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250 Years of America's Climate Record · Atmosphere with Emily Gracey

• Emily Gracey: July 4, 1776. 56 men gathered in a stuffy room in Philadelphia with a mission to build a new nation. One of those men stepped out that morning, bought himself a brand new thermometer, and started taking notes. His name was Thomas Jefferson, and the observations he recorded that day became the beginning of an American climate record that stretches all the way to today. And those records allow us to ask a remarkable question. How different is America's weather today from the world the founders knew 250 years ago? That story is America's climate, and it has a lot to tell us about where we've been and where we're headed. Today on Atmosphere, the weather records of the Founding Fathers. How America's climate has changed over 250 years. And what the data says we may be experiencing by the time our country turns three hundred. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation. Each week I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it. Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us. It's the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No air conditioning, no electric fans, wool coats and powdered wigs, and 56 men crammed into a hall with the windows nailed shut. Not for secrecy, but to keep out the horse flies. That's the scene that greeted the founding fathers as they gathered to do something the world had never seen. vote to dissolve the ties between a colony and its crown and declare themselves a free nation. We know an extraordinary amount about what the weather was like that week. And we know it because one of those men had a habit that honestly sounds very familiar to anyone in meteorology. Thomas Jefferson kept meticulous weather records. He took readings at sunrise to catch the overnight low. And again around three or four o'clock in the afternoon when he figured the temperatures peaked. Some days he took three or four readings. He noted cloud cover, wind direction, humidity. He called these things indexes of climate, and he brought his thermometer with him everywhere, including to Philadelphia in July of 1776. He started his record on July 1st, right there in the middle of the Continental Congress. And on July 4th, before heading to the Statehouse for what would become the most consequential afternoon in American history, he went shopping. He stopped at a store on 2nd Street and bought a brand new thermometer. And then he used it that same day, July 4th, 1776. He took four temperature readings. 6 o'clock in the morning, 68 degrees. 9 a.m. 72. 1 p.m. 76 degrees. And then again at 9 that evening, 73 and a half. Clear skies, a light wind. By Philadelphia's July standards, then or now, a genuinely lovely day. Today Philadelphia's average 4th of July high is degrees. The founders had it a little easier weather-wise than we do for our cookouts. John Adams, to put it gently, was less scientifically inclined about the weather and more personally aggravated by it. Even before 1776, he was writing to Abigail that he dreaded the melting heats of a Philadelphia summer and feared his frail constitution might not survive it. In later summers, he described the city's air as feeling like the breath of a hot oven. He was dramatic about it, but honestly, he wasn't wrong. Philadelphia in July is no joke. But here's what strikes me about Jefferson and that thermometer. He wasn't just curious about the weather. He was thinking about something bigger. About climate. About what the patterns across many years, many places, many observers might tell us about the American continent itself. In 1784, he wrote to his friend James Madison, urging him to keep his own weather diary. Systematic columns twice a day, temperature, pressure, wind, and with notes on the first blooms of spring and the first frost of fall. He wanted a network. He wanted data. He understood even then that you couldn't know a climate from a single reading. He needed time. He needed patience. He needed 250 years of someone paying attention. And a lot of people have been paying attention. The records that Jefferson started have grown into something he could have only dreamed of. A nationwide web of observation, data, and science that has been quietly building a portrait of this country's climate for two and a half centuries. My guest today has spent her career dissecting those data. Caitlin Trudeau is an applied climate scientist at Climate Central, where she leads fire weather research and digs deep into West Coast climate impacts. She has a master's degree from the University of Nevada Reno, where she studied Arctic climate change. She's even done field work in Churchill, Manitoba, studying what's happening to the northern tree line. And she's been working directly with meteorologists and journalists to translate that science into stories that people can tell. Today Caitlin's going to walk us through 250 years of American climate records, how they've been kept, what they reveal, and what the data tells us about where this country is headed. 250 years ago, Jefferson started asking the question. Caitlin is here to help us understand what we've learned since then. Caitlin Trudeau, so excited to have you on today to talk about our history, our present, and our future when it comes to climate. Big, big year for the United States. And this is fun to talk about for me because I think a lot of times when we're talking about climate, we look at it at this global scale. But this gives us an opportunity to really kind of hone in on the United States, because that's what we're focused on this year. Let's go back to like 1776. Because we didn't really have like reliable weather records then, right? Yeah. So I mean ⁓ not in terms of observations, but we did have things like paleoclimate records, which are things like tree rings, ⁓ lake sediments. ⁓ so so there are different like proxy records, ⁓ which are basically, you know, the natural archives, the natural recorders of our climate, but we didn't have really reliable observations. ⁓ and it's not that no one was observing or recording, in fact. I it's been said over and over again that on the day that the Declaration of Independence was signed, Thomas Jefferson went out and bought a thermometer. And that for the next like fifty years he recorded the temperature where he lived and that he was a very avid, I guess you could say a weather nerd like this or our modern terms. but yeah, he he was very interested in in in weather. And so he there there were people who were recording, you know, changes in our temperature, when they were recording, you know, when it would rain. ⁓ you know, really