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The temperature threshold the human body can't survive

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The temperature threshold the human body can't survive

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The temperature threshold the human body can't survive

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Netflix Trailer | 2019

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The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind | Offical Trailer [HD] | Netflix

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William's Story | The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind | Netflix

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Center For Climate And Energy Solutions

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Our mission is to secure a safe and stable climate by accelerating the global transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and a thriving, just, and resilient economy.

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(Multiple Reasources)

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Our Trajectory

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones. Credit: left - Mike McMillan/USFS, center - Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right - NASA.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth's climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

" The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change - modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

Read more

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

What's the difference between climate change and global warming?

"Global warming" refers to the long-term warming of the planet. "Climate change" encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

detailed answer

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

" The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." ²

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Future Effects in the U.S.

U.S. Regional Effects

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

detailed answer

Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.

Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.

Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.

Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.

Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

References
References
Header image shows cracked mud stretches across sections of the Panamint Valley. Credit: NPS/Kurt Moses; A degree of concern thermometer image credit: Pixabay/geralt

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Long-term effects of global climate change in the United States.

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Heat waves, wildfires & drought: How this summer is a 'preview' of Earth's coming climate crisis

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Heat waves, wildfires & drought: How this summer is a 'preview' of Earth's coming climate crisis

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8/15/21 | Denise Chow

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In a summer already full of extreme weather,it's the heat waves roasting hundreds of millions of people across three continents that are confirming a grim climate prophecy for many experts.

Sizzling temperatures in the United States and Canada and persistent heat in parts of Europe and northern Africa are creating dangerous health conditions, aggravating droughts and fueling wildfires around the world. And it's this troubling confluence of climate threats that researchers have been warning about for two decades.

"Climate scientists were predicting exactly these kinds of things, that there would be an enhanced threat of these types of extreme events brought on by increased warming," said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's very distressing. These are not encouraging signs for our immediate future."

While August is typically one of the hottest months in the Northern Hemisphere, this week's heat waves add to a growing list of recent extremes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday that July was the hottest month since record-keeping began 142 years ago. Catastrophic flooding killed more than 200 people in Europe last month, and wildfires are raging in Siberia, across the Mediterranean and along the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada.

But to many experts, these events offer just a glimpse of what lies ahead in future summers because of climate change.

This week, a United Nations panel released an alarming report on the state of climate change and the consequences of further global warming. The assessment highlighted the threat of extreme weather events, including how global warming will make heat waves both more frequent and more intense.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that severe heat waves that previously occurred once every 50 years will now likely happen once per decade. And in a study published last month in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists determined that record-shattering heat events are up to seven times more likely to occur between now and 2050, and more than 21 times more likely to occur from 2051 to 2080.

The oppressive heat that blanketed the Pacific Northwest early this summer demonstrated how dangerous heat extremes can be. Hundreds of deaths were linked to the June heat wave, and more than 35 cities across Washington state and Oregon tied or set new temperature records.

"The heat event that we had in the Pacific Northwest in June - it's not that we're suddenly going to see that every summer, but the recent extremes are certainly a preview of what we'll see more frequently in the future," said Karin Bumbaco, a research scientist at the University of Washington and Washington's assistant state climatologist.

Heat waves occur when a ridge of high pressure parks over a region, suppressing cloud formation and causing air to compress and warm. The resulting heat domes have been associated with tropical cyclone activity, which can alter the circulation of air over the Northern Hemisphere and trigger unusual weather patterns.

Heat waves occur naturally in the summer, but climate change is exacerbating these events because emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are causing average temperatures to increase. These changes to baseline temperatures mean that when heat waves do occur, they are more likely to be severe, said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

"If average temperatures are increasing everywhere, that increases the odds of more intense heat events," he said. "Even relatively small increases in average temperatures cause a much bigger shift in the extremes."

Extreme weather events, including heat waves, are driven by a complex mix of atmospheric processes and can vary from year to year, but climate change helps amplify the threats, said Philip Mote, a climate scientist at Oregon State University.

Global warming can also create feedback loops that then make other extreme events more likely to occur. Droughts, for instance, can intensify heat waves because the sun can more easily heat the ground when there is less moisture in the soil to evaporate.

"Right now, we have drought conditions over half the country, so that's also playing into why we're seeing so much heat this summer," Bumbaco said.

Yet even while climate scientists have spent the past few decades projecting the effects of global warming, Mote said the intensity and pace of changes to the planet have been surprising.

"I've been involved with climate research for 23 years, and I honestly didn't think it would get this bad this fast," he said. "This isn't really news to anyone who have been studying this for a while, but it's depressing to see it coming true."

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Heat waves, wildfires & drought: How this summer is a 'preview' of Earth's coming climate crisis

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In a summer already full of extreme weather,it's the heat waves roasting hundreds of millions of people across three continents that are confirming a grim climate prophecy for many experts. Sizzling temperatures in the United States and Canada and persistent heat in parts of Europe and northern Africa are creating dangerous health conditions, aggravating droughts and fueling wildfires around the world.

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Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame

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Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame

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July, 30th 2018 | Quirin Schiermeier | nature

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The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster. Europe is baking under prolonged heat, with destructive wildfires in Greece and, unusually, the Arctic. And drought-fuelled wildfires are spreading in the western United States.

For Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, the past week has been a frenzy, as journalists clamoured for her views on climate change's role in the summer heat. "It's been mad," she says. The usual scientific response is that severe heatwaves will become more frequent because of global warming. But Otto and her colleagues wanted to answer a more particular question: how had climate change influenced this specific heatwave? After three days' work with computer models, they announced on 27 July that their preliminary analysis for northern Europe suggests that climate change made the heatwave more than twice as likely to occur in many places.

Soon, journalists might be able to get this kind of quick-fire analysis routinely from weather agencies, rather than on an ad hoc basis from academics. With Otto's help, Germany's national weather agency is preparing to be the first in the world to offer rapid assessments of global warming's connection to particular meteorological events. By 2019 or 2020, the agency hopes to post its findings on social media almost instantly, with full public reports following one or two weeks after an event. "We want to quantify the influence of climate change on any atmospheric conditions that might bring extreme weather to Germany or central Europe," says Paul Becker, vice-president of the weather agency, which is based in Offenbach. "The science is ripe to start doing it".

The European Union is interested too. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, UK, is preparing to pilot a similar programme by 2020 that will seek to attribute extreme events, such as heatwaves or floods, to human-induced climate change. If that works well, a regular EU attribution service could be in place a year or two later, says Richard Dee, head of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service at the ECMWF. "It's ambitious, but doable," says Otto, who is also helping to set up the EU effort.

That weather agencies are contemplating such regular services shows how far 'attribution science' has come since the first cutting-edge research projects - more than a decade ago - tried to attribute individual weather events to climate change. Now, after more than 170 studies in peer-reviewed journals, attribution science is poised to burst out of the lab and move into the everyday world. It still has difficulty with some kinds of extreme weather phenomena, but as meteorological services begin to offer attribution information routinely, the bigger challenge is to work out how to make the studies helpful to the people who might use them. "It's one thing to make scientifically robust attribution statements," says Peter Walton, a social scientist at the University of Oxford. "How to go about using that information is another thing."

Attribution 101

The idea behind attribution science is simple enough. Disasters such as record-breaking heatwaves and extreme rainfall are likely to become more common because the build-up of greenhouse gases is altering the atmosphere. Warmer air contains more water vapour and stores more energy; the increasing temperatures can also change large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. But extreme weather can also arise from natural cycles, such as the El Niño phenomenon that periodically warms sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Researchers say that teasing out the role of human-induced global warming - as opposed to natural fluctuations - in individual weather extremes will help city planners, engineers and home-owners to understand which kinds of floods, droughts and other weather calamities are increasing in risk. And surveys suggest that people are more likely to support policies focused on adapting to climate-change impacts when they have just experienced extreme weather, so quickly verifying a connection between a regional event and climate change, or ruling it out, could be particularly effective.

Otto, the deputy director of the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute, is a veteran of attribution science, having conducted more than two dozen analyses. On 4 June, for instance, she and her colleagues completed a study focused on the southern edge of Africa, which had been suffering from a three-year drought. By early this year, the situation had become so dire in South Africa's Western Cape Province that officials in Cape Town had warned they would soon hit 'Day Zero', when the region would run out of water to serve basic needs - a first for a major city.

As reports of Day Zero made international headlines, Otto and Mark New, a climate scientist at the University of Cape Town, decided that the event was a good candidate for an attribution study. Working in their spare time because they had no dedicated funding for the project, researchers from the Netherlands, South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom started by defining the regional extent of the multi-year drought. They also created an index of its severity, which combined measurements of rainfall and heat. Then, the teams turned to the workhorses of attribution studies: complex computer models that mimic Earth's climate. On each of five independent models, they ran thousands of simulations. Some of these took into account observed levels of human-generated greenhouse gases; others ran with natural concentrations of the gases, as if the Industrial Revolution had never happened. The researchers compared how many times a drought of similar severity and extent turned up in the thousands of test runs. Most of the teams used their own dedicated computers, but the Oxford branch of the study conducted its simulations on the weather@home model ensemble, a distributed computing framework that uses the idle time of thousands of volunteers' personal computers.

By the time the team met in June, rains had returned to South Africa and had pushed Day Zero away. But the scientists were still chasing the causes of the mega-drought, which could help to determine whether the region might face a repeat anytime soon. Coordinating a four-way Skype call from her office in Oxford, Otto looked relieved when colleagues agreed that the analysis had yielded a result. "Global warming has tripled the odds of three consecutive dry years in the region," she says.

The findings came just in time for Roop Singh, a climate-risk adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague, the Netherlands, to present the results at a conference on climate-change adaptation in Cape Town two weeks later. Researchers there didn't find the results particularly shocking, Singh says - but they did trigger lively discussions about whether the increase in drought risk could help to justify increased investment in diversifying water sources in Cape Town. Otto's study was published on 13 July, before peer review, at the website of World Weather Attribution, a partnership of six research institutes (including the University of Oxford) that joined together in 2014 to analyse and communicate the possible effect of climate change on extreme weather events.

Although Cape Town avoided Day Zero this year, policymakers in the region say Otto's results send a sobering warning to water authorities that might be inclined to downplay the risk of global warming. "This is an incredibly strong message which we cannot afford to ignore," says Helen Davies, director of green economy in the Western Cape Government's Department of Economic Development and Tourism. "We may need to work on a radically new approach to water management," she says.

The work by Otto's team joins a rapidly growing corpus of studies on climate attribution. From 2004 to mid-2018, scientists published more than 170 reports covering 190 extreme weather events around the world, according to an analysis by Nature, which builds on previous work by the publication CarbonBrief. So far, the findings suggest that around two-thirds of extreme weather events studied were made more likely, or more severe, by human-induced climate change (see 'Attribution science'). Heat extremes made up more than 43% of these kinds of events, followed by droughts (18%) and extreme rain or flooding (17%). In 2017, for the first time, studies even stated that three extreme events would not have occurred without climate change: heatwaves in Asia in 2016, global record heat in the same year, and marine warming in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea from 2014-16. But in 29% of cases in Nature 's analysis, the available evidence either showed no clear human influence or was too inconclusive for scientists to make any judgement.

Sometimes studies seem to come to opposite conclusions about a particular event. One study about a 2010 heatwave in Russia found that its severity was still within the bounds of natural variability; another analysis determined that climate change had made the event more likely to occur. The media found the results confusing, but climate scientists say the discrepancy is not surprising because the two studies looked at different issues: severity and frequency. According to Otto, "The example goes to show that framing and communicating attribution questions is a real challenge." But researchers have become more sophisticated since then about how they set up and present their studies, she adds.

Rapid reports

The South Africa study could have been done faster, had the researchers been able to spend all their time on it. This year's work during the European heatwave was not the first rapid study: in 2015, for instance, during another sweltering heatwave in Europe, an international team of researchers (including Otto) found within weeks how climate change had made comparable heatwaves four times more likely in some European cities, and at least twice as likely over much of the continent. Meteorological agencies plan to work even faster when they put these experimental methods into regular operation. Over the past few months, Otto has talked extensively with the staff of the German weather service, briefing them on how to conduct attribution studies using the best approaches. On 21 June, she signed an agreement with the agency that provides free use of the University of Oxford's weather@home model. Meanwhile, the Copernicus Climate Change Service has asked Otto and two of her colleagues to write a paper describing workflows and methods for conducting rapid attribution studies, to be published by September.

Otto says a rapid attribution service is needed because questions about the role of climate change are regularly asked in the immediate aftermath of extreme weather events. "If we scientists don't say anything, other people will answer that question not based on scientific evidence, but on whatever their agenda is. So if we want science to be part of the discussion that is happening, we need to say something fast," she says.

Some scientists might feel uncomfortable if weather forecasters announce results before work has gone through peer review. But in these cases, the methods have already been extensively reviewed, says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Hegerl is also a co-author of a 2016 report by the US National Academies, which concluded that the science of attribution has advanced rapidly and would benefit from being linked to operational weather prediction. "It can be really useful to have results quickly available for event types we understand reasonably well, such as heatwaves," she says. "You don't need to peer review the weather forecast," adds Otto.

But not all of the science involved in attribution studies is settled, Hegerl says. Computer algorithms still struggle to model severe local storms that result from the rapid convection of air, such as small hailstorms and tornadoes, so scientists can't say whether climate change has made these events more likely. Reliable attribution is also difficult or even impossible where long-term climate records are still lacking, such as in some African countries. And there might still be natural climate variability that is not fully visible in the relatively short record of direct climate observations. To trace very-long-term climate fluctuations - such as those caused by changes in atmospheric-pressure patterns or sea surface temperatures that cycle once every few decades - researchers must rely on low-resolution proxy data, such as from tree rings. That this variability doesn't always show up in direct observations does create some uncertainty in studies, particularly for research on drought attribution, says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

At a meeting in Oxford in 2012, some critics questioned whether climate scientists could be confident about the conclusions of attribution studies, given the lack of observational data and weaknesses in the climate models of the time. But since then, doubts have largely been quelled. Researchers now run the studies using several independent climate models, which reduces uncertainty because they can look for results that concur. And scientists are more careful about how they make probabilistic claims. "Extreme-event attribution has made a lot of progress since it began with scant resources," says Fischer. "It may still not work for small hailstorms or tornadoes. But attribution claims are now fairly robust for any large-scale weather patterns that can be represented by state-of-the-art climate models."

