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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our Brian Lehrer Show quiz series, Life by the Numbers. Test your knowledge, win prizes, and learn stuff. The topic for today, climate change. We will ask you a few questions about a few different climate-related issues and topics related to the news that you've been hearing on the show and elsewhere. If you get your question's answer right, you can choose between a Peace Love and Brian Lehrer tie-dye T-shirt or a Brian Lehrer Show New York City skyline mug.

Who wants to play? Call in at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Of course, that's our on-air number. That's not our membership drive number and we'll never ask you for membership donations on the air. Call in if you want to do a climate-by-the-numbers quiz. Just answer one question right and you'll be able to choose between a Peace Love and Brian Lehrer tie-dye T-shirt or the Brian Lehrer Show New York City skyline mug. Who wants to play? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We're opening the lines now. Joining us as climate quizmaster is Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for The New York Times. Hi, Somini, welcome back to WNYC.

Somini Sengupta: Hi, Brian, it's good to be back as a longtime contributor to WNYC.

Brian: I'm glad to hear that. As the calls are coming in and getting in line, you want to just talk to everybody a little bit about being an international climate reporter right now like, how do you make it interesting? We've launched a weekly climate story of the week segment on this show. Today's quiz, what we're going to do right now, is our climate of the week's story for this week.

One of the things that we find the reason we're doing this is that climate stories tend to be incremental, except when there's a big storm or something. When the news is changing so fast, in other ways, when there's a war somewhere or there's an election somewhere, then all the news media runs and gets galvanized toward it. The climate breaks down micro inch by micro inch. How do you cover it as international climate reporter for The New York Times?

Somini: Every story is, in part, a climate story. Here's why I say that because there are climate implications for the war in Ukraine right now. There are climate implications for pretty much every election in our lifetimes going forward because decisions will be made by local politicians, state politicians, national politicians about how to tackle this very clear and present danger to our lives. I don't see other stories getting in the way of climate stories necessarily. My challenge is to make sense of how climate risks impact just everyday life.

Brian: We will hear some of that in the quiz, so here we go. Peter in Syosset, you're on WNYC. Ready to play?

Peter: Good morning, Brian. Yes, I am.

Brian: Thank you for calling in. All right, Somini, you have the first question there?

Somini: Okay, so during 2020, the first year of the pandemic, global greenhouse gas emissions changed by about 5%. Did they go up by 5% or down by 5%?

Peter: This is in the first month of the pandemic?

Brian: The first year, 2020.

Somini: The first year.

Peter: First year. I would say it went down.

Brian: That is right. They went down.

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Somini: They went down even more.

Brian: Hang on, Peter. We're going to take your address off the air so we can send you either a Peace Love and Brian Lehrer tie-dye T-shirt or a Brian Lehrer Show skyline mug. Which one do you want, Peter? The T-shirt or the mug?

Peter: I think I'll take the mug, Brian. It'll go with the Brooklyn Roasting Company coffee.

Brian: All right, hang on. Somini, that's interesting. Well, let's do the next caller, and then we're going to talk about this question. Andrew in Brooklyn, you're ready to play?

Andrew: Yes, I am.

Brian: All right. Somini, question two.

Somini: Question two. Global emissions of greenhouse gases changed by about 5% again. The next pandemic year, 2021, did they go up or did they go down?

Brian: We just established in question one that global greenhouse emissions went down by about 5% in the first year of the pandemic. How about the second year of the pandemic, Andrew? Another 5% change, up or down?

Andrew: I'm going to go up.

Brian: Up is correct.

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Brian: You want a mug or you want a T-shirt?

Andrew: Oh, I got to go with the T-shirt. Thank you, Brian.

Brian: All right, we're going to send you a T-shirt. Hang on, we'll take your address off the air. Let's talk about this. Why did greenhouse gas emissions go down in the first year of the pandemic?

Somini: They went down because we burned less fossil fuels. Oil, gas, and coal. People stay at home. There wasn't much transportation use. There's a real decrease in transportation use. In fact, the decline was really, really pronounced in the US. It was an 11% decrease in carbon dioxide emissions in the US because we burn fewer fossil fuels.

Brian: I find that stat so interesting that it went down even further in the United States. It just shows how much the US as a major industrialized country contributes to the total greenhouse gas emission load on the climate. Then, of course, it went up again in 2021 because even though the pandemic was still going, people were starting to return to more of their previous travel habits. That's the simple answer to that part of the question.

