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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC, and now our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday, all this year on the show. As the summer season winds down on this day after Labor Day, let's take stock of some historic facts. June and July this year were the hottest on record. 2023 is on track to be the warmest year in recent history, meaning since they started keeping modern records.

While it may be physically very uncomfortable, the rising heat, which is starting earlier in the year and keeping winters mild as well, is already having a big impact on everything, from plants to animals, and even industrial activity. Bloomberg recently reported on how the rising temperatures are impacting key environmental and economic factors around the world from Florida Keys coral reefs to India's wheat production, and even pine trees in New Jersey.

Zahra Hirji is here. She is a Bloomberg News climate reporter, and joins us now to discuss her reporting. She and her team at Bloomberg wrote the recent piece called Rising Temperatures are Wreaking Havoc Year Round. Zahra, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on.

Zahra Hirji: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to talk about long-term trends, which is really how we know the extent of global warming, but about this summer in particular, who set records?

Zahra Hirji: Everywhere set records. I mean, there have been major global records. As you mentioned, this was the hottest June and July on record globally, but then there's also been daily records set, monthly records set. Phoenix, Arizona, specifically has had its hottest July on record, and is on track to have its hottest summer on record. Really all around, the globe records are dropping.

Brian Lehrer: I'll give you another record and ask you to put it into context, because I know people bring this up as a confounding factor in how to understand all this. You write in your article this summer, ocean temperatures of the Florida Coast surged a whopping 3 degrees Celsius above the average, in part due to the current El Nino atop the longer trend in climate change. People might have been hearing about El Nino, but haven't read into it too much.

Can you explain that current called El Nino and what scientists say about how climate change is impacting it?

Zahra Hirji: Sure. El Nino is one of these global systems that's been happening for a while. You have La Nina, which is like one side of it, and with that, you can have some cooler than average ocean temperatures, and then the flip side, we had that switch flip earlier this year, you get the El Nino, and that's when you start having warmer ocean temperatures. Specifically, it could lead to some the-- It's just the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere.

El Nino specifically can mean that certain ocean temperatures, like in the Pacific Ocean, can get very warm, but where the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf Ocean are, they're pretty close to the Pacific Ocean around Mexico and that coast, so because the atmosphere is absorbing some of the heat from the ocean, it could transfer, and you can start getting a little bit of that warming, not just in the Pacific Ocean, but elsewhere, but this is a short term phenomenon.

It's something that will happen for a couple of years or so. That's why we can have an intense outburst of ocean temperature and warmer global temperatures right now, but then, of course, in the background to everything that's been happening for decades and decades, is climate change. We've been releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and that has been leading to the slow onset of warming. What we're seeing this summer is both of those things really coming to a head, and some really extreme temperatures.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's a good way to describe it, both of those things coming to a head, because what I see in the political context sometimes is people who want to downplay global warming say, "Oh, all these records we're having this year, well, of course there's an El Nino," but there have been El Nino periods in the past and they haven't gotten this hot, because the underlying climate change wasn't there to this degree yet. Would you put it the same way?

Zahra Hirji: That's exactly right. We have had many El Ninos in the past and we haven't seen these temperatures. The reason why is because of climate change. There's an interaction between these things too, where we are seeing this slow increase of, every time there's an El Nino, that it just gets warmer and warmer and warmer. The other way that another researcher framed it for me is, an El Nino is sort of a glimpse into the future.

We might imagine that this year is especially hot, next year may likely also be hot as El Nino continues, then we may have some slightly cooler years, but as we continue to have global warming, we may start to see the temperatures that we're seeing this summer actually happen with increased frequency because of climate change.

Brian Lehrer: To the slightly longer term, and then we're going to do a really longer-term thing with a very interesting piece of sound that our producer Zach Gottehrer-Cohen helped out with, but in the, let's say medium-term, or short-ish, but not just this year term, a stat that I keep seeing is the nine last years have been the nine hottest years on record globally. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily sequential with a step every year.

2015 was hotter than 2014, 2016 was hotter than 2015, doesn't necessarily work in an exactly linear way like that, but that the last nine years were warmer than any nine-year period that came before. Have you looked at that kind of decade-long data?

Zahra Hirji: Absolutely, and it's true. It's just one more way of seeing, really, how it's getting hotter and it's just going to continue getting hotter. People often like to say this may be the hottest year on record for all of us, but it may also be one of the coldest summers you're ever going to experience going forward.

Brian Lehrer: You report for Bloomberg that since the 1900s, the planet's average temperature has warmed by about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Your team sent us your data set, which was a list of every month from the year, starting with January, 1900, and ending December of last year, and how anomalous each of those months was, like how much colder, or more frequently, how much warmer was a particular August, compared to the average August for the years 1951 through 1980.