Unclear impact

In South Africa, Davies says Otto's latest study should help to press the case for new approaches to regional water management. "Meteorologists assured us after the second year of drought that there was no way we were going to have a third dry year in a row. But we can't use the past any more for what might happen in the future. We need to learn to adapt to a changing climate, and we absolutely need attribution to do it right." One of the lessons of the recent drought and the attribution analysis is that the Western Cape should not rely solely on rainfall to replenish its water supply, she says. Instead, it should diversify by tapping groundwater and expanding its desalination and waste-water treatment facilities.

But, in general, it's hard to know what effect attribution studies are having, social scientists say. That's because it is difficult to tease out the impacts of these findings from other studies that forecast increased risks of extreme weather associated with climate change - or from the shock of the weather events themselves. Still, if attribution studies start appearing regularly in weather reports, rather than just in scientific journals, then their impacts could become much more conspicuous, says Jörn Birkmann, an expert in spatial and regional planning at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. "City and infrastructure planners who plan and approve new housing areas, hospitals or train stations need to consider risks of extreme weather events more precisely if these events are clearly attributed to climate change," he says.

Evidence from attribution reports could also feed into litigation on climate change, suggest Birkmann and James Thornton, the London-based chief executive of ClientEarth, an international group of environmental lawyers. Court cases that allege failure to prepare for the effects of climate change haven't yet cited attribution studies, Thornton says. But he thinks judges will increasingly rely on them to help decide whether defendants - who might be oil companies, architects or government agencies - can be held liable. "Courts tend to give credibility to government data," he says. "If attribution moves from science to public service, judges will be much more comfortable using the results."

At the German weather agency, Becker says he is convinced that attribution studies will become a valuable service for many parts of society. "It's part of our mission to illuminate the links between climate and weather," he says. "There is demand for that information, there is science to provide it, and we are happy to spread it."

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Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame

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The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster. Europe is baking under prolonged heat, with destructive wildfires in Greece and, unusually, the Arctic. And drought-fuelled wildfires are spreading in the western United States.

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Climate Crisis: ‘Apocalyptic’ heatwave and drought hit parts of US

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Climate Crisis: ‘Apocalyptic’ heatwave and drought hit parts of US

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Jun 21, 2021 | Channel 4 News

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Climate Crisis: ‘Apocalyptic’ heatwave and drought hit parts of US

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Impact of climate change and extreme weather events on global economy

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Impact of climate change and extreme weather events on global economy

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Jun 24, 2021 | CBS News

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Impact of climate change and extreme weather events on global economy

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By: Climate Central

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Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future

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Buy Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders

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Brian Cosgrove (Author)

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DK Eyewitness Books: Weather: Discover the World's Weather from Heat Waves and Droughts to Blizzards and Flood

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DK Eyewitness Books: Weather: Discover the World's Weather from Heat Waves and Droughts to Blizzards and Flood [Cosgrove, Brian] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. DK Eyewitness Books: Weather: Discover the World's Weather from Heat Waves and Droughts to Blizzards and Flood

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How to save a planet

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Fighting Fire with Fire | How to Save a Planet

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From California's crimson skies to smoke so thick along Colorado's front range that sent people indoors for days, this year has been an especially bad one for extreme wildfires. On today's episode, we ask, how did the wildfires get so bad - and what can we do to address them?

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Not Just Wildfire: The Growing Ripple Effects Of More Extreme Heat And Drought

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Not Just Wildfire: The Growing Ripple Effects Of More Extreme Heat And Drought

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June 24, 2021

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subscribe to Consider This from NPR podcast

subscribe to Consider This from NPR podcast

For the second weekend in a row, parts of the American West will be gripped by historic heat, coming in the second decade of megadrought that has gripped the region for 22 years.

Wildfire is an obvious threat - but there are other consequences of extreme heat and drought, as smaller snowmelts and lower reservoirs lead to water cutbacks and more expensive electricity. And climate change is making it all worse.

Colorado Public Radio's Michael Elizabeth Sakas reports on another consequence: what happens when there isn't enough water to build new homes.

Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, explains how extreme heat can affect the human body,

Additional reporting in this episode:

* Jordan Kern spoke to NPR's Scott Detrow about hydropower in the West.
* Michael Elizabeth Sakas reported on western snowmelt.
* NPR's Kirk Siegler reported on record high temperatures.
* NPR's Lauren Sommer reported on dwindling water supplies.
* NPR's Nathan Rott, Luke Runyon of KUNC in Colorado and Annie Ropeik of New Hampshire Public Radio discussed the growing consequences of heat and drought.

In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Lee Hale and Brent Baughman. It was edited by Sami Yenigun with help from Jennifer Ludden and Neela Banerjee. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo.

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Not Just Wildfire: The Growing Ripple Effects Of More Extreme Heat And Drought : Consider This from NPR

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For the second weekend in a row, parts of the American West will be gripped by historic heat, coming in the second decade of megadrought that has gripped the region for 22 years.Wildfire is an obvious threat - but there are other consequences of extreme heat and drought, as smaller snowmelts and lower reservoirs lead to water cutbacks and more expensive electricity.

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The heat wave that hit America’s Pacific Northwest 

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The heat wave that hit America’s Pacific Northwest 

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New York Times Daily | July 14th 2021

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transcript

The Heat Wave That Hit the Pacific Northwest

Hosted by Astead W. Herndon; produced by Annie Brown, Jessica Cheung, Rachelle Bonja and Asthaa Chaturvedi; edited by Liz O. Baylen and Paige Cowett; and engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Shawn Hubler.

Record-breaking climate extremes, from heat to drought to wildfires, are blanketing the United States this summer. This is how one region has been struck.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today: Record-breaking climate extremes are blanketing the United States this summer - from heat, to drought, to wildfires. Astead Herndon spoke with our colleagues, Sergio Olmos, about the historic heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest, and to Henry Fountain about how much climate change is to blame.

It's Wednesday, July 14.

astead herndon

Sergio, I feel like Portland has been basically at the center of every national news story recently.

sergio olmos

Well, we had a pretty extreme year in Portland. We had Covid shutdowns, 100 days of consecutive protests. Then we had historic wildfires where the sky just turned red. And then, finally, the city is starting to open back up again. Covid restrictions are starting to get lifted. People are starting to come out of their houses, go to restaurants, go to bars, and regular life was resuming a little bit. And then this massive heat wave just descends on the Pacific Northwest in late June.

sergio olmos

It's Oregon, Washington and parts of Western Canada, and it brings this punishing heat.

archived recording 1

Portland hit an all-time record high of 112 earlier today.

archived recording 2

Today in Portland, Oregon, temperatures soared to 114 degrees.

archived recording 3

Portland hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, making it one of the hottest places in the world.

sergio olmos

In Portland, we saw temperatures for three days in a row break record after record, and it finally got to 116 degrees.

sergio olmos

You know, 116 degrees is like 40 degrees above what it should normally be for this time of the year.

astead herndon

Wow.

sergio olmos

And that's 9 degrees above the previous record of 107.

sergio olmos

And so we see Portland thrown back into this state of emergency, right? Just like Covid or the protests, the wildfires - everything shuts down. No one's outside. And this time, it's a different catastrophe. It's heat.

astead herndon

I know reporters have this weird experience, where people are staying in, and you run out. And I know that that is a reporter's shared instinct. But can you describe what it was like over those last couple of weeks? What has it felt like, just physically being in that level of heat?

sergio olmos

Yeah it felt like, I walk out of the door, and the heat wave hits you. It's like, OK. Feels like Vegas, right? But I'm in Portland. This is the Pacific Northwest, where it's raining a lot of the time. It's cool. It's not a place you think of to buy an AC. It never gets that hot. We're not used to this. 116-degree weather is something that - the health officer here for the county explained it that bodies acclimate to heat, but it takes time. You can't just acclimate one day to the next, one week into the next. And so yeah, we're not acclimated to that, and our infrastructure's not built for it.

For instance, I was driving around, and just a few blocks from my house, in the middle of the road, the pavement just buckled. It cracked, and it rose up. And the city said it was heat-related. I don't know anything about pavement, Astead, but I assume it wasn't -

astead herndon

I've never seen it buckle, so you've already got me shocked. [LAUGHS]

sergio olmos

Public transportation here, right? So the city, ahead of time, was like, hey, public transportation is gonna be free this weekend. If you need to get to a cooling center or anything, just get on there. Don't worry about paying for it. But as soon as the heat hit, the streetcars and the trains - they stopped them because the overhead wires for the light rail system were being strained. They were only designed to work in temperatures of up to 110 degrees. And the streetcars - the cables that power them were actually melting.

astead herndon

Wow.

sergio olmos

So the city of Portland paused all trains, all streetcars, at the time they needed them the most. So it was harder for some people just to get to the cooling centers.

And there's a socioeconomic aspect to all this. There's a professor at Portland State University named Vivek Shandas, and he studies climate adaptation. And during the heat wave, he went around Portland with a thermometer. It's not the kind you buy at the store. It's a scientific-grade thermometer. And he took measurements of different parts of Portland, and he found that the wealthiest parts of Portland were, in some cases, 98, 99 degrees. Right?

And then he went to the working class parts of Portland, parts of Portland where the highest concentration of people of color, historically, have been disinvested. So not a lot of sidewalk, not a lot of tree covers, a lot of it exposed to sun, and a lot of concrete that just absorbs the sun's radiation. He found a reading of 121 degrees in the poorest neighborhoods in Portland.

[music]

And so if you look at that and look at the big picture here, the county released a map of where people died in the city. And in the poorest zip codes, the highest number of deaths occurred. And in the wealthiest zip codes, we had the lowest number of deaths occur.

astead herndon

And what do we know about the people who died? Who are there?

sergio olmos

Right now, at least 193 people have died across Oregon and Washington related to the heat. What we know is that many of the people who died were elderly, living alone, without air conditioning. Others were homeless, and others had underlying health conditions.

For example, there's a story of an 84-year-old woman in Washington state, Dorothy Galliano, who was found dead in her home. She lived alone and had no air conditioning. A friend said that she was found with the window cracked open and the TV on, and she just imagined that Dorothy was watching TV, dozed off and just didn't wake up.

Another woman, Debra Moore, was found collapsed on the sidewalk just a few steps from a house she was visiting. And the police said that she had serious, underlying health issues. You have the story of a houseless man, Joseph Wade Davis, who's 64. And he had just this tent on the side of the road with PVC pipe and tarp. And he was just discovered dead at 10 a.m.

So it's a mix of people. Obviously, the most vulnerable, elderly who were living alone without AC, homeless folks - these are the highest number. But there are other people, healthy adults, who also died, and some of them died at work.

sergio olmos

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

speaker

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

sergio olmos

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

speaker

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

sergio olmos

Sebastian Francisco Perez - he was the first reported workplace fatality related to the heat. And he died in the Willamette Valley, where he lived and worked. And so I went there to learn more about him. And it's like a farmland community there, where they grow a lot of fruit, trees and kind of the breadbasket of Oregon. And I eventually tracked down his brother-in-law and his nephew, and they were working in the field when I find them. And he tells me about Sebastian Francisco Perez.

sergio olmos

He came from Guatemala three months ago. He wanted to have children, but he couldn't afford it in Guatemala. Lived just very austere conditions. They grew their food. They didn't have any wages. Came here to try to get some money to start a family.

sergio olmos

And he owed a coyote - these are the people that help immigrants cross illegally - he owed them $8,000 for the crossing. Five to front, three after. And so he was desperate to work. And that Saturday, when it was extraordinarily hot - and a lot of farm workers could take the day off, took it.

sergio olmos

He asked to work.

sergio olmos

He was told by relatives, like, don't do it. It's too hot. He said, no, please. I need the money.

sergio olmos

That Saturday, he was moving irrigation lines in a field of trees, and his co-workers, other laborers, found him collapsed among the trees. And they called 911, but they couldn't tell the operator where he was exactly. A lot of the laborers, a lot of them immigrants, they work from farm to farm, and they get brought in together. And they don't necessarily know where they are all the time. So they called his nephew, and they said, hey, he's collapsed on the ground. We don't know what to do.

sergio olmos

He tells them, take him to the shade. I'm on my way.

sergio olmos

And -

sergio olmos

Unfortunately, they couldn't resuscitate him. He died that day.

[music]

sergio olmos

So this heat wave was kind of an opening salvo to what's going to be a catastrophic season. The west is currently in the midst of a historic drought. Another heat wave is already sweeping across California and the southwest, and fire season has already begun here in Oregon. And this is unprecedented. This is the earliest in the year that I've covered a wildfire season. There's a fire right now burning in Oregon. It's uncontained. It's already burned 150,000 acres as of Monday. And nobody expected the season to begin this early or already have been this destructive.

astead herndon

So from one climate disaster to the next?

sergio olmos

Yeah.

[music]

astead herndon

Thank you, Sergio.

sergio olmos

Thank you, Astead.

