Rising seas, raging fires, more powerful hurricanes—as the climate changes, so do many facets of life. A look at how 60 Minutes has documented the transformation.
Extreme weather episodes are upending the practices and economics of winemaking - and in some cases, changing the taste of the wine itself - in Old World and New World vineyards alike.
"The physics is quite simple," Hansen told Pelley in 2020."As you add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, you increase the heating of the surface. So, at the times and places where it's dry, you get more extreme droughts. The fire seasons become longer. The fires burn hotter. But at the times and places where it's wet, you get more evaporation of the water. And you get warmer, moist air, which provides greater rainfall. And it's the fuel for storms.
Hansen believes the way to do that is for governments to tax cheap fossil fuels to make them more expensive than clean alternatives. The consequences without it, he warned, are too terrible. Pelley's report also explored how much of this transformation is due to Earth's naturally changing climate and how much is man's doing. According to Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, the answer is frozen in the Arctic's glaciers. As it freezes, ice captures everything in the air, so the Arctic's ice has captured an atmospheric record that covers half a million years.
Alfonsi spoke with Peter Demenocal, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University who studies ice cores. He told Alfonsi that the cores pulled from Petermann Glacier are filling in a crucial piece of the climate change puzzle. One culprit, Pelley reported, is climate change. He spoke with Tom Swetnam, one of the world's leading fire ecologists. Swetnam and his colleagues had just published their findings showing that climate change had increased temperatures in the western U.S. by one degree, and that has caused four times more fires.
"I think this summer has been a real wake-up call for most Australians," Joelle Gergis, a climate scientist at the Australian National University and a lead author of a United Nations report on climate change, told Williams in 2020."And myself as a climate scientist, seeing the extreme level of heat and the bushfires and the drought conditions playing out so catastrophically has been, I think, a wakeup call to the world.
"So by the year 2050, which is only thirty years into the future, many places around the world, including in the U.S., are going to experience their historical once-in-a-hundred-year flood level once a year or more frequently," Oppenheimer said."Let me repeat that. An event that used to cause severe flooding once a century, we're going to get that same water level once a year.