Which is a standard baseline that climate scientists like to use for comparison, that period of the '50s, '60s and '70s. Our colleague Zach Gottehrer-Cohen has translated that into sound for our listeners. Now, the first thing you will hear, folks, is the decade from 1900 to 1910, for that decade, the tones will do a sweep from low to high, from the most anomalously cold to the most anomalously warm.

Over that sweep, you'll hear that some notes are louder than others, and that represents how many months per decade fit into a particular bucket. The louder tones represent the more common temperature anomalies. Spoiler alert, things are getting warmer overall. I bet you didn't need that spoiler. You'll hear the louder parts of each decade getting higher and higher pitch over time.

You'll also hear each decade repeated four times to make sure each decade could sink into your ears before moving on to the next decade for comparison. If that's all confusing, it's meant to unpack in advance a little bit of what you're going to hear, and it all takes place in the next 48 seconds.

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Zahra Hirji: I don't actually hear any--

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Brian Lehrer: Kudos to Zach Gottehrer-Cohen. They can write, they can book guests, they can come up with great ideas for the show, and they are an artist musically, and so there it is. The bottom line there is that, as you heard those 48 seconds go by, the pitch was getting higher and higher on average, and that's what represents the gradual warming. We put it into audio thanks to Zach, Bloomberg put this into a visually appealing graph, which we will link to on our website.

Zahra, can you just explain some of the nuances there, things that stood out to you when you put this in data graphic form for Bloomberg News?

Zahra Hirji: Yes. Well, I'll also clarify that it's not Bloomberg data, but we are using NASA's data to show that change in temperature. One of the reason we like to look at temperature anomalies versus just straight observed temperature is because it can better capture differences at a particular place. You can imagine how, in New York, the temperature on the ground might be different than the temperature on the top of the Statue of Liberty.

How temperatures are changing over time, that difference at the ground and also on top of the Statue of Liberty is roughly going to be the same. As you said, the anomaly is the difference from the past or whatever you're using as the relative. As the decades have gone by, it's just been getting warmer and warmer and warmer. We are now in the 2020s, and that's looking to be the warmest that it's been in the past 100 or so years.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC, FM HDNAM, New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio, and live streaming @wnyc.org. We are in our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on The Brian Lehrer Show, all this year. Our guest today, Zahra Hirji, Bloomberg News Climate Reporter, as we're talking about the numbers on this day after Labor Day.

This day after the summer season when many heat records were set around the United States and around the world, and we're putting that in big picture in historical context. We can take a few phone calls at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or text at that number, or tweet @BrianLehrer. We've got a few more minutes with Zahra to go over some of the data from this summer, from this year, putting into historical perspective as we just take a step back at the end of the summer season, day after Labor Day, and talk about global warming by the numbers.

Zahra, a lot of listeners probably know that coral reefs are considered a canary in the coal mine for climate change, and they were among the first ecosystems visibly impacted by rising temperatures at least reported by the media, and we might not have heard about them in a while. You reported on the coral reefs in the Florida Keys, what did your reporting find?

Zahra Hirji: Yes, it's actually incredibly sad. There's been this extreme heat wave, as we've already talked about, ocean heatwave, in particular, and in Florida Keys, there are just these amazing coral reef system, but they are incredibly temperature sensitive. When temperatures get so hot, that's when they start to-- It's called bleach. Coral reefs have this special relationship with algae, which is what gets them this beautiful color, that algae can react pretty poorly to high temperatures, so then the coral expels them.

That's when they turn white, or bleach. At that point, coral reefs are basically starving. They're not necessarily dead yet, but that's really just a matter of time that they are in that period. What we've seen this summer is, ocean temperatures got to the hottest they've been since the satellite records, the past couple of decades, and that happened in July. The reason that's important is, as it's been getting hotter, bleaching may happen year after year.

Usually, it starts in August or September, which are when the oceans get hottest throughout the year, at this point, in the year, for this region. The fact that it got so hot so early has meant that for weeks, the system has just been dealing with unimaginable heat. It's this open question of, are they actually going to be able to survive this year? Year over year, the number of corals and coral reefs themselves have shrunk because of these high temperatures, along with other environmental factors.

There's this real concern that we could see this mass die off this year. When we did this piece, it was in the middle of the summer. It actually has gotten worse since this piece came out. I've continued to talk with coral reef scientists and they're just not sure what's going to happen to this precious ecosystem, going forward. If you go down right now, a lot of the coral reefs are just white, and this is an ecosystem that's not just beautiful, it's great for the ecosystem itself.