[music]

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

astead herndon

OK, Henry, I've been speaking with our colleague who has been reporting on the heat waves out in the West. There was the record-breaking one that happened in June in the Pacific Northwest and another that's underway in California. The question that's running in the back of my head is, how much of what we're seeing is related to climate change?

henry fountain

Well, you know, that's the question that journalists and others always ask after a heat wave or other kind of extreme weather event. And it's really a central question. So right after the late June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, in fact, there was actually a group of scientists trying to figure that very question out.

henry fountain

This group is called World Weather Attribution, and they held a press conference on Zoom announcing their findings. It was led by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Friederike Otto.

henry fountain

They try to figure out a link, if it exists, between the world that's warming and these extreme events, like this really, really bad heat wave. And they try to do it really quickly.

henry fountain

They think that getting it out when it's still fresh in people's minds would help people understand the problem.

astead herndon

And how exactly do they do that analysis? How do they measure the impact of climate change when it comes to a single event?

henry fountain

They use a lot of computers, basically, that run models of the world. They simulate the world. And they run some models with the world as it is today, which is, it's warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit because we've poured all this CO2 into the atmosphere. They also run models of a world that would exist if we hadn't pumped all that CO2 in the atmosphere - in other words, a world without warming. And then they compare the two results.

So for instance, if a heat wave like this had a 1 in 100 chance of occurring in any given year in a world that hadn't warmed, and in a world that warmed it has a 1 in 10 chance of happening in a given year, then you know that climate change had an impact.

astead herndon

So when these scientists ran this model, what did they find?

henry fountain

Well, what you've got to understand about this heat wave - it was really off the charts. It was extraordinary.

henry fountain

And when they ran the analysis, the results were clear.

henry fountain

This extreme heat wave in this place would have been impossible before we started warming the world.

henry fountain

So it was still a rare event, but 100 years ago, it was an impossible event. And that's because the world has warmed.

henry fountain

And what these researchers have also found is that heat waves are more affected by climate change than any other extreme weather.

henry fountain

And she said that heat waves, more than any other type of climate-related natural disaster, are not only more likely, but they also tend to kill more people.

henry fountain

Just think about it. A flood might affect a relatively small region, area near a river, whatever. But a heat wave can cover a huge amount of area. In this Pacific Northwest heat wave that ended in the end of June, everybody in Oregon, everybody in the state of Washington, and most of the people in British Columbia were affected. So I think the researchers estimated that that was something like nine million people, and that's really a lot of potential victims of extreme heat. And so all of this has these scientists concerned.

henry fountain

You know, I've covered a bunch of these attribution studies, and I've talked to a lot of scientists about them. And normally, it's pretty straightforward. But there's one thing Dr. Van Oldenborgh said that really struck me, and I frankly I kind of found it alarming.

henry fountain

Essentially, he said, like, after this heat wave, it was so unusual, so extreme, we're not sure we really understand heat waves anymore. Like, it's really kind of jolted us in our certainty of the way heat waves behave.

astead herndon

Henry, it sounds like what you're saying is what really surprised you is the fact that the scientists themselves were surprised, and that they were saying the heat wave that was just experienced in the Northwest may have actually changed their understanding of how these operate. What exactly are we saying, though? How is this heat wave possibly different than ones that we have seen previously?

henry fountain

So what we'd expect with a kind of quote, unquote, "normal" heat wave is that, as the average baseline temperature goes up, you'd expect the hottest, record-breaking temperatures to go up at about the same rate more or less. But with this heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, the highest temperatures broke the record not by a couple of degrees, but by as many as 9 degrees.

So the scientists are trying to figure out what's going on here, and they say there's really only two possibilities.

henry fountain

Maybe it's just this confluence of bad luck, as they put it.

henry fountain

The Pacific Northwest had a heat wave that was compounded by the drought that's been going on in the West, and the jet stream was acting funny or whatever, and maybe that's the case. And in that case, maybe it's not such a concern.

henry fountain

But if it's some other mechanism, some other threshold idea, that's a concern. Maybe this one time of it now becomes once every five years or 10 years or once a year or whatever. So that's the fundamental issue they're trying to figure out. More and more, I think this heat wave is a big deal. It's like a seminal event, really. Kind of like a big volcanic eruption or something, and it's going to be studied for a long time because it was so unusual. And they've got to figure out why.

astead herndon

So what's most alarming about their findings is that it could mean that we have hit a sort of tipping point.

henry fountain

It's not necessarily that we've hit a tipping point. But the thing that really stuns a lot of climate scientists, and it certainly stuns a lot of people, is how fast things are happening. I'm guilty of this, too. I've been writing about climate change for a while, and it was always like, yeah, the big impacts are going to be in the middle of the century. Well, the big impacts are starting now. And it's obvious now that the impacts are hitting us, but it seems like they're sort of accelerating. So whether we've passed a tipping point or not, I don't know. But we're in a bad state right now where bad climate events are happening, and what we thought would happen in the future is happening now.

astead herndon

Hm. This makes me think back to the beginning of our conversation, when you were talking about all of those scientists who are rushing to get information out to the public after each of these extreme weather events. There seems to be an optimism at the core of that effort, a belief that, with a little more information, with a little more knowledge, that policymakers and the public will care more about this issue - will push people to do something. But I guess I'm wondering, is that true? Is this really a problem of lack of information?

henry fountain

Well, a couple of things. Scientists are scientists, right? They're like men and women who believe in empirical thought and experimentation and getting data and analyzing it, and figuring out what's going on and explaining it. If they're optimistic, they think they're going to do what they can do, which is explain the world - the way it is, the physical world, the warming world - to people.

And then there are some scientists who then take that and use it to go out and directly influence the policy makers, like they go lobby Congress or whatever. But there's a lot who just think, I'm going to do my job, and then it's up to the public and the public's elected officials to do their job and deal with it. And, you know, I think you've seen some of that. Scientists have gotten better about explaining what's going on more quickly. And this whole attribution study by this group - I mean, that's their goal.

But what's really going to change people's minds is the more they're personally affected by things like heat waves or floods or droughts, particularly if they keep happening or if, God forbid, they lose a loved one to a flood or to a heat wave.

astead herndon

I guess the "glass half full" read is that, as these things like heat waves become more tangible in people's lives, then something will be done. But that same view also means that a lot of bad things are going to happen to people before they really come to know the bad effects of climate change. And we know that the people who are most likely to experience those negative effects are the people who are most vulnerable in our communities - the people who are most unheard, the people who have the least amount of political power to do something about it.

henry fountain

You know, sadly, I think that's really true.

[music]

The poorest and most disadvantaged people in society tend to suffer the most from all kinds of climate-related disasters, and heat waves are really no exception. And what we've learned is that as the world continues to warm, heat waves are going to continue to increase in frequency and get hotter, and we may even see more events like this one in the Pacific Northwest with really off-the-charts, extreme heat. And that doesn't bode well for all of society, but it's especially bad news for the poorest and disadvantaged among us.

astead herndon

Thank you, Henry, for your time.

henry fountain

Well, thanks. Nice talking to you.

[music]

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

michael barbaro

In a speech delivered on Tuesday in Philadelphia, President Biden issued his most forceful denunciation to date of Republican efforts to restrict voting in states across the country and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory.

michael barbaro

The speech was designed to reassure Democrats, who say Biden has failed to deliver on a promise to make voting rights a central theme of his presidency. And it comes as Republican lawmakers in Texas try to adopt voting restrictions over the objections of their Democratic colleagues, many of whom have fled the state to block the legislation.

michael barbaro

Today's episode was produced by Annie Brown, Jessica Cheung, Rachelle Bonja, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Austin Mitchell. It was edited by Liz O. Baylen and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Shawn Hubler.

[music]

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Record-breaking climate extremes, from heat to drought to wildfires, are blanketing the United States this summer. This is how one region has been struck.

Hosted by Astead W. Herndon; produced by Annie Brown, Jessica Cheung, Rachelle Bonja and Asthaa Chaturvedi; edited by Liz O. Baylen and Paige Cowett; and engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Shawn Hubler.

The heat wave that hit America's Pacific Northwest this summer took many by surprise.

Places that are usually cool and often rainy, such as Oregon and Washington, were covered by a blanket of heat in the triple digits - an extreme heat that damaged infrastructure and claimed 193 lives.

After the temperatures soared, a group of scientists quickly came together to answer a question that was on the minds of many: How much is climate change to blame?

Henry Fountain, a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

Sergio Olmos, a freelancer for The Times.

Image

Wildland firefighters watching as a plane dropped fire retardant on Harlow Ridge above the Lick Creek Fire, southwest of Asotin, Wash. The fire had burned over 50,000 acres in the southeast of the state as of Monday. Credit... Pete Caster/Lewiston Tribune, via Associated Press

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page. Here's how.

Henry Fountain and Sergio Olmos contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo and Rob Szypko.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Theo Balcomb, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman and Wendy Dorr.

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The Heat Wave That Hit the Pacific Northwest

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transcript Record-breaking climate extremes, from heat to drought to wildfires, are blanketing the United States this summer. This is how one region has been struck. michael barbaro From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. [music] Today: Record-breaking climate extremes are blanketing the United States this summer - from heat, to drought, to wildfires.

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Climate One | June 25th, 2021

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Last week's heat wave across the western United States busted more records - a trend that doesn't seem to be going away.

Despite the serious threats extreme heat presents to our health, livelihoods and economy, we tend to perceive intense heat events differently from other climate disasters, says Kathy Baughman-McLeod, senior vice president and director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

"[Heat events] don't have the drama that a flood or hurricane has. It just doesn't have the visual nature," she says.

In 2020, the center created the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, which aims to build a network of city leaders and experts to tackle the growing threat of extreme urban heat around the world.

Because heat disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, "a chief heat officer wakes up every day thinking about how to protect people and their livelihoods, especially vulnerable people," Baughman-McLeod says. "We need to be heat risk informed: what are the risks, who is most at risk, where are they, what are the interventions that can help protect them, how much they cost, how do we pay for it, how do we coordinate and learn from other cities that are doing this?"

Miami-Dade County is one of the places that has joined the alliance. Physician Cheryl Holder is co-chair of Miami-Dade's new Heat-Health Task Force and has spent decades working with populations more at risk for heat impacts.

"The people who are doing the work outdoors, the people who work at the service level, the people who you hear about the coronavirus who are now called the 'frontline workers,' that's always been my people that I've cared for," Holder says.

Holder says she uses a mnemonic with her patients to understand the myriad effects of heat.

"It's called HEAT WAVE and each of those letters stand for the main areas that this climate is impacting us," she says, from heat illness to worsening allergies to waterborne and vector-borne disease and the exacerbation of mental health complaints.

Holder says she's working to convince her peers, particularly older doctors, about the risk of extreme heat and climate change on their patients and practices. She also advocates for better heat warning systems and equity-driven education outreach measures.

Meanwhile, farmers in the nation's heartland are trying to figure out what their future holds. Dennis Todey is director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub. He says the region is experiencing more heat, especially in the form of higher overnight temperatures and higher humidity.

"That humidity actually is helpful for crops," like corn and soybeans, he says. "But that humidity issue for humans and livestock or animals is a whole other set of problems."

Todey says farmers are aware of the changing conditions and working to figure out how to respond to them.

"We know that there are natural variabilities and varies from year to year. So, agriculture does try to deal with those. The problem we're having now is some of those variations and some of those changes are becoming larger and harder to deal with."

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Last week's heat wave across the western United States busted more records - a trend that doesn't seem to be going away. Despite the serious threats extreme heat presents to our health, livelihoods and economy, we tend to perceive intense heat events differently from other climate disasters, says Kathy Baughman-McLeod, senior vice president and director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

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When you see our little frog seal on a product, you're probably aware that it signifies something positive. But have you ever wanted to know more about what's behind the seal-and exactly how choosing a product bearing the Rainforest Alliance Certified seal helps people and nature thrive in harmony?

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Fate, GrowEastAfrica, Ethiopia

Fate is a farmer who has forged a new livelihood from the resources and education she accessed through GrowEastAfrica, an SPI partner in Ethiopia. Building upon her training, she's stepped into leadership with the Soyama Women's Association. She shares:

"Just a few years ago, we were a community that was worried about what we would eat tomorrow and what the future looks like. Today, not only are we growing our own food, but we're making plans for the future of our people and our community. We are creating markets for ourselves, we're inspiring and empowering each other, and we're saving money and contributing to our own development. Because of the support from Seed Programs International and Yohannes, we now have access to water where there was none. We're building on what we've already accomplished to include neighboring villages and communities. Hope has come back to us, and we hope to grow our project so everyone - us, our communities, our villages and our country - can become fully self-reliant. We have reached this place because of the support of many people that we will never meet. It is all thanks you to you. Thank you for choosing to invest in our community and in our well-being."

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Why Sow Seeds to Fight World Hunger? - Seed Programs International

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Fate is a farmer who has forged a new livelihood from the resources and education she accessed through GrowEastAfrica, an SPI partner in Ethiopia. Building upon her training, she's stepped into leadership with the Soyama Women's Association. She shares: "Just a few years ago, we were a community that was worried about what we would eat tomorrow and what the future looks like.

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Advancing Drought Science and Preparedness Across the Nation

The National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is a multi-agency partnership that coordinates drought monitoring, forecasting, planning, and information at national, tribal, state, and local levels.

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Advancing Drought Science and Preparedness Across the Nation The National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is a multi-agency partnership that coordinates drought monitoring, forecasting, planning, and information at national, tribal, state, and local levels.

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C2ES - Center for Climate and Energy Solutions

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C2ES - Center for Climate and Energy Solutions

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In the face of increasing climate impacts, climate resilience is critical for communities and businesses to thrive. C2ES advances new resilience strategies, provides leading policy analysis, and convenes stakeholders around emerging challenges to build broad support for action and make investment in resilience a clear choice for public and private decision-makers.

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Decoding the Weather Machine

PBS Airdate: April 18, 2018

PAUL DOUGLAS (Meteorologist): Most people sense a change in the weather. It's not your imagination.

NARRATOR: Megastorms, droughts, fires...

JOHN HOLDREN (Harvard University): We're seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.

PAUL DOUGLAS: How many times does that have to happen before it's not a fluke, but it's a trend?

NARRATOR: ...is this trend the new normal?

HEIDI CULLEN (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute): Our planet did not come with a manual of how it all works.