Somini: Absolutely.

Brian: All right, Luke in Los Angeles, ready for a quiz question?

Luke: Yes, I'm ready.

Brian: Somini, hit him.

Somini: All right, President Biden did something significant for the climate on day one of his presidency. It was his marquee day one climate promise during the campaign, reversing something that Donald Trump did. What did Joe Biden do on day one?

Luke: Did he enter the Paris Agreement?

Brian: That is exactly what he did on day one.

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Brian: It didn't even take him till his second day in office. He did it, Somini, on inauguration day, right?

Somini: Yes, he rejoined the United States in the Paris climate accord as he said he would do. Remember, Donald Trump pulled the United States, the only country in the world, out of the Paris climate accord as he said he would do.

Brian: The only country to get in and get out. Luke, you want a T-shirt or a mug?

Luke: I would love a mug, but I'm also conscious of all the transport miles it would take to get to Los Angeles, so you can skip me if it's too much emission.

Brian: Well, that's a moral choice. How about that? A very climate-conscious caller winning a prize and not taking the coast-to-coast transportation of his prize. Thanks a lot, Luke. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Brandy in Manhattan. We won't have to ship as far to Brandy if she wins. Hi, Brandy, you're on WNYC. Ready to play?

Brandy: Yes, good morning, Brian.

Brian: Somini, what you got for Brandy?

Somini: Yes, so Fridays for the Future is the global student-led protest movement where school-aged children don't attend classes to raise awareness of the climate crisis. That movement was started by an activist named Greta Thunberg in 2018. How old was she that year when she became a global superstar?

Brandy: 14?

Brian: Ooh, close.

Brandy: 15?

Brian: Okay, you said it before. I could say no, so that is right, 15.

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Brian: T-shirt or mug?

Brandy: Thank you. You're so generous. I'm a little excited. T-shirt.

Brian: All right, hang on. We'll take your address off the air. It is amazing as Greta Thunberg continues to be prominent on the world stage to think that she was just 15 and had that impact at that age that she had in 2018.

Somini: Yes, absolutely. She started sitting with a poster close to the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm. At that time, there were other young people's climate protests going on elsewhere, but hers got a lot of attention and a lot of young people took inspiration from her movement. It has become really quite an international and really sustained movement. Four years later, Fridays for the Future is still holding protests and rather large coordinated ones in various cities around the world.

Brian: Linelle in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Linelle, ready to play?

Linelle: Yes, I am. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hi, Linelle.

Somini: Hi, Linelle. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in part, because of climate change, roughly half the world's population already faces a severe scarcity of what essential natural resource, at least part of the year? Roughly half--

Linelle: Water.

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Brian: That was easy. T-shirt or mug, Linelle?

Linelle: T-shirt, please.

Brian: [chuckles] Hang on. We will get that tie-dye T-shirt out to you. By the way, folks, if you win a T-shirt or if you want one as a thank-you gift in the membership drive, I'm told we have sizes ranging from small to XXL, so there you go. Talk about that. Roughly, that was one of the most surprising stats to me as we were preparing this quiz, Somini, something that I know you or your Times colleagues have reported on that, roughly, half the world's population, half, currently faces severe water scarcity, at least part of the year. Is that unusual?

Somini: Oh, it's staggering and it is incredibly painful, incredibly onerous for the ordinary people, many of them women, who are responsible for collecting water in various parts of the world. I've seen this with my own eyes. I remember meeting someone in Chennai in Southern India, where for a whole host of reasons, there was a very, very sharp water crisis one year.

One family had taken to collecting the water that came out of their air conditioner to help them with showers in the morning. People would stand in line for hours for a water tanker to come up. This is how climate change can exacerbate, can supersize already existing risks. There may be a whole bunch of reasons for there to be water scarcity in one part of the world or another. Very often, man-made anthropogenic global warming can really heighten and exacerbate that risk.

Brian: Elizabeth in Brooklyn, ready to play? Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Oh, hi. Yes. [inaudible 00:12:52]

Brian: All right, Somini, what you got for Elizabeth?

Somini: How many more degrees of warming is considered the limit of what the world is now trying to stay within? This number gets a lot of publicity in climate circles because a certain number of degrees of warming is what the IPCC considers the threshold before we would have unavoidable increases in multiple climate hazards and really major threat, so what is that temperature in Celsius?