Fish, different animals live there, but it's also a huge part of the economy. Part of the tourism is going out and seeing these reefs, swimming, and snorkeling. If these reefs are suffering, that can also have a major impact on the local economy.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I happen to be someone who doesn't love swimming in the cold waters off the beaches of New York and the Jersey Shore. I've really enjoyed those few times when I've been lucky enough to go down to Florida or the Caribbean, and go swimming and snorkeling around there. You reported that the waters off the Florida Keys reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit at one point this summer. Did you happen to go in the water? I can't even imagine what that feels like, when the water is warmer than your body temperature.

Zahra Hirji: I did not, but I have spoken with many, many scientists who have, and they described it as incredibly uncomfortable. When it's that hot, it's like you're in a bathtub, not a little bit warmer. It is not the refreshing experience you would normally experience when you're jumping, or you think of jumping, into the ocean. I think it was maybe even a little too hot for them, and it's just another way of feeling like the oceans just weren't what they would expect and weren't what they normally are.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, Roger in Westchester wants to react to Zach Gottehrer-Cohen's sound design about the increasing temperatures since 1900. Roger, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Roger: Hello, all. That sound effect of the progressively rising temperature brought me to a realization. You know the frog analogy where you slowly can cook a frog to death by gradually increasing the temperature of the water?

Brian Lehrer: Because they don't realize it, yes.

Roger: Well, the frog is unaware of it, but we are, and we're still cooking ourselves to death, and that just hit me. We have the wherewithal and we're still doing it. We're just as dumb as the frogs.

Brian Lehrer: Roger, thank you very much. It's certainly going to be a big political topic in 2024. I've been seeing reporting over the last few days, about how the Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy is campaigning in Iowa a lot on global warming being a hoax, and finding a lot of resonance, even though we know statistically, even just from this segment, that it's not a hoax, but he's finding that that message resonates with a lot of people in Iowa, which holds that early caucus next year.

People who think that the government under Biden is doing too much about global warming. This is obviously going to be a big issue when we are letting ourselves be like the frog in gradually boiling water, boiling ourselves to metaphorical death, because it's not so different today than it was yesterday, and it's not going to be that different tomorrow. In fact, Zahra, that's one of the reasons that we do a climate story of the week like this, because news is usually about things that change quickly and dramatically.

Climate warms very slowly, and so there may not be a news event every week, but the climate is continuing to warm year by year, as we've demonstrated, so we're carving out space for it every Tuesday on the show all this year, just to make sure it doesn't fall by the wayside, because it's not the most dramatic thing that's happening. As a closing thought, and I'm curious to get your reaction to this--

I think one of the reasons that we're seeing more pressure for climate policy is that we are seeing more extreme weather events that can be tied, at least in part, to the rising global temperatures. We know what they are, they're wildfires, they're heat events, like in Phoenix, that you were talking about this summer, that are unprecedented even for a place like Phoenix. When these extreme weather events take place, it's those things that really drive policy, right?

Zahra Hirji: That's the goal, or not the goal, but that's people, scientists, and others following this crisis continue to worsen really hope for is, when will these disasters--? You mentioned that it's not a news story every day, but the summer has felt like there have been so many disasters that it could be, I have been feeling like I've been reporting on a new disaster every day, or at least every week, which one of those will maybe sink through and lead to policy change?

It is true that it's been steadily getting warmer, and it's not maybe easy to identify that on the day-to-day. That was part of the inspiration for doing a story like this, is to point out that even when it's not the hottest day of the year, climate change is having impacts, and it's having impacts across the different seasons. Maybe it means that the coldest day of the year is getting less cold, and that has a big impact on certain types of species that are pests, and that could kill trees.

Which then are trees that we depend on, and use, and make up our ecosystem, or that if spring temperatures don't reach a specific threshold, which are needed or critical for the growing season, that that could then impact the type of food that we have, and how many people have access to that, or it can mean that it's impacting the ecosystems that we like to see and travel to, and that impacts tourism.

It doesn't have to be the hottest day of the year to have these major ripple effects across our economy, and that we're starting to see those really build up. The disasters are the ones that really shine through. They do grab the headlines, and it's not necessarily that climate change is causing those disasters, but it's certainly making them more likely and it can make them worse. Those come with pretty high costs as well.

When will we actually have enough policy to deal with those? I think there are a growing number of people who want to see that happen, and it's waiting. There have been a lot of actions, even within the US, like passing the Inflation Reduction Act last year, but those policies for providing solutions also, they need to be more to just deal with the scale of this crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we're seeing it from both sides. Climate is going to be a major issue in the 2024 election cycle. Thanks for helping us do some of the science. Today, Zahra Hirji, Bloomberg News climate reporter. Her recent piece is titled, Rising Temperatures are Wreaking Havoc Year Round. Thank you so much.

Zahra Hirji: Thank you.

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