NARRATOR: To understand how it works, NOVA explores one of the greatest scientific quests of all time...

ANDREA SELLA (University College London): This is the essence of science.

NARRATOR: ...a global investigation of our climate machine...

PILOT: Looking good back there?

NARRATOR: ...and how it determines our weather.

GREG ASNER (Carnegie Institution for Science): Yeah, super clean data.

The technology is a huge leap forward. It's game changing.

STEPHEN PACALA (Princeton University): It's just been like flipping on the lights.

NARRATOR: It is a historic adventure...

JOHN HOLDREN: The science goes back almost 200 years.

RALPH KEELING (Scripps Institution of Oceanography): It was one of these things waiting to be discovered.

NARRATOR: ...probing deep into our natural world...

ED BROOK (Oregon State University): There's really nothing like it in science.

NARRATOR: ...looking for clues, from Greenland's ice sheet...

BRIAN ROUGEUX (Mountaineer): The only way out of there is that helicopter. You're certainly not walking out.

NARRATOR: ...to the desert of Australia...

ANDREA DUTTON (University of Florida): That gives us a really important window into the past.

NARRATOR: ...the stakes are high, yet the outcome: uncertain.

PAUL DOUGLAS: We're poking at the climate system with a long, sharp, carbon-tipped spear.

JOHN HOLDREN: And we cannot perfectly predict all of the consequences.

NARRATOR: Can these discoveries show us where our planet is headed?

ANDREA DUTTON: What gives me hope is that we understand this, so we actually can do something about it.

STEPHEN PACALA: It's a planetary crisis, but we're clever enough to think our way out of this.

NARRATOR: Right now on NOVA, Decoding the Weather Machine.

At a weather studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota, there is a storm brewing...

PAUL DOUGLAS: The models aren't sure where this thing is going.

NARRATOR: ...and T.V. meteorologist Paul Douglas is trying to predict its path.

PAUL DOUGLAS: There's the eye. So it's moving more northwest.

METEOROLOGIST: It's still a very strong tropical storm.

PAUL DOUGLAS: I don't think anybody in their right mind sets out to be a meteorologist.

Meteorologist Paul Douglas with an update on Irma...

I am going to be wrong frequently, and people will second-guess me, and I will get verbal abuse.

...and of course the big story: Marco. The damage quite extensive.

Predicting the future...

...140 miles an hour...

...it's not for the faint of heart!

NARRATOR: ...because the weather these days is not for the faint of heart, either.

PAUL DOUGLAS: ...all the ingredients converging to turn this into a true superstorm.

NARRATOR: While Paul is reporting on a Category 5 hurricane threatening the U.S....

METEOROLOGIST 1: Once again, smoke dominating...

NARRATOR: ...his team is also reporting on wildfires in the west...

METEOROLOGIST 1: We've got a multitude of active large fires, not only...

NARRATOR: ...and another megastorm en route.

METEOROLOGIST 2: It could be making a very close call with the Bahamas. We'll keep you up to date.

PAUL DOUGLAS: It's an atmospheric free-for-all.

NEWS REPORT: Now, the Twin Cities' fastest growing television news...

NARRATOR: Over nearly four decades of blizzards, hurricanes and floods, Paul has seen it all.

PAUL DOUGLAS: (Film Clip) It may have been the most extreme outbreak of heat and humidity on record...

...worst blizzard of the century...

NARRATOR: But over the years, storm by storm, Paul began to develop an uneasy feeling. He wondered was something up with the weather.

PAUL DOUGLAS: The rhythm of the atmosphere was off. We were seeing more freakish weather; storms were stronger and wetter. It wasn't the old-fashioned minus-20, minus-30 winters anymore. It was raining in January. How many times does that have to happen before it's not a fluke, but it's a trend?

NARRATOR: Douglas had heard about global warming, but given all the crazy weather he'd experienced, he was skeptical. And he's not alone. A third of Americans doubt humans are changing the climate.

MINISTER: We pray that you awaken us...

NARRATOR: Douglas understands where they're coming from. Many in his community of Christian conservatives are distrustful of big government.

PAUL DOUGLAS: A lot of the pushback is because when people look at climate change, they think, "Oh, my god! If this is true, the only possible solution is more government, more regulation, E.P.A. times 100."

NARRATOR: But dealing with the weather, day in and day out, forced Douglas to confront a question we all ultimately face: is the frequency of powerful storms and odd weather patterns just normal weather variability...

NEWS REPORT 1: Why has this gotten so big and so ferocious?

NARRATOR: ...or is it a new normal?

NEWS REPORT 2: ...shut down almost 30 roads.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Most people sense a change in the weather. The weather's out of tune.

NARRATOR: So, how can we decode these changes?

Douglas is not the only one noticing changes.

Seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade; wildfires are at an all-time high, while Arctic Sea ice is rapidly diminishing.

JOHN HOLDREN: We are seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD (University of Georgia): When it rains really hard, it's harder than ever.

KATHARINE HAYHOE (Texas Tech University): We're seeing glaciers melting, sea level rising.

JOHN HOLDREN: The length and the intensity of heatwaves has gone up dramatically.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Plants and trees are flowering earlier in the year. Birds are moving polewards.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: We're seeing more intense storms.

NARRATOR: Changes like these have led an overwhelming majority of climate scientists to an alarming conclusion: it isn't just the weather that's changing, it's what drives the weather, Earth's climate.

JOHN HOLDREN: Climate change is happening now and the damage is happening now.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: People notice extremes, and climate change is increasing the risk or probability of certain types of extreme weather events.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: If we look all around us, we see over twenty-six-and-a-half-thousand independent lines of evidence that the planet is warming.

NARRATOR: But while there may be evidence for a changing climate, hasn't Earth's climate always been changing? Glacier expert David Holland says the evidence for that is as solid as rock.

Walking through Central Park in New York City, he finds a huge boulder impossibly balanced on bedrock.

DAVID HOLLAND (New York University): It's a different type of rock than any rock that we can see in the neighborhood. This rock was clearly transported here by some mechanism.

NARRATOR: And the mechanism powerful enough to carry this huge boulder was a glacier, a vast sheet of ice.

DAVID HOLLAND: Unquestionably, there was a very large glacier over Manhattan almost 20,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: Twenty-thousand years ago, New York City looked very different from today. It was a much colder place, covered by ice that extended down from the North Pole.

FIELD PALEONTOLOGIST: ...and very carefully. Oh yeah, look at that!

NARRATOR: And there is evidence that millions of years before that, the Arctic was completely different, too. Fossils have been found of palm trees in a place now famous for ice and snow, Alaska.

Earth's history is full of dramatic swings from hot to cold, so isn't today's changing climate just natural? The scientific evidence says no and points to a very different cause: us, primarily through our burning of fossil fuels.

That's a serious charge, and addressing it will be enormously expensive. So what is that evidence?

The quest to understand what is behind our changing climate began, surprisingly, more than 200 years ago.

ANDREA SELLA: At the end of the 18th century, there's really this, this flowering of fundamental exploration of science of all kinds.

NARRATOR: Andrea Sella, a chemist at University College London, says scientists at the time were out exploring the natural world and what factors control Earth's climate.

ANDREA SELLA: And one of the things that is very interesting, at the time, is this idea of what heat actually is. People were beginning to realize that there are these invisible radiations that can convey heat. Today, we call it infrared radiation. It's what you feel when you're standing in front of a roaring fire, but it's invisible to our eyes.

NARRATOR: A Frenchman named Joseph Fourier, science advisor to Napoleon Bonaparte, wanted to understand if these invisible radiations of heat helped determine Earth's temperature.

He reasoned that if sunlight just warmed Earth, the heat should build up, and the planet would be intolerably hot, but if all the heat coming in radiated right back out to space, our planet would be cold.

ANDREA SELLA: Fourier sets up the first kind of scheme for understanding that balance between energy in and energy going out.

NARRATOR: Fourier was intrigued by a simple experiment with a dark box, a thermometer and a pane of glass that could explain how Earth's temperature was set.

ANDREA SELLA: The really striking thing is that when he turns it towards the sun, the temperature of the thermometer goes up and up and up. If he takes the thermometer out, the air is very cool, but when he puts it back in, the temperature rises again.

NARRATOR: Why does the air inside the box heat up? The glass must be allowing heat from sunlight into the box and trapping some of it.

Fourier wondered if something similar in the atmosphere was doing the same thing as that pane of glass, helping to regulate Earth's thermostat. While not exactly how our planet works, this metaphor was a first step in figuring out our climate.

Earth's climate is set by a complex interaction among its four major components: land, sea, ice and the atmosphere, or air.

Fourier had zeroed in on the role of air.

JOHN HOLDREN: In 1824, Fourier was the first to deduce that it's the composition of the atmosphere that governs the surface temperature of the earth; 1824, almost 200 years ago, and climate science has been accumulating ever since.

ANDREA SELLA: He plants a seed, this idea that the atmosphere is trapping some of the heat that comes down from the sun. And the real question is how does that happen?

NARRATOR: Forty years later, John Tyndall, another prominent scientist, discovered a clue about how Earth's atmosphere is heated, with an experiment at London's famous Royal Institution.

ANDREA SELLA: The Royal Institution was a place which combines cutting edge science and the equivalent of TED Talks of today, public lectures in which the latest science could be communicated to the common man.

NARRATOR: Tyndall wanted to figure out if a gas in the atmosphere was trapping heat like that pane of glass. After making a breakthrough in his lab, Tyndall quickly went public with a dramatic live presentation.

ANDREA SELLA: He presents it to the public. You know, "Here is the latest science," and he is redoing the experiment step by step and explaining his thought process.

NARRATOR: Tyndall's original lab equipment is still housed at the Royal Institution, and Sella has dusted it off to bring this famous experiment back to life.

ANDREA SELLA: This is the business end of the whole experiment. It's what's called a "thermopile," and it was something that had only recently been invented.

NARRATOR: Two sensors inside measure heat.

ANDREA SELLA: If there's a difference in temperature between one side and the other, what it does, it produces a little voltage, and an electrical current is going to flow down these wires, and then you can measure it, using a voltmeter.

NARRATOR: Tyndall's idea was to use this sensor to measure the temperature difference between two sources of heat. On one side was a tube that he could fill with different gases.

ANDREA SELLA: What he does is he lets in a gas into the tube. He starts with air, then he moves on to nitrogen, to oxygen, essentially to every gas he can think of.

NARRATOR: To Tyndall's surprise, when he tested the two gases that make up 99 percent of the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, the needle on the voltmeter didn't budge. Those gases had no effect on the heat.

Tyndall then tested a gas that exists in only trace amounts in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide.

ANDREA SELLA: And when he does carbon dioxide, he realizes that the radiant heat from that end doesn't make it through to the thermopile. In other words, what he's got, he's got his hands on a substance which will trap heat in the sky.

NARRATOR: Tyndall had solved the mystery posed by Fourier's glass box. It was carbon dioxide and a few other trace gases, like water vapor, that trap heat radiating off the planet. These gases, called "greenhouse" gases, exist naturally. Sunlight passes through them and warms our planet.

That heat radiates back out as infrared light, but some of the heat gets trapped by the greenhouse gases and they help warm Earth like a blanket.

At the time of Tyndall's discovery, England was being transformed by an industrial revolution that has changed the way we work and live. That revolution was powered by burning coal and oil.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Tyndall figured out that carbon dioxide traps heat. But even more importantly, Tyndall realized that when we dig up coal and burn it, it's actually releasing more of these heat-trapping gases.

NARRATOR: Coal and oil are formed mainly from small plants and algae and are mostly made of carbon.

After being buried for millions of years, when that coal or oil is burned, the carbon reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. That is released back to the atmosphere, adding more greenhouse gases. These gases, in turn, act like an extra blanket, trapping more heat. But how much of this heat trapping gas is there, and what impact does it have?

To figure that out, climate research would need to be taken to new heights, literally.

Ralph Keeling, of the Scripps Institution in San Diego, has come to Hawaii to see just how much carbon dioxide is in the air and if that amount is changing.

Perched on a volcano, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory is one of the most important atmospheric research sites in the world.

RALPH KEELING: It is almost like a pole, two miles high, sticking up from the middle of the ocean. So, we are above this cloud layer, and for sampling carbon dioxide and getting numbers that are representative of a really big picture, it's nice to be away from the surface, so you are away from all these local influences that might change the carbon dioxide levels.

NARRATOR: Samples are continually drawn from the air and analyzed, which can reveal clues about the health and functioning of our planet.

RALPH KEELING: We are, basically, measuring a vital sign of the earth, by probing deep into the core of the atmosphere.

NARRATOR: This atmospheric measurement was pioneered by Ralph's father, Dave Keeling, in the 1950s. His great innovation was to figure out a way to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.

RALPH KEELING: He developed an apparatus that allowed him to do more precise measurements than had ever been done before.

NARRATOR: But could such an extremely sensitive measurement be taken in this remote location, serviced by one unpaved road?

RALPH KEELING: It was a remote site. A lot could go wrong. So, it was a pretty nervous time as to whether things were really functioning.

NARRATOR: At first, everything ran smoothly, and the measurements were exactly as he expected, but then something happened.

RALPH KEELING: The generator in the station failed. And the next time the generator came on, the measurement was drifting downwards. And he was thinking, "Oh, no, something erratic with the instrumentation. We don't really know how this is working." And then there was another power outage, and it started in an even lower level. Now it is drifting upwards. It looked problematic, to say the least.

NARRATOR: Ralph's father, Dave, didn't know what to make of these erratic results, but he kept going. Several months later, the measurements started going down again. Suddenly, the answer dawned on him. Instead of a bad measurement, it was a whole new discovery.

RALPH KEELING: By the beginning of the next year, he realized, "Oh, this is just the seasons. I'm seeing the seasons. It is real. It's not a bad instrument."

NARRATOR: Dave Keeling's instruments were working perfectly, so much so that they had detected a subtle interaction between plants and the atmosphere.

