable Energy Arena for the
first time ever solar and wind power
were both declared cheaper than most
coal-fired electricity production
marking a key tipping point in the
ongoing demise of the fossil fuel
industries but the month was marred by
yet more extreme weather events as the
deadliest cyclone ever to be recorded in
the southern hemisphere trotted into
Mozambique Malawi and Zimbabwe in an
excruciating ly slow five-day crawl
across those three countries cyclone EDI
left a trail of utter destruction
including 1,300 fatality s and countless
of his missing even as far south as New
Zealand a state of emergency had to be
declared on South Island as bridges and
roads were washed away and power and
communication lines were destroyed by
what that country's water institute
described as an atmospheric River with a
footprint stretching some five thousand
kilometres all away from the Timor Sea
more than three feet of rain fell within
48 hours the highest ever total for New
Zealand and just when the farmers of the
American Midwest were breathing a brief
sigh of relief after the February Arctic
freeze there relentlessly torrential
rains arrived there as well
the first quarter of 2019 was the
wettest on record in the United States
at least three people were killed new
record river levels were set in 42
different locations and at least a
million acres of US farmland in nine
major grain producing states were
completely flooded by the end of March
only about 56 percent of the expected
corn and soybean planting had actually
taken place northern hemisphere
springtime March onwards into April and
also marching onward was a new bunch of
upstarts calling themselves extinction
rebellion or XR this slop hit the
international headlines as they
mobilized tens of thousands of people
from every region in the United Kingdom
to converge on London bringing large
areas of our capital city to a complete
standstill for two whole weeks in an
entirely peaceful but very disruptive
exercise to get across the four demands
for climate mitigation the XR movement
has now gone pretty
global so expect to see a protester
glued to a building near you very soon
April also saw the publication of the
International Renewable Energy agency's
roadmap to 2050 explaining how we might
transform our energy and electrification
over the next three decades and of
course here at j-hat we had a good look
at what they were suggesting all of
which you can see in more detail by
clicking up there somewhere but the
skies kept putting pressure on two
poorly prepared communities all over the
planet
floods continued to ravage countries
across the Americas Africa Asia Europe
and the Middle East including Syria
where the waters completely displaced
the already displaced refugees in the
camps of Idlib province India and
Bangladesh were hit by cyclone ferny the
strongest cyclone seen in that part of
the world since 1999 cyclone Kenneth hit
Mozambique in Tanzania with a force
greater than any storm most countries
have experienced since records began
killing at least a hundred people and
causing damage estimated at a hundred
million dollars meanwhile just to the
north severe droughts pushed nearly 11
million people in Ethiopia Kenya and
Somalia towards extreme hunger and
disease including cholera as crops
failed cattle died and water sources
became contaminated a couple of starkly
contrasting climate declarations hit our
screens in May of this year starting
with the United Kingdom government who
having met with a delegation from
extinction rebellion and under pressure
from their own Committee on climate
change officially declared a climate
emergency and set the target to reach
net carbon zero emissions by 2050 the
first major economy to do so in that
same week up at the 11th ministerial
meeting of the Arctic Council US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a
speech celebrating the rapidly declining
Arctic sea ice and welcoming the almost
unimaginably exciting commercial
opportunities that would soon be made
available by the newly opened northern
ocean trade routes and access to
previously unavailable Arctic fossil
fuels even going as far as to describe
methane
freedom gasps June Mountain star of a
long Northern Hemisphere summer
dominated by extreme heat events with
almost 400 all-time high temperatures
being set kicking off in India where
some regions experienced temperatures
surpassing 45 degrees Celsius for almost
three weeks June the 10th was the
hottest day ever recorded in Delhi of 48
degrees Celsius and this year also
brought the hottest July ever recorded
in that country 65 percent of the
population were exposed to temperatures
above 40 degrees Celsius every day for
over two months the longest heatwave in
India's history similar deadly heat
waves were also endured in Europe North
America and Japan and then the wildfires
began of course wildfires happen every
year but rarely with the magnitude we
witnessed in 2019 California's annual
files are probably the best known and
this year's were particularly brutal but
fires were also raging out of control in
the Arctic Circle in southern European
countries like Greece Portugal and
Croatia and all over South America
during July and August
China Ruiz days into September with the
second costliest typhoon of all time
typhoon lucuma leukemic killed at least
28 people and a million others had to be
evacuated to safety
storm durian battered the Bahamas
turning out to be the strongest
hurricane ever to hit that country and
one of these strongest Atlantic
hurricanes on record storm Imelda made
landfall on the gulf coast as the 5th
wettest storm in US history
dumping 40 inches of rain on Texas and
the relentless floods kept coming and
coming
causing major problems wherever they
struck in some cases hitting areas that
hadn't fully recovered from the first
and second law of deluge 'as earlier in
the year November proved to be a bit
like Groundhog Day for the United States
as a repeat of the polar vortex collapse
at the start of the year caused the
Arctic to dump its frozen temperatures
yet again across vast swathe of the
lower 48 bringing record-breaking low
temperatures closing many schools and
causing the cancellation of more than a
thousand
flights as we trundled into the final
month of 2019 the United Nations held
the cop 25 climate conference in Madrid
in Spain where the nations of the world
spent two weeks discussing the new
global carbon pricing program as well as
how to significantly increase then
nationally determined contributions
towards reducing greenhouse gas
emissions before concluding the
conference with complete failure to
agree on how to move forward on either
of those two crucial challenges and
while all that was going on in the
northern hemisphere down in the southern
hemisphere Australia was witnessing the
onset of late spring bush fires that
would go on to reach catastrophic Leone
controllable proportions right now as
I'm standing here talking to you in the
very last week of the year the map of
Australia looks a bit like most of it's
on fire the prime minister Scott
Morrison has kindly deign to return from
his family holiday in Hawaii and is
actually conceded on national television
that there is no argument about the
human influence on climate change and
its impact on the severity of the bush
fires his country is currently enduring
and yet still after all we've witnessed
around the planet in this dramatic and
potentially pivotal year for our climate
cynics will be gently swaying in their
rocking chairs saying things like so
we've had some bad where there are
admittedly some tragic casualties but
most people seem to be getting on with
their everyday lives more or less as
normal so should we really be so
obsessively concerned about these
apparent changes in our climate and
those same folks will be comforting
themselves with the reassuring notion
that our climate has always been
changing and always well it's just
Nature's Way and we humans are
spectacularly good adapting and
overcoming trouble is though right now
as we prepare to go into 2020 we're only
just at the very bottom of an
exponentially rising curve of climate
consequences all the scientifically
accepted indicators suggest that what we
witnessed this year
far from being a freak year for weather
is actually set to become the baseline
norm as we go through the next decade
and beyond 2019 showed us how just one
degrees Celsius of extra atmospheric
warming can dramatically and dangerously
alter our planets climb
balance on our current emissions
trajectory will be another degree or so
warmer in 20 to 30 years time and at
least three degrees warmer by the end of
the century
so 2020 really does look set to be an
historically important year in the
fortunes of our civilization not to
mention countless other species that are
unwittingly relying on us humans not
screwing up can our nation's finally
come together to reach consensus on
rapid implementation of climate
mitigation strategies will developed and
developing nations cooperate and make
sacrifices for the greater good of
humanity or will we continue along the
road of political polarization and
inward-looking tribal nationalism I'll
let you ever think about that as you
munch through your Christmas dinner
leftovers as always thanks for watching
have a fantastic new year's and here's
to our hopefully peaceful and prosperous
2020 see you next year
you