Alejandra Borunda
speaker
325 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4 Sep
Alejandra Borunda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that could affect how many people will be available when those hurricanes and wildfires hit this summer.
Yeah, and I think a lot of this is a question of who pays, right? Because we know climate disasters are getting worse. They're going to continue to get worse. If we're not studying it, if we're not preparing for it, those are costs that people will face in some way.
And so it's a question of whether the federal government is there to support that or whether it's states and local communities that are going to be left kind of paying for that in the end.
And as we all know, talking about money is a famously chill and easy thing to do, right? Super chill. This is a really, really fraught topic.
And Emily, there's another topic that's also been a source of big debate in the climate community and came up this year at the COP a little bit. And that is the number 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Exactly. You know what I'm talking about here.
It showed up almost 10 years ago in the Paris Agreement of 2015. And it was the number that a lot of countries agreed to try to keep below in the massive project of trying to limit global warming around the world. Okay. Unfortunately, it's getting uncomfortably close. And so there's a lot of chatter happening at conferences like these where people are starting to ask, is that goal even possible?
And if not, what happens?
That is a great question, Emily. And basically in short, for many years now, but especially since this big special report by a bunch of scientists in 2018, scientists have warned that the risks of global warming could get substantially worse overnight. Once we go past that level of warming, that 1.5 C. Okay. This is Lila Warjawski.
She's a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
So what she's talking about here is just that, like, you get past 1.5 and you get more of the bad stuff that we're already getting. Heat waves that are even more intense than those we're having now, which is kind of terrifying, honestly. Or stronger hurricanes, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, no one wants stronger hurricanes, the ones this season were truly devastating. Yeah, exactly.
And I think the other thing is that there's some even more alarming possibilities once we go past 1.5. Like, for example, if the Greenland ice sheet melts too much, the melt can actually become unstoppable. There's these processes that keep on going no matter what we do after that.
I used to have a professor back in climate science grad school, and he just, he always would say that we're just running the world's biggest science experiment. Like, let's see what happens when you pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide. Let's all stick around to find out.
We are pretty close. If you use the methods laid out in the IPCC, and that's the big scientific consensus report that comes out every few years, that tells us that we're at 1.3 Celsius of warming.
Yeah. And I just want to be clear, that method has an issue. It's fundamentally backwards looking. Oh. It averages the observed temperature data from the last 10 years with models that look forward the same amount. But baked into that approach is this reality that it won't actually show us crossing 1.5 until a few years after that's already happened.
Yeah, and you have identified something that many scientists are now working on because they also want to know more quickly. A new study actually just came out right before the COP meeting that uses an approach that is a little more snapshot-y, and it says we're probably closer to 1.4 C.
And I just, I know that sounds scary, but to be clear, that's not really how anyone thinks about this. It's just one year. And scientists know that temperatures bop around a lot because of things like El Nino or just like a randomly hot year. And so that's why they do that approach that looks at the longer term averages in the first place. But it's also not a great sign.
It's so hard because the reality is warming past 1.5 really does present these real existential threats to a lot of people around the world. Like the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, for example, it could literally end up underwater if sea levels rise too far. And that's a real risk. The farther warming gets past 1.5 C. Here's Abraham Nassak in their Ministry of Climate Change.
Yeah, but I think it's also important to know that passing that 1.5 level, it's not like falling off a cliff. It's more like we're playing a dice game that gets more and more loaded. Like the probability that bad things happen gets higher. Yeah, exactly.
But I do, I like want to stress that it's not like we wake up one morning past this 1.5 level and have all of these things just like happen at once. Got it. Okay. Andrew Jarvis is a climate scientist at Lancaster University in the UK. And he's an author of that new study I mentioned before, the one that tells us that we're closer to 1.4 than 1.3.
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