Trees breathe in carbon dioxide, drawing it out of the atmosphere, and use the carbon to grow leaves in the spring. In the fall, when the leaves die and decompose, some of that carbon goes back into the atmosphere.

This annual rise and fall of carbon dioxide is what Dave Keeling discovered. It is the breath of the world's forests.

RALPH KEELING: It never occurred to him that he would see this. It was one of these things that it was just waiting to be discovered.

NARRATOR: That breath can be seen today with images created from NASA satellite data. These clouds are carbon dioxide moving through the atmosphere. Red shows the highest concentrations.

Over the northern hemisphere, you can see the forests absorb carbon dioxide in the spring and summer and release it in the fall.

The breath of the forests explains the zigzags in the "Keeling Curve." But the measurements also revealed something alarming: the zigzagging curve was increasing each year.

RALPH KEELING: You see the wiggle is already up and down in the first few years. And if you look at it over this now almost 60-year timeframe, you see that it is accelerating upwards.

JOHN HOLDREN: The Keeling Curve established, without question, that the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was going up steeply, sharply, rapidly.

NARRATOR: But how unusual is this rapid rise? Keeling's measurements go back 60 years, but that's still only a tiny window on Earth's vast climate history. To put that rise in perspective, we would need a time capsule deep into Earth's past.

Fortunately, there is one, only it's buried in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, the interior of Antarctica.

ED BROOK: The interior is like being at sea. It's just this immense mass of ice. It's just really an astonishing thing to see.

NARRATOR: But geologist Ed Brook, of Oregon State University, doesn't come here for the scenery. He and other polar scientists are on the hunt for ancient air, captured in ice. These expeditions can last years, and reach deep below the surface.

ED BROOK: The ice drill can drill down into the ice sheet, break off a core and bring it back to the surface. We take out ice yard by yard, and the deepest ice cores are over two miles deep.

NARRATOR: Snowfall builds up in layers each year and is compressed to form huge ice sheets. So, drilling down two miles can reach back to snow that fell a very long time ago.

JOHN HOLDREN: And in those layers, there are gas bubbles that are trapped. And we can now analyze the composition of those gas bubbles and understand what the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. In the Antarctic ice sheet, we can go back 800,000 years.

NARRATOR: Back in Ed's freezer, samples of ice are selected and prepared for analysis. Clearly visible within them are tiny precious bubbles of ancient air.

ED BROOK: I never get tired of looking at the bubbles. It's remarkable that we have this old atmosphere in our freezers.

NARRATOR: Crushing or melting the ice releases the air.

ED BROOK: There's really nothing like it in science. Normally, we have to make, kind of, indirect inferences about the past. But in this case, we have these tiny capsules of air that we can directly measure.

NARRATOR: When Ed measures the recent levels of carbon dioxide in the samples, it confirms Keeling's data. Over the last 60 years, the trend is the same.

ED BROOK: The ice core record connects directly with the Keeling Curve, which is one of the reasons we know the ice core record is so good, because the data show the same thing.

NARRATOR: But these ice cores can extend the Keeling Curve back in time and reveal that today's concentration of carbon dioxide is unusually high.

JOHN HOLDREN: The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for 800,000 years.

NARRATOR: But it also shows something else, an overall pattern with levels of carbon dioxide rising and falling.

ED BROOK: The pattern repeats itself. There are small variations. Each cycle is a little bit different, but they're not random-looking at all. They're actually quite regular.

NARRATOR: This regular pattern raises an important question: what does it have to do with climate?

One way to get at that is to compare carbon dioxide levels with past temperature. Andrea Dutton, of the University of Florida, is looking for clues about Earth's past temperatures in seashells.

ANDREA DUTTON: I consider myself a detective of the earth. We're looking for clues and the pieces to put together the puzzle of what happened in the past.

NARRATOR: Andrea can analyze the chemistry of the shells to reveal Earth's past climate.

ANDREA DUTTON: You can see growth bands that show every year in the life of this clamshell.

NARRATOR: Like tree rings, these layers reflect how clams build their shells. Encoded in each layer is chemical information about the temperature of the water. As shells grow, they incorporate oxygen from the seawater.

Oxygen comes in different forms: one is oxygen-16. It has eight protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus. Another form, oxygen-18, has two extra neutrons. The colder the water, the more oxygen-18 is incorporated in the shell. This difference allows Andrea to determine the temperature when it formed.

ANDREA DUTTON: I could take a clamshell that is 50-million years old and tell you how warm it was in the summer and how cold it was in the winter, within a single year.

NARRATOR: Each shell provides a brief snapshot of Earth's climate.

But to build the full picture of past temperatures requires digging up millions of other, even more plentiful shells, at the bottom of the sea, where they have accumulated over time. Research vessels drill deep into the seafloor and pull up cores of this sediment, which are then carefully archived in vast libraries of mud.

DANIEL SCHRAG (Harvard University): The floor of the ocean is essentially a tape recorder, because there are organisms that grow either in the surface water and fall down into the sediment or on the bottom of the ocean. And we can take those fossil shells, measure their chemistry and reconstruct what the temperature of that ancient seawater was so long ago.

NARRATOR: Back in Andrea's lab, she sifts through the ancient mud, searching for these tiny fossil shells.

ANDREA DUTTON: You spend hours and hours and hours picking out these tiny little shells, so that we can analyze the chemistry of those shells to understand the temperature in the past.

NARRATOR: From this ocean mud, emerges a record of temperature that goes back tens of millions of years.

DANIEL SCHRAG: You can take different cores from different places all over the ocean and synthesize them in one grand record.

NARRATOR: That record shows temperature swings from warm periods to ice ages triggered by changes in Earth's orbit. But when these temperature changes are paired with the levels of carbon dioxide from ice cores, a startling correlation emerges. The two graphs are a near perfect match.

ED BROOK: When we look at the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide, they change, essentially, at the same time.

ANDREA DUTTON: As CO2 goes down, so does the temperature. As the carbon dioxide ramps up, the temperature ramps up again.

NARRATOR: Other lines of evidence confirm this correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide. When dinosaurs ruled the earth, it was much hotter than today, and levels of carbon dioxide were higher, too.

DANIEL SCHRAG: Carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate.

NARRATOR: Just as Tyndall's discovery predicted, a key factor in regulating Earth's thermostat is the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As carbon dioxide goes up, so does temperature, resulting in a warmer climate. And the level measured today is higher than it has been in at least 800,000 years and it's rising fast.

So what is causing this increase?

Earth's orbit can trigger the increase in temperature and carbon dioxide, but is not in the right phase to do so.

There are other natural sources that pump carbon into the air, like volcanoes, the decay of forests or huge fires. And there is the carbon that we have been pumping into the air since the industrial revolution through the burning of fossil fuels. Which of these is the culprit for today's rising carbon dioxide levels, and how can we tell?

Back in Hawaii, Ralph Keeling is working to figure that out by collecting and analyzing samples of air.

RALPH KEELING: Air may not look like anything, but it's rich with different molecules. There is just an enormous amount of information content in one sample of air, if you can take it all apart.

NARRATOR: Ralph collects air in vacuum-sealed chambers, releasing the valve to pull in a sample. Just as ancient seashells have different types of oxygen, air contains carbon atoms with different numbers of neutrons. By analyzing the ratio of those different carbon atoms, Ralph can determine if the source of the carbon is ancient or not.

Carbon released from burning coal or oil made from deposits buried for millions of years is ancient.

RALPH KEELING: Fossil fuels have been locked up underground for millions of years. So, when we emit fossil fuels into the atmosphere, we're emitting carbon that is very different. It has a very distinct fingerprint.

NARRATOR: This chemical fingerprint and many other lines of evidence leave no doubt that we are responsible for the skyrocketing levels of carbon dioxide.

JOHN HOLDREN: It is a slam-dunk. We know without question that humans are responsible for the big increases in heat trapping gases in the atmosphere. And that's not just theory, that's not projection; it's observations.

NARRATOR: But ultimately, the question is how much will these changes really impact our earth?

DANIEL SCHRAG: When Dave Keeling started measuring atmospheric CO2, in the late 50s, the idea that humans were profoundly affecting the entire atmosphere in a way that was significant for the earth's climate was almost unthinkable. I still think, even today, some people resist the idea on the grounds that, you know, how could humans actually change something as enormous as the earth?

NARRATOR: One of those doubters, by his own admission, was weatherman Paul Douglas, in Minnesota.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Like politics, all weather is local. We live in our bubbles, you know? We wake up, we look outside the window, and we take note of the weather.

Look at this sprawling shield of cloud cover.

And it's hard to broaden your view, even for meteorologists. We tend to be fixated on one location.

NARRATOR: But for Paul, unusual storms and flooding in the Midwest signaled to him that climate change was real.

NEWS REPORT 1: The worst flooding that this area has ever seen...

NEWS REPORT 2: The devastation is massive.

NARRATOR: And it was affecting everyone, everywhere.

NEWS REPORT 3: Severe flooding has been reported across many northwestern parts of the country.

NEWS REPORT 4: Lucifer is living up to its name.

PAUL DOUGLAS: The more I looked around, the more I realized that it was nationwide. It was worldwide.

FOREIGN WEATHER REPORTS

PAUL DOUGLAS: This isn't a 30-year-down-the-road thing. It is right now. It's happening.

NARRATOR: What Paul came to realize was how these global changes in the atmosphere could be affecting his local weather patterns.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Climate and weather are flip sides of the same coin. You impact climate, it's going to impact weather.

NARRATOR: Weather is what is happening in the atmosphere at a given time and place: hot, cold, rain or snow. Climate is an average of that weather, over longer periods.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Climate is the History Channel; weather is CNN Headline News. It's a snapshot.

NARRATOR: Paul says the connection between climate change and our local weather comes down to how much heat is in Earth's system.

Always the weatherman, he takes to the green screen to explain.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Uneven heating by the sun of the earth is what drives the weather machine: intense direct sunlight over the Equator, just a glancing blow of sunlight over the northern latitudes, obviously much hotter here. Cold air wants to flow south; hot air wants to flow north. But there's a twist, and that twist is triggered by the earth spinning on its axis. The combination of heating plus the spin of the earth on its axis creates the complicated air circulations that drive our weather.

NARRATOR: It is fundamentally these two factors, Earth's spin and heat differences between the poles and the equator that create the weather patterns we know. So, if you trap more heat in the system, you change the weather.

PAUL DOUGLAS: You put more heat into the system, there are going to be consequences, like more extremes worldwide. Weather that would have formed anyway is now super-sized.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: There are certain conditions that may be enhancing larger storms. We can expect more intense hurricanes going forward, as our climate system warms.

PAUL DOUGLAS: We're poking at the climate system with a long, sharp, carbon-tipped spear and then acting surprised, shocked, indignant when the weather bites back. And the weather will be biting back with greater ferocity, with greater frequency.

For Praedictix, I'm meteorologist Paul Douglas.

NARRATOR: As a meteorologist, Paul has made a career out of predicting the weather for the next few days.

What we need now are predictions about how our climate is changing over the next 50 years or even hundreds of years.

JOHN HOLDREN: We are more powerful than nature in the push we are putting on climate. And we don't entirely understand and cannot perfectly predict all of the consequences.

ANDREA DUTTON: It's not we're worried because it's never happened before, Earth's climate has changed. What hasn't happened before is to change it this quickly.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: We are so far outside the range of natural variability. We have not seen carbon dioxide levels like this in the history of human civilization on this planet.

DANIEL SCHRAG: We're really doing an experiment on the planet that hasn't been done for about 40-million years.

NARRATOR: Across the globe, scientists are now racing to understand and model Earth's climate system, trying to figure out just how damaging climate change will be.

From the ice sheets of Greenland to the deserts of Australia, and from Hawaii's volcanic peaks to the depths of the ocean, they are searching for clues in the land, sea, ice and air, the key elements of Earth's climate machine.

HEIDI CULLEN: Our planet did not come with a manual of how it all works, and so, much of science is trying to, kind of, take the planet apart and understand how all of these pieces work together.

The evidence is clear that by burning fossil fuels, we humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere, which is now trapping more heat. How the other parts of the climate machine will respond will determine how much our climate will change and how much the great diversity of life that it supports will be affected.

The stakes could not be higher.

ANDREA DUTTON: The planet has been here for 4.5-billion years, and it's still going to be here, but it will be a very different place. What I'm really concerned about is how humans will survive and how our lifestyles will be affected by this in the future.

RUTH GATES (Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology): We are already feeling the effects of climate change. We don't have the luxury of being a gentlemanly scientist in the 1850s. We have to make a difference right now.

NARRATOR: Can we figure out the climate crisis, before it's too late?

STEPHEN PACALA: It's a planetary crisis. And it's a crisis that we've collectively created together, but we're clever enough to think our way out of this.

PILOT: Flight instruments are set for departure, so we'll just haul this baby out.

NARRATOR: The efforts to think our way out of this and understand what the future may hold are now underway.

NARRATOR: High above the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Greg Asner, of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University, is on a mission to find out what part the land plays in Earth's climate machine.

GREG ASNER: Forests are a big part of the earth machine. To think about the world without forests would be like taking a piece of the machine out, and then the whole machine won't actually work.

NARRATOR: These forests are home to the magnificent sequoia trees.

GREG ASNER: We're currently right in this zone. And these are the great forests of the Sierras. This is where the bulk of the giant sequoia trees live.

NARRATOR: Greg's plane is a flying laboratory.

From 10,000 feet, he uses lasers to reconstruct the entire forest in 3D, capturing a million-and-a-half trees an hour.

PILOT: Looking good back there?

JOSEPH HECKLER (Asner Lab): It is looking good.

GREG ASNER: Yeah, super clean data.

The technology is a huge leap forward. It's game changing.

You can't really see what the trees are doing with the naked eye, but instrumentation lets us peel away the foliage and see the chemicals in the foliage.