Brian: This is the way it usually gets discussed. X degree Celsius is the threshold beyond which scientists say the earth faces irreversible catastrophic damage.

Elizabeth: Right, I got it. Let me just ask. Are you looking for a whole number or one with a decimal?

Brian: If it has a decimal, then we're looking for one with the decimal.

Elizabeth: [laughs] I have a feeling it's either 1.7 or maybe 2 degrees Celsius.

Brian: Ooh, that one's going to be wrong, Elizabeth. Thank you very much, but she was pretty close because it's 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is a good one for you to explain, Somini, because people hear this and they think, "Well, 1.5 Celsius. First of all, it's not that much. It's still only a few degrees Fahrenheit." The world's going to change dramatically by a few degrees if there's a warming of just a few degrees?

Somini: That's a scientific consensus, yes. What are we talking about? We're talking about how much is baseline temperature projected to go up between the start of the industrial era roughly 150 years ago to the end of this century. Right now, the average baseline global temperature is already roughly 1.1 degrees higher in Celsius. If that continues, if we continue at our current pace, we will absolutely shoot past 1.5 degrees. In fact, right now, we're on a pathway to warm by somewhere around 2.7, 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century if all of the climate pledges are kept.

Yes, it does seem like 1.5 degrees is tiny. If it's 1.5 degrees hotter in your hometown, does that really matter? Well, yes, when the baseline, when the average temperature goes up, then you're much more likely to break your high-temperature records in your hometown. We're seeing that already. We're seeing these crazy heat waves. We're seeing crazy temperature records being set, not only heat. That 1.5 degrees warming threshold has all kinds of other consequences. On the warming in the ocean, for example, and sea-level rise or how much rain, a hurricane might dump on a coastal city.

Brian: That's related to warming over the ocean.

Somini: Absolutely. That baseline temperature really does exacerbate extreme weather, so it's very important.

Brian: We have time for one more question. Somini, let's make it question 11. That, I think, is numbered that way on your sheet. June in New City in Rockland County. Hi, June. You're on WNYC. Ready to play?

June: I am.

Somini: Hi, June. I think this question is the net-zero question, Brian?

Brian: That's right, yes.

Somini: Okay, so this is another thing that you already hear a lot about and you do already. Pledges to go "net zero" have recently come from countries ranging from the United States to China and to companies like Amazon and Apple. Can you give us a rough definition of the term "net zero"? This is a hard one.

Brian: It's a hard one.

June: Yes, it's cutting emissions.

Somini: Yes, say more.

June: Okay, it's cutting your emissions to net zero?

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Brian: Well, we need a little more than that. Thanks for trying, June. Let's give one more person a crack at this. How about Caitlin in Brooklyn? Caitlin, you're on WNYC. Do you think you can define net zero a little bit in a climate context?

Caitlin: Yes, so I would say that net zero is looking for everything that we take in. We're able to somehow mitigate or at least mitigate what we take in and what we put out.

Brian: Yes, that is right.

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Brian: Caitlin, a T-shirt or a mug?

Caitlin: I have to go T-shirt.

Brian: All right, hang on. We're going to take your address and we'll send you a T-shirt. This is the one I ask you to ask this question before we run out of time because I really want you to explain this. Obviously, we do these quizzes to have some fun and give away stuff, but also to learn stuff. I think people hear the term "net zero" so much and don't really know what it means. Like what Caitlin was saying, we can offset the emissions that we are responsible for in our lives to some degree, but can we really?

Somini: Yes, so this is a really important one because we're drowning in net-zero promises right now. As Caitlin said, it means reducing emissions. If there's any that you're still producing and putting up into the atmosphere, it means balancing that out by removing an equivalent amount of emissions. There's a lot of debate about whether these net-zero promises mean anything because some companies may say, "Well, we're planting trees, for example, to balance out the emissions that we produce."

Well, are those the right kind of trees? Are they going to just go up in flames in the next wildfire? Here's why net zero is important for your audience and our audience because it's up to people. It's up to ordinary people to hold companies and their governments to account. By net zero, what do you mean? How are you going to balance out the emissions that you're producing? How do we know that those trees are going to last? Are you using that net-zero promise to essentially keep doing business as usual? This is where really accountability journalism and a knowledgeable citizenry comes in.

Brian: That's our climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show, our Life by the Numbers climate quiz with Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for The New York Times. Somini, thanks so much for helping out with this.

Somini: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

 

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