NARRATOR: Greg's measurements provide a clue to one of the surprising mysteries of climate change: why aren't things actually worse?

DANIEL SCHRAG: We knew from Dave Keeling's measurements that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was rising. We knew roughly how much coal and oil and gas we had burned, and there was a certain amount of carbon dioxide that wasn't showing up in the atmosphere. Now the question is, where did it go?

NARRATOR: We can calculate how much carbon dioxide we are putting into the air, and we can measure how much carbon dioxide is in the air, but, intriguingly, those numbers do not add up.

RALPH KEELING: The increase in the atmosphere is only about 50 percent of what we're actually putting into the atmosphere. So, half of what we emit isn't even staying there. It is going somewhere else.

NARRATOR: Given how much we are emitting, levels of carbon dioxide should be much higher than they are. So where has all the carbon gone?

Finding the answer is essential to predicting our climate future.

NARRATOR: With his sensors, Greg is able to detect some of the missing carbon.

GREG ASNER: Let's focus here for a while, and, yeah, keep that on top.

NARRATOR: His instruments can peel back the canopy of the forest below, to reveal the chemical makeup of each individual tree. In this image, the red shows areas of high carbon, the blue, low carbon.

GREG ASNER: Forests soak up carbon dioxide, and they put it into wood, leaves, roots, you know, the basic building blocks of a tree. And that carbon is held in that tree.

NARRATOR: Although trees breathe in carbon dioxide in the spring and exhale it in the fall, overall, as they grow, they store some of that carbon. This helps cool the atmosphere, by reducing heat-trapping gases.

All around the world, Greg is precisely recording the carbon content of millions of trees. From this kind of research, the impact of forests has become clear: they are helping us, a lot.

GREG ASNER: Trees are soaking up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that we are putting into the atmosphere per year. And so, without that subsidy, without that service, we would actually be in a more precarious predicament, making our atmosphere even hotter.

NARRATOR: The land, part of Earth's climate machine, is playing an essential role, because trees are absorbing about 25 percent of the extra carbon dioxide that is heating our atmosphere. It turns out that the oceans are doing the same.

STEPHEN PACALA: Of every two molecules of CO2 that we put into atmosphere, one of them gets absorbed by the surface of the planet, half of it by the oceans and half of it by land. Without these, the problem would be worse than twice as bad as it is already.

NARRATOR: And there is another way that the oceans are helping us. They are absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: When we talk about warming of the climate system, we tend to focus on the atmosphere, but the lion's share of the warming of our climate system is in the ocean.

NARRATOR: Viewed from space, Earth has been described as a "blue marble." Our planet is a water world. And it is largely uncharted territory.

HEIDI CULLEN: The oceans really are our final frontier. It's 70 percent of our planet, so we have to understand what's going on there.

NARRATOR: There is no better place to understand just how the oceans dominate our climate than here in the Southern Ocean, the massive body of water encircling Antarctica.

But getting that understanding can be treacherous.

The Southern Ocean is as mysterious and inhospitable as any place on Earth.

STEPHEN RISER (University of Washington): The whole ocean is a mystery, but the Southern Ocean has been the ultimate mystery.

NARRATOR: Stephen Riser, of the University of Washington, is onboard the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer.

Stephen is one of the leaders of a multi-year, international effort to investigate how our oceans are changing. He is now zeroing in on the Southern Ocean.

STEPHEN RISER: It's a very difficult place to work. Even in good conditions, the weather is terrible. In the winter it's ice covered, so we largely have no idea what's going on under the ice. Nobody in their right mind goes there in the winter.

NARRATOR: Along with teams from around the world, he is building fleets of underwater drones, called "Argo floats," to do the work.

These robots are pioneering explorers, designed to probe parts of the earth never seen before.

CREW MEMBER 1: Back deck, this is Bridge. Go ahead.

CREW MEMBER 2: Hey, just checking in.

CREW MEMBER 1: We're right about 100 meters right now.

NARRATOR: In the Southern Ocean, Stephen launches one of these underwater floats, and then it's on its own, hopefully, for years to come.

STEPHEN RISER: The float is launched at the sea surface. It will signal to the satellite that it's okay; it will drop to a depth of 3,000 feet, drift for 10 days, then drop to 6,000 feet briefly. And then, as it ascends back to the sea surface, it will collect data all the way up, with all of its sensors on.

NARRATOR: These sensors take the vital signs of the ocean, including its chemistry and temperature. Once at the surface, the floats beam that data to a satellite, before diving back down and repeating the cycle.

STEPHEN RISER: You never know what you are going to get, but every observation is a gem in its own right, because there aren't very many of them yet.

STEPHEN PACALA: We've been blind about the oceans. It's just been a dark room. And the Argo floats are like flipping on the lights. For the first time, you can actually see what's going on.

NARRATOR: So far, over 3,000 floats have been launched, all around the globe. They now pepper our oceans, dutifully collecting data on an unprecedented scale.

DANIEL SCHRAG: We suddenly have a three-dimensional measurement of the oceans that is essentially continuous in time over the last 10 years. In one summer, we collected more data than we had in 50 years previously of all of oceanographic measurements.

NARRATOR: With this information, the Argo floats have transformed our understanding of the ocean.

The water in the ocean circulates. At the surface, it is warmer, but in the deep ocean, the water is very cold and has not been exposed to the atmosphere for hundreds of years. It is in the Southern Ocean that this deep cold water rises to the surface.

ALISON GRAY (University of Washington): The Southern Ocean is this gateway between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. There's not many places in the global ocean where that deep water can contact the atmosphere.

NARRATOR: Once at the surface, the deep cold water, that scientists call "old water," soaks up heat like a sponge.

ALISON GRAY: That older water has not been in contact with the atmosphere for a long time, since before the industrial era, and so this is water that hasn't seen any of the heat that has been accumulating in the climate system. When that water does come up to the surface, it is able to take up the excess heat.

NARRATOR: The Argo floats reveal that over the last 30 years, the ocean has heated up by an average of a half-degree Fahrenheit.

This may not sound like a lot, but the impact is enormous.

JOHN HOLDREN: When the oceans change in temperature by a little bit, that is storing the same amount of heat that the atmosphere would store by changing in temperature by a lot.

STEPHEN RISER: If we put all of that heat into the lower atmosphere, the atmosphere would heat up by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, that's how much heat we're talking about here.

NARRATOR: We have already warmed the atmosphere a degree-and-a-half Fahrenheit. Without the help of the ocean, it could be much hotter.

In all, a staggering 93 percent of the heat that we're putting into our atmosphere is getting soaked up by our oceans. This comes with consequences. Heating the ocean and adding carbon dioxide are damaging to life in the sea.

As you change one component of the climate machine, you affect the others, which can have benefits but can also lead to devastating consequences.

And one of the most urgent questions of all is what will happen when the warmer air and ocean come into contact with the polar ice caps?

In a helicopter over Greenland, David Holland, of New York University, wants to find out how warmer temperatures are affecting this actively shrinking glacier. Today's mission is to place motion trackers directly on the ice.

DAVID HOLLAND: We are going to go to three locations on the glacier and see if we can begin to understand how large glaciers disintegrate.

NARRATOR: Constantly moving, this glacier is filled with crevasses, which makes it extremely dangerous, so David has brought along Brian Rougeux, an experienced mountaineer.

BRIAN ROUGEUX: It is dangerous in terms of the helicopter being able to land and dangerous, certainly, in terms of being able to walk around.

NARRATOR: They reach the first location David has picked, but there is no way to land.

After 20 minutes, they find a spot that could work.

HELICOPTER PILOT: Let's give it a shot.

NARRATOR: But the ice here may collapse under the weight of the helicopter. They must do what is known as a "toe-in."

BRIAN ROUGEUX: A toe-in is where the helicopter will come in and set its skids down on the ice, but not power down. So, the ice doesn't get its full weight, just kind of touches down just enough to give me an opportunity to hop out, get the gear out, and then he's able to take off again.

NARRATOR: Without landing, the pilot drops off Brian and lifts off.

This is the Jakobshavn glacier, ice as far as the eye can see.

BRIAN ROUGEUX: It is difficult to really put into words what it feels like to look around and know that miles of ice are surrounding you. And then you have in the back of your mind the only way out of there is that helicopter. You're certainly not walking out.

NARRATOR: On the western coast of Greenland, the Jakobshavn glacier is one of the fastest disintegrating glaciers in the world.

The glacier meets the sea, here, where icebergs break off, in a process called "calving."

In 2015, an iceberg twice the size of the Empire State Building breaks off and floats out to sea.

Speeding up a year of images reveals the glacier advancing as ice flows from inland, but from space, satellites show the glacier is actually retreating. In one decade, it lost 10 miles.

WALEED ABDALATI (University of Colorado): The Jakobshavn ice stream is pretty much the fastest glacier in the world, and it drains huge amounts of ice from the Greenland ice sheet.

NARRATOR: And the draining of ice from Greenland appears to be accelerating.

WALEED ABDALATI: It's almost like uncorking a bottle of wine, right? There's all this pressure of ice wanting to flow to the sea, and as you remove that resistance in the front, that ice will accelerate.

NARRATOR: Back on the glacier, Brian has been working quickly to install instruments that can reveal how the ice is moving behind the calving wall.

Brian signals to the helicopter, and they swoop in to pick him up. It's a successful deployment.

The data from the motion trackers and other high tech devices, like this radar, are giving Holland new insights into how glaciers disappear. What he has found is surprising. For glaciers in contact with the ocean, warmer air causes some of the loss of ice, but the real trigger for intense calving is warmer water coming underneath the glacier and destabilizing it.

And David says that changing winds and currents are bringing that warmer water up from the Gulf Stream, increasing the loss of ice.

DAVID HOLLAND: People have begun to understand that half the ice loss occurs through calving, through fracturing of ice.

NARRATOR: This calving is a concern, because ice melts slowly but it fractures in an instant.

DAVID HOLLAND: The fracture and breakup of the glacier could actually dominate everything. If that is the case, then the retreat of glaciers could be much faster than previously thought.

WALEED ABDALATI: And the reason we care is there is about 23 feet of sea level equivalent locked up in the Greenland ice sheet. If it were all to disappear, oceans would go up 23 feet. That's not going to happen, well, in the near future. But it is shrinking, it is losing ice to the oceans, and oceans are rising as a result.

NARRATOR: The same loss of ice is unfolding on the other side of the planet, only on a much bigger scale.

Locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet is a total of 200 feet of possible sea level rise. And this vast continent of ice, especially the western part, is breaking up faster than anyone thought possible.

JOHN HOLDREN: There is a huge amount of water locked up in the Antarctic. The only question under warming is how rapidly that ice could melt or slide into the ocean.

NARRATOR: The melting or break up of all that ice would devastate much of civilization as we know it, as sea levels rise and flood cities and coasts.

So, how much sea rise can we expect from today's increasing temperatures and how quickly?

The answer lies half a world away in a remote corner of the western Australian outback. Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida has travelled here to work out how high sea levels could rise in the future, by looking into the past.

ANDREA DUTTON: Earth has done experiments for us in the past. It hasn't warmed up perhaps as quickly as we've seen over the last century, but it has been this warm before.

NARRATOR: By drilling deep into this rock, Andrea can travel back to that time when Earth was as warm as today.

ANDREA DUTTON: Every time someone takes the drill for the first time, they look at me, and they say, "That was really hard." It is rock. So, it takes a long time to collect a little bit of core, but it's worth it because it gives us a really important window into the past.

FIELD SCIENTIST: Oh, there we go. Now we're not mucking around.

NARRATOR: Inside the cores, she finds fossils of ancient coral. There is only one way to explain what that coral is doing here: this whole landscape was once under water.

An ancient coral reef extends more than a mile in from today's coastline. At one location, Andrea finds some of these ancient fossils exposed and rising above today's waterline.

ANDREA DUTTON: It looks like concrete, but you can see little pieces of corals poking up.

NARRATOR: Corals only grow in the ocean. So, wherever there are fossilized corals, there must have been seawater.

ANDREA DUTTON: The corals that we are looking at need sunlight to survive, so they live very close to the sea surface. So, we use that to our advantage to understand where that sea surface was in the past, by looking at how high the coral is.

NARRATOR: By mapping this ancient Australian reef, Andrea is able to tell how high sea levels were the last time Earth was as warm as today.

ANDREA DUTTON: You can see the waves breaking on the shoreline below me. Where I'm standing, I'm already more than nine feet higher than that. We know the seas must have risen at least to that level to keep these corals alive.

NARRATOR: Andrea has found similar coral formations around the world, from this time period, that point to even greater sea level rise.

ANDREA DUTTON: Our research shows that with just the amount of warming we've seen today, the seas could rise much higher, up to 20 to 30 feet higher than today.

NARRATOR: This enormous increase is due, in part, because warmer water has a greater volume, but it also means that, at that time, some of the world's great ice sheets must have collapsed.

WALEED ABDALATI: The big question is how fast? Does it take us 500 years to get there? Well that's one thing. Or does it take us 100 years to get there. That's three feet in a decade. That's a lot.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: In Antarctica, we see massive glaciers breaking off, adding to the amount that sea level is rising. Two thirds of the world's biggest cities are within just a few feet of sea level. And you can't pick up a city and move it.

NARRATOR: So, when will we start to feel the impact of sea level rise? Some people already are.

The Marshall Islands are a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific. They are home to 50,000 people and a vibrant culture. Today, they face becoming a new kind of refugee: a climate refugee.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER (Marshall Islands Resident): We are only, like, two meters above sea level, so every time that there is a high tide, all this water gushes over and crashes into our homes and washes away graves. You feel really small. These floodings are going to continue to the point where we can't live there anymore.

NARRATOR: Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet from the Marshall Islands. For her family, it is their homes and their very way of life that is at stake.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: What's going to happen to our culture, our traditions? We're hoping to not become nomads. We're hoping to not become lost, There are songs and chants that you can't hear anywhere else. What will happen to those stories that have survived for thousands of years? There's just things that you can't find anywhere else on Earth that you can only find in the Marshalls.

UNITED NATIONS ANNOUNCER: From the Marshall Islands, please welcome Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.

NARRATOR: Kathy has become the voice of the Marshalls, addressing the United Nations with a poem to her daughter about the world she will face.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER:

"dear matafele peinem,

i want to tell you about that lagoon

that lazy lounging lagoon lounging against the sunrise

men say that one day

that lagoon will devour you

they say it will gnaw at the shoreline

chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees

gulp down rows of your seawalls

and crunch your island's shattered bones"

NARRATOR: Her words are an attempt to bring the realities of climate change to people who believe it will not affect them.

KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER: "with only a passport to call home"

It's kind of hard to connect to an issue that you don't see outside of your own front door, you know? I understand that. It doesn't stop it from being a reality though. If our island goes down, who do you think will be next? It's going to be the rest of the world, it's just going to start with us.

NARRATOR: The results of climate change are, in fact, already striking the rest of the world, and much closer to home.

SKIP STILES (Wetlands Watch, Norfolk, Virginia): For those people who don't believe that sea level rise is happening, all you've got to do is come to Norfolk, or Charleston, or Miami, or New Orleans or San Diego, because you could see evidence of this in every one of those cities. This walkway, that was once supposed to allow people to walk and enjoy the water, is now under water.

NARRATOR: Sea level rise is now a reality even in the United States. And low-lying cities, like Norfolk, Virginia, are on the front line.

Today is a king tide, one of the year's highest and an omen of what is to come.

AARON MYRAN (Norfolk, Virginia Resident): This floods all the time. So, like, when that happens, we'll take our furniture and stack it up. It's been much higher than this before. It's sort of annoying to have all this flooding all the time.

NARRATOR: The flooding may be annoying today, but it will become a tragedy if it continues. Norfolk is an important commercial port and home to America's largest naval base.

COLONEL JASON KELLY (Norfolk District, United States Army Corps of Engineers): You have Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval station in the world. Our national defense is certainly impacted by what's happening in the community outside.

NARRATOR: Sea levels here have risen about 18 inches since World War I, about half of that related to climate change. For this strategically important port, the rising water is literally getting in the way.

JASON KELLY: Folks live and reside in the communities right outside of the base. And on a daily basis they must get to the base to perform the duties that are vital to our national security.

REAR ADMIRAL ANN PHILLIPS (United States Navy, Retired): Sea level rise means there is just that much more flooding and that means that there's just that much more impact to roads, logistics infrastructure, moving cargo back and forth. And so that just makes it that much harder for you to prepare that ship to go and for the crew to prepare themselves to go.

NARRATOR: According to retired admiral Ann Phillips, climate change is a national security issue.

ANN PHILLIPS: It's about readiness. The Navy does see climate as an impact to its readiness and its ability to be resilient. From a national security perspective, sea level rise is a threat multiplier or a threat magnifier.

NARRATOR: But to the people who live here, coastal flooding has an enormous personal cost.

DONNA WOODWARD (Norfolk Resident): This house has flooded three times. I just don't know. I don't know how we'd be able to sell the house. Honestly, I really don't.

NARRATOR: Donna Woodward and Jim Schultz doubted they could sell their house and so decided to raise it up.

DONNA WOODWARD: It came down to deciding whether we wanted to go ahead and move out of the area or put all the money into elevating the house and staying.

JIM SCHULTZ (Norfolk Resident): It's happening now, not in the future, today. It's happening as we stand here. So, anyone who doubts it, we invite them to buy all of this property here and to come live and see for themselves.

DONNA WOODWARD: Sea level rise affects me in ways I had not thought of, you know? I need to be able to get to work. I bought a truck that has a snorkel.

ANN PHILLIPS: Sea level rise affects everyone here personally, and that is going to continue to accelerate. We have no time to waste, the situation is urgent.

NARRATOR: For the people of Norfolk, climate change is already affecting their lives. And across all of America, the costs are mounting.

On a single day in 2017, a satellite recorded three megastorms bearing down on the Americas. Meteorologist Paul Douglas' weather team has never seen anything like it.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Wow.

METEOROLOGIST: Look at that. It's terrifying.

PAUL DOUGLAS: This is easily going to be a three-hundred-billion-dollar year for hurricanes.

NARRATOR: Two-thousand-seventeen was the costliest hurricane season on record. Harvey alone caused catastrophic flooding in southeastern Texas, with financial damages that rival Katrina, and Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Warmer oceans don't trigger hurricanes, but the hurricanes that do spin up naturally have a greater potential to become extreme.

MARSHALL SHEPHERD: You can think of warm ocean water as the fuel supply for these big heat engines in these hurricanes. In a warmer climate, system hurricanes will have more octane gasoline to draw from in the ocean, and that drives these large powerful storms.

NARRATOR: Wildfires in the western United States have quadrupled since the 1980s, exacerbated by drought.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: We're seeing wildfires burning greater and greater areas, the hotter and drier it gets.

NARRATOR: Effects like these are being felt across the planet, and some are even accelerating the warming itself.

GREG ASNER: See that? Red is bad.

NARRATOR: When trees that have been helping by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere burn down, much of that carbon is pumped back into the air.

GREG ASNER: Big climate events have had massive implications for how much carbon is not just stored, but released back to the atmosphere.

NARRATOR: And in the Arctic, ice that has been cooling the planet by reflecting away some of the sun's heat is melting. The loss of ice means more warming.

WALEED ABDALATI: It's a self-compounding effect. As temperatures warm and ice starts to melt, the ice and the ocean system absorb more energy, which causes the temperatures to warm more, which causes more ice to melt and so on. Once it begins, it wants to run away in big ways that will further accelerate climate change.

HEIDI CULLEN: We're so completely vulnerable to our climate. We're just incredibly vulnerable to changes in our climate, especially rapid changes.

NARRATOR: As virtually all peer-reviewed scientific research confirms, the case for climate change caused by human activity is overwhelmingly clear.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: It's real, it's us, the risks are serious, and the window of time to prevent widespread dangerous impacts is closing fast.

ANDREA DUTTON: A lot of times people ask me "Doesn't your work terrify you?" And yeah, it does. It keeps me awake at night sometimes, thinking about my children or what will become of my state or my country, or my relatives, in the future. It is a scary thought. But what gives me hope is that we understand this, and we have an incredibly good idea of what is about to happen, so, we actually can do something about it.

NARRATOR: To do something about our climate future, we need to know what lies ahead.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: It's kind of as if you are driving down one of our dead straight roads, here in Texas. You can be driving down the road, even staying in your own lane, if you are driving along looking in the rearview mirror, because the road is completely straight, so where you were in the past is a perfect prediction of where you are going to be in the future. But what if you are driving down this road, looking in your rearview mirror and a giant curve comes up? You're going to run off the road, because the past is not a perfect predictor of the future if the road is changing.

NARRATOR: To see the road ahead, scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, New Jersey, are working to turn our understanding of how the land, sea, ice and air interact into a powerful simulation called a "climate model."

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Using nothing but basic physics, we can actually produce, in our computers, a virtual Earth.

NARRATOR: With this virtual Earth, scientists like Kirsten Findell work to predict where our climate is going, before it's too late to change course.

The first step is breaking the climate machine into its core components.

KIRSTEN FINDELL (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory): Every climate model has four major physical components represented. We represent the ocean, we represent the land, the sea ice and the atmosphere all around the earth. Within those four components, we also then break up the earth into little grid boxes. And then we can slice up the atmosphere into thin layers and slice down into the ocean and down into the soil.

NARRATOR: Once they have divided the system into manageable parts, they use well-established mathematical equations, grid box by grid box, to run the model forward in time.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: These models are amazing. They can produce weather systems, even hurricanes; they can produce droughts and floods.

NARRATOR: Worldwide, there are dozens of models. They predict how each part of the climate machine will change, like sea surface temperature, storm intensity or the extent of the ice caps. Every detail is included. But the path to perfect models is still a work in progress, because Earth's climate machine is such a complicated one.

The role that clouds play, for instance, is important, but poorly understood. And the speed at which ice sheets will break apart is another big unknown.

STEPHEN PACALA: We're definitely making progress on making better predictions, but there is still an enormous amount about the climate system that we don't fully understand.

NARRATOR: But the models can be checked against things we know, like air temperature over the past hundred years. The models can be started in the past and run forward. The blue line shows the average of those predictions.

When compared with the actual temperature record, in red, their accuracy is revealed.

JOHN HOLDREN: Computer models don't exist in isolation. We calibrate them against what we've observed. We test them against the history of climate change. And we now know they're pretty good.

NARRATOR: The models can be used to run a virtual experiment: if we continue emitting carbon dioxide on the path we are on, what do they say our world will look like in 2100?

This map shows how temperatures could change. The models predict the average temperature could be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That means in New York City, days with temperatures over 90 degrees would more than triple. And in the Arctic, which will heat up even faster, it could rise, on average, more than 15 degrees.

HEIDI CULLEN: One of the things we understand really well about our climate system is that if you crank up the average temperature of the planet, it is going to fundamentally change your weather.

JOHN HOLDREN: Their results suggest we will see more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, and the prevalence of devastating heatwaves will be much more extreme.

NARRATOR: The models also show that by the end of the century, it is likely the ocean will rise one-and-a-half to four feet. Without major changes, this would put parts of cities like Miami under water.

And new insights are coming in all the time. The work of David Holland and other scientists suggests that if large parts of western Antarctica break off, eight feet or more of sea level rise by 2100 is not out of the question.

DAVID HOLLAND: All bets are off for Antarctica. That is a place where very large sea level rise, on the scale of 100 years, is quite possible. That doesn't mean it will happen; but it actually could physically happen.

NARRATOR: The road ahead is a world that could be increasingly hard to live in. The question now is what can we do about it to reduce the possible damage?

PAUL DOUGLAS: We're going to figure this out, because, in the end, we are not going to have a choice; we're going to have to figure this out.

NARRATOR: The path ahead comes down to three basic options. We can do nothing and suffer the consequences;...

...we can adapt as the changes unfold, or we can act now to mitigate, or limit the damage. The options are connected. The more we mitigate, the less we would need to adapt. The more we adapt and mitigate, the less we would suffer.

JOHN HOLDREN: Society has only three options; and if we want to minimize suffering, as should be our goal, we need to maximize both mitigation and adaptation.

NARRATOR: Adaptation is perhaps most urgent in the ocean, which, right now, is bearing the brunt of climate change by absorbing most of the heat. Billions of people depend on the sea for food or their livelihood. As temperatures rise, many species of marine life are moving to cooler waters, threatening local fisheries. And warmer water is killing off coral reefs, which support about 25 percent of all life in the sea.

This photo was taken in Florida in 1975. This is the same reef now.

RUTH GATES: We've lost 50 percent of the world's reefs in the last 30 to 40 years. That's...I mean, even when I say it, I have to be honest, I still find it shocking, and I want to find a reason for that figure to be wrong. But it is not wrong. The majority of the world's reefs will be dead by 2050.

NARRATOR: Ruth Gates runs the Coral Lab at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and is working to save the reefs by helping them adapt.

RUTH GATES: If there's any bleached corals that we see, we want to get those tagged.

NARRATOR: Today, her team is out monitoring the health of a reef in Kaneohe Bay.

Coral reefs may be a case study in the devastating effects of climate change, but they also offer a lesson in survival.

RUTH GATES: If 50 percent of the reef has died, let's just turn that around and talk about the fact that actually 50 percent of the reef has survived. Our question is why?

NARRATOR: To help answer that question, the team prepares a sample of coral, puts it in water and places it in a cutting-edge microscope that can view living coral in real time.

Under ultraviolet light, we can see the coral filled with algae, or tiny plant cells, that give it a red color. They are essential for the coral's survival, because they provide nutrients the coral needs.

RUTH GATES: Where you see the bright red, that bright red is the pigment, deep inside of the tiny plant cells. They power the system.

NARRATOR: Ruth can turn up the heat of the water and watch what happens.

The coral belches out the plant cells in tissue that looks like a black cloud. Turning the living coral from a vibrant red to a lifeless, empty black. But not every coral reacts to heat in the same way.

Ruth and her team work to identify and grow hardy coral that can better withstand the heat.

RUTH GATES: If we had a lot of time, this is exactly what nature would do. Essentially, it kills off the ones that can't survive the new conditions and then it selects for the best of the best.

NARRATOR: She calls these winners "super corals," and hopes to use them to repopulate reefs around the world.

There is no time to waste.

RUTH GATES: It's mind-blowing to think about it, you know, a species who has been on the planet for, you know, over 200-million years, wiped out in less than 50.

NARRATOR: Gates says that if coral is to survive it must adapt and fast. And ultimately, so must we.

Adapting to our changed climate is already in the works in places like Norfolk, Virginia, where streets are regularly flooding.

JASON KELLY: What are we going to do to make sure that we can adapt? What are we going to do to bounce back and evolve? What actually changes from what we see now?

NARRATOR: Colonel Jason Kelly, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is overseeing a plan to cope with the rising water.

JASON KELLY: The city has to change. Norfolk is reimagining itself in a way that will permit resilience.

NARRATOR: The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed spending more than one-and-a-half-billion dollars on an adaptation plan for Norfolk, to keep it operating for the next 50 years. The plan includes a five-mile floodwall, water-retaining parks and surge barriers.

But adaptation can only go so far. Houses are still at risk, and managing a few feet of sea level rise is a lot different than the worst case scenario of eight feet by 2100.

CHRISTINE MORRIS (Chief Resilience Officer, Norfolk, Virginia): Keeping all of that water in the river will be a challenge. It can be done, but it's going to be a very different city if it's eight feet.

NARRATOR: Across America, cities are drawing up plans to adapt to the impacts of climate change, whether that's too much water from rising sea levels and stronger storms, or too little water from harsher, longer droughts.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: You start to talk about different ideas when you realize that we have a big problem on our hands and we have to consider now how to fix it.

NARRATOR: But there is a way to avoid the worst impacts of climate change in the first place. The more we mitigate, or limit, how much our climate changes, the less we will have to adapt.

That will require shifting our economies away from burning fossil fuels. The good news is technology is moving so fast, there are many alternatives.

STEPHEN PACALA: The scientific toolkit finally got big enough to crack this thing. Wind and solar are much further ahead than anybody ever thought they would be 10 years ago. They're growing impossibly rapidly.

NARRATOR: The proof of that rapid transition can be seen in Findlay, Ohio: middle American, blue collar, and home to a Whirlpool factory, spinning out dishwashers.

DALE LAWS (Vice President, Manufacturing, Whirlpool Corporation): This is Whirlpool's Findlay Operations. We have roughly 2,700 employees that work here, and we make over 15,000 dishwashers a day.

NARRATOR: At this factory, cheap power is essential to the bottom line.

DALE LAWS: We are constantly looking at how we perform better, day in and day out. We look at our energy cost rising. The question was can we reduce the cost of the energy that we consume?

NARRATOR: To get the energy this factory needs, Whirlpool decided to add a twist to their production line of dishwashers: wind power.

JEREME KENT (Chief Executive Officer, One Energy): There's enough wind energy, if you could capture it, to light the world. The question is how much of it can you capture?

NARRATOR: Whirlpool turned to Jereme Kent, a 32-year-old C.E.O. of a company that is taking on the big utilities by harnessing wind power right at the factory door.

JEREME KENT: Our wind turbines directly power the customers they serve. We take utility-scale wind turbines, and we install them for the biggest power users around.

DALE LAWS: In terms of how we operate here, you would not know that 15 percent of our power is generated by wind energy.

NARRATOR: Nothing has noticeably changed at this factory, apart from long-term energy savings.

Wind is such good business for Whirlpool, they ordered seven more turbines, for other plants in Ohio.

JEREME KENT: We aren't doing this because it's good for the environment; we're doing this because it's good business. It happens to be good for the environment, it happens to be great for the environment. But that's secondary to the fact that it has to have a real business need, if you want to run a business around it.

NARRATOR: Wind technician is one of the fastest growing professions in America and, for Jereme, a dream job.

JEREME KENT: I got into this business because this was the coolest thing I could find. You're telling me I get to go out and play with cranes that weigh a million pounds and build a 400-foot-tall structure? Okay, where do I sign up?

NARRATOR: These turbines are 40 stories high, with rotors the size of a football field. Each can produce enough electricity to power up to 400 homes or make a lot of dishwashers.

JEREME KENT: It's time to innovate, and it's time to change. Instead of having one plant that makes 1,000 megawatts, let's have 100 plants and make 10 megawatts, or 1,000 plants that make one megawatt.

NARRATOR: Kent has developed an innovative approach to a tried and tested technology: wind.

Others are developing entirely new technologies.

One of the best places to see that in action is at the National Renewable Energy Lab, or N.R.E.L., outside of Denver. Think of it as an invention factory for carbon-free, renewable energy.

STEPHEN PACALA: They're working on endgame technologies that fully fill the gap between where we need to go and the track that we've been on since the beginning in the Industrial Revolution.

NARRATOR: So where do we need to go? Jet fuel made from plants; taller, more powerful wind turbines; better batteries; and the next generation solar cell.

JOSEPH BERRY (National Renewable Energy Laboratory): It's not every day that you get a chance to really work on a technology that could really change the way we live. And this is going to change the way we generate electricity. It's really exciting.

NARRATOR: Joseph Berry and his team are working to re-invent the solar cell.

JOSEPH BERRY: The sun is the biggest energy source we've got access to. And if you look at how large that resource is in comparison to what we use, it dwarfs it.

NARRATOR: The problem is that manufacturing and installing today's solar is still relatively expensive. That's where Joseph and the other scientists at N.R.E.L. come in. They think they've found a gamechanger in a class of materials called perovskites.

DAVID T. MOORE (National Renewable Energy Laboratory): We love perovskites. This is the coolest solar material, I'm going to say ever, but certainly the coolest solar material in the past 20 years. We can make it so easily, we could make an awful lot of it. We can make it really cheap, and we can make it really fast.

NARRATOR: What perovskites can do is remarkable. Similar to the silicon that is currently used in most solar cells, they take energy from the sun and turn it into electricity.

But while silicon requires exacting production techniques, perovskites are easy to work with and can even come in a bottle.

DAVID MOORE: Think of it like an ink. The nice thing about working with liquid things is that you have a wide variety of ways you can apply it. We can even put it on with a paintbrush.

NARRATOR: With just a few strokes of perovskite paint, these solar cells can generate power as efficiently as silicon.

JOSEPH BERRY: That's what makes it completely transformational. Imagine being able to integrate it into, essentially, every road surface, into fabrics. We're really talking about a future that...where solar is integrated into everything, that will...everything, full stop: your house, your car, your jacket, the whole shebang.

NARRATOR: While perovskites are still several years from hitting the marketplace, already it is cheaper to create energy from solar or wind than building new power plants that use coal or nuclear.

But the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine, and changing our entire existing energy system is not going to happen overnight. Fossil fuels still account for 80 percent of the world's total power, and many people rely on them for their jobs and livelihoods.

What if we could still burn fossil fuels, but without emitting carbon dioxide? That's an idea they're developing at SaskPower, in Canada.

One of the four coal-fired units here has been modified. Instead of releasing its carbon dioxide into the air, it is captured and pumped more than two miles underground, where it is effectively stored.

STEPHEN PACALA: That facility takes CO2 and injects it deep under the earth. There aren't more of these right now, because there is no commercial reason to do them. There's no economic incentive.

NARRATOR: While carbon capture may be good for the environment, it's not good for business. So, is there a way to make it pay?

LISA DYSON (Chief Executive Officer, Kiverdi): There are many things that can be done scientifically and technically, but the question is how much does it cost and is anyone going to pay for it?

NARRATOR: Where others see a waste product, Lisa Dyson sees potential.

LISA DYSON: When people think of carbon, they often think of fossil fuel emissions. But carbon is everywhere. We're made of carbon; we're carbon-based life forms. Carbon's in our food, our yogurt, our ice cream, our, you know, cheese sandwiches.

NARRATOR: Lisa has started a company that uses microbes to take carbon dioxide and turn it into something we can use.

LISA DYSON: So, we have carbon dioxide bubbling into these bioreactors, and we have single-celled organisms, these super-charged carbon recyclers that are making complex molecules, like proteins.

NARRATOR: The microbes ingest carbon dioxide and help convert it into products like protein or oil for food, plastics, even cosmetics.

LISA DYSON: We do it because it's good for the planet, but we go to the companies and we show them how it will be good for their business.

NARRATOR: Lisa envisions a day that our choices for solving the climate crisis are not just suffer, adapt or mitigate, but also prosper, by learning to recycle carbon dioxide into useful everyday products. If carbon capture and renewable technologies become more widespread, carbon dioxide levels will stop increasing.

But even reaching that goal may not be enough, because we still would have record high levels, continuing to warm up our planet.

We may need to find a way to pull more carbon dioxide out of the air than we emit into it, to go into what's called "negative emissions."

HEIDI CULLEN: We don't just have to go to zero emissions; we've actually got to go negative. We've got to suck stuff out.

Fortunately, there is a way to do this already built into the climate machine: photosynthesis.

DAVID MONTGOMERY (Author, Growing a Revolution): A very simple way to remove carbon dioxide from the air is called photosynthesis. Plants do it every day for free.

NARRATOR: For geologist Dave Montgomery and his wife, Anne Biklé, solving the climate crisis starts in their own backyard.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: When we bought our house, in north Seattle, the yard had really wretched soil. It wasn't what my gardener wife wanted.

NARRATOR: The first step was improving the soil by adding extra plant material and enhancing the natural process.

Plants pull carbon in from the air and turn it into sugars. They pump some of those sugars down into their roots to feed microorganisms, which use the carbon to build healthy soil. And when the plants decay, more carbon is added to the soil. But modern gardening and agriculture can disrupt this process and send the carbon back into the atmosphere.

When Dave and Anne moved into their new house, the carbon content of the soil was less than two percent and looked like this. About a decade later, it's much richer and packed with carbon, almost 10 percent.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: Those are big changes, going from a percent or two to pushing 10 percent over our whole yard. That's tons of carbon sequestered as a consequence of gardening.

NARRATOR: And what works for this small garden, could work for enormous fields.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: We could do the same thing on the world's farmland and sequester an awful lot of carbon, enough to take a bite out of global fossil fuel emissions.

NARRATOR: That is precisely what Minnesota farmer Dave Legvold is now doing.

DAVE LEGVOLD (Farmer): Good dog.

This is 40 years that we've been on this farm and I've been farming.

NARRATOR: When Dave started working on the farm, he found the soil was in bad shape.

DAVE LEGVOLD: It was abused for about 30 years. And I watched my soil washing downhill and leaving my farm, and I thought, "This is not good."

NARRATOR: On most farms, the soil is tilled, or plowed, to reduce weeds and pests. But in the process, much of the carbon gets dug up and released back to the atmosphere. Dave decided to go another route called "no-till" farming.

DAVE LEGVOLD: Every time you harvest, you leave the residue from that crop in place, so there is a protective blanket on the top of the soil. So, here we have residue left from last year's corn crop. Corn stalks, leaves, an occasional corncob. Not tilling helped the soil become healthier.

NARRATOR: Despite the benefits, no-till remains an unorthodox method, so Dave has a fair share of neighbors who think he's a bit crazy.

DAVE LEGVOLD: The neighbors look at a no-till field and they say, "Oh, my goodness, how can you grow a crop in that shabby looking field?" But at the end of the season, my yields are as good or better than the fields that have been tilled.

NARRATOR: Not only is the soil healthier, but it absorbs much more carbon. No-till, combined with other agricultural techniques could capture more carbon dioxide than is emitted by all of the cars in the U.S.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: We need to fundamentally rethink how we do agriculture, focused on soil building, soil health, putting carbon back in the ground. And if we're able to do that, then agriculture could be a major contributor to very positive changes related to global climate.

NARRATOR: In the climate machine, the land already absorbs significant carbon dioxide out of the air. The right agricultural practices could absorb even more, as would planting more trees.

There are even high tech artificial trees in development that could absorb up to 1,000 times the carbon. There are many strategies to address the climate crisis. It's likely we'll need all of them.

JOHN HOLDREN: We need more renewables; we need to surmount the challenges that face expansion of nuclear energy; we need to do better at energy efficiency; we need to learn how to remove carbon dioxide from the combustion gases from fossil fuels. We've got a lot of work to do.

NARRATOR: For over 200 years, in every corner of the globe, scientists have probed Earth's climate machine, developing a deep understanding of how it works.

They have proven beyond reasonable doubt that climate change is happening and that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause. They have built computer models that can predict the road ahead, and they have come up with ways to adapt, or solutions to avoid the worst of the impacts. But there is one powerful piece of the climate machine so unpredictable and inconsistent that no computer model could ever guess how it will behave: us.

JOHN HOLDREN: You know, there are some people who say, "Well, the future of climate change is too uncertain to justify action today." But, in fact, the largest uncertainty about the future of climate change is what we decide to do.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: In terms of how temperature is going to change, what's going to happen to our drought and our flood patterns, how much sea levels are going to rise, one of the biggest uncertainties are what are the choices that we are making today?

NARRATOR: Figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis is where science meets politics. And the issue has become highly contentious.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Up until about 2008, there was bipartisan support for climate action. But it's been turned into a political football, and that's unfortunate, because Republicans' homes are going to flood just as readily as Democrats' homes.

RADIO HOST: I know it's we're living in a divisive era.

PAUL DOUGLAS: Yeah, I know it's divisive out there, politically. But the oceans are warmer. That's not a model: that's just going out and measuring the temperature.

NARRATOR: Meteorologist Paul Douglas, a conservative, was once skeptical of climate change, but now is convinced we must act.

RADIO HOST: Our text line is 81807. We want to hear your stories, too.

PAUL DOUGLAS: We need to get past denial, and we need to find some common ground. We can debate policy, let's not debate the facts.

RUTH GATES: The scientific evidence is so clear about where we're going, but there is an astonishing inertia. We're not mitigating fast enough to stop the train crash.

STEPHEN PACALA: The technological solutions make it inevitable that we will solve this problem. The question is just how much damage we create before we finally reign it in.

WALEED ABDALATI: We can wait; we can do nothing for 50 years, but we will have dug a much, much deeper hole for ourselves to climb out of.

NARRATOR: The evidence for human-made climate change is solid. Solutions for how to stop or slow it are available.

The greatest uncertainty is us. This is not a problem far off in the future. Nearly two-billion children alive today, like Matafele Peinem of the Marshall Islands and Aaron Myran of Norfolk, Virginia, will live to see what happens.

Depending on how we respond, they could inhabit a very different world.

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Decoding the Weather Machine PBS Airdate: April 18, 2018 PAUL DOUGLAS (Meteorologist): Most people sense a change in the weather. It's not your imagination. NARRATOR: Megastorms, droughts, fires... JOHN HOLDREN (Harvard University): We're seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency. PAUL DOUGLAS: How many times does that have to happen before it's not a fluke, but it's a trend?

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How America’s Hottest City is Innovating to Survive | Weathered

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How America’s Hottest City is Innovating to Survive | Weathered

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How America’s Hottest City is Innovating to Survive | Weathered

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Fine-tuning the climate | DW Documentary | 2020

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Fine-tuning the climate | DW Documentary | 2020

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Fine-tuning the climate  | DW Documentary

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Can We Cool the Planet? | NOVA | PBS | 2020

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Can We Cool the Planet? | NOVA | PBS | 2020