there was like really ⁓ crazy intense winters around that time, kind of around ⁓ end of the little ice age. So there's not the kind of same observational records that we have today. ⁓ but there were records, they just were pretty sparse, and a lot of them were just documented by people, ⁓ and in like diaries and stitch diaries and stuff. Okay. So Can you give us an idea as to what weather and climate was like in 1776? Yeah. So around that time, you like I said, at the end of the Little Ice Age, was this kind of period, it's a multi-century period where, especially around the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of the world, we're more cooler than normal. So we were kind of coming out of this colder time. and in fact, they had some really, really harsh winters right about the time that the country was founded. ⁓ in 1780, they they had the hard winter. And they said it said that New York Harbor froze over from Manhattan to Staten Island. and so it was considered, you know, one of the coldest winters of the colonial period. and and there were also, you know, over the next at least maybe like 10 or 20 years, ⁓ there were, you know, volcanic eruptions that also led to some cooling around the world. ⁓ You know, it's not quite in the 1700s, but in 1816 was when we had the year without a summer. ⁓ that was ⁓ I think it was Tambora's eruption, that basically led to a year without a summer of of cooling ⁓ due to the volcanic ash that was up in the atmosphere. So it was definitely a cooler period, but it's not to say that it wasn't hot, because there's also r ⁓ recordings of battles happening. I think the Battle of Monmouth, ⁓ one of the first battles in modern day New Jersey. them it was recorded that it was like a hundred degrees that they were fighting through. And they they wore like really kind of wool, they were a lot of wool and like ⁓ heavy cloth. So there are some records. I think it was said that there were ⁓ a lot of soldiers that died from heat stroke instead of like actually fighting. So there were and that was in you know middle of of June, July. So not too surprising. But I think that there was definitely colder winters back then. Kind of, you know, we we see the occasional really cold winter, but this was something that was pretty like common and and it was actually really dangerous. And a lot of people feared it. There were a lot of brutal winters ⁓ in those earlier years of of the US. ⁓ so that's that's some of the things that we know from the from the early years. but but yeah, I mean, we can also look back and one of the reasons why we know what temperature, what the temperature was, and things like that is through. Those proxy records, those paleoclimate data. So like ice cores and tree rings. That's actually one of my favorite things to do around town. I live in Sacramento and sometimes they have to cut down trees. There's tons of trees here, but for one reason or another. and just looking at the tree rings and just counting back the years, ⁓ it's one of my favorite things to do. So I I really love paleoclimate records and natural those natural archives. I think it's just a really incredible ⁓ thing that we have. And that's how we know. You know, what the temperature was like millions of years ago and things like that. Yeah. I think it's so cool too. Like I I always think it's wild that you can like pinpoint a year where like a volcano erupted in a tree that has been cut down. Yeah. That's wild. Like when there was like big fire or when there was a drought. ⁓ yeah. It's it's just really incredible. And and I think it's something that's so often overlooked. and maybe it's just something that I'd like to geek out about. Maybe that's just totally it. But ⁓ you know, there there are There are so many different ⁓ parts of our natural world that are actually recording, you know, recording for us. And they've been doing consistently like that for millions of years, which is really amazing. We we know about tree rings and ice cores. Are there any other that maybe that people haven't heard of? So lake sediments, ⁓ you could do pollen, ⁓ pollen counts, ⁓ corals are another really interesting one. Corals are also kind of similar to tree rings. ⁓ so yeah, lake sediments, ocean sediments, Yeah, tree rings, corals, ice cores. I think those are the main ones. I know there's more, but ⁓ those are the main ones that that that we look for. But ⁓ but yeah, it it's just it's really great to be able to do that. And, you know, just the I think what's so amazing about the ice cores and specifically is that the ice cores that can drill down like miles into these ice sheets. And there's little trapped bubbles of air that are basically like a time capsule of what the atmosphere was like. And so they can analyze those little air bubbles that are trapped in the ice cores. And that's how they can analyze, you know, what the the composition of the atmosphere was. So it's it's really incredible like how far we've come, you know, like thinking about ⁓ you know, where we were when the country first started. I I also read something recently that Thomas Jefferson had actually thought that the climate was changing. but he thought that it was ⁓ about the clearing of the forests. And the land use change that was happening on the eastern ⁓ coast, which I think did contribute to to the emissions, ⁓ emissions there, but is kind of like more on the deforestation side, not the actual like ⁓ greenhouse gases from ⁓ carbon emissions and things like that. But ⁓ so he had actually written something about it in one of his journals about how is thinking it's the notes on the state of Virginia. And so he had been talking about how he thinks that the clearing is actually causing more warming. ⁓ So it's that's it's really interesting. So he kind of was just looking around him. And, you know, he just bought in his thermometer ⁓ in 1776. And, you know, just kind of people were just looking around the world and recording what they saw. ⁓ and now you look at all the different tools and technologies and things that we have. It's it's really incredible to think about just how humans have. just learned so much, but then also invented all of these different ways to observe the world around us and to find these like kind of hidden mysteries, you know, like all these little like like things like paleoclimate records. Like who would have thought to look into trapped ice or like trapped bubbles in ice, you know, or or to look at tree rings? Like these are all like kind of things that have been around us, but we have like kind of ⁓ we've kind of just like stumbled upon them and then realized they were tools. These are actually clues to what the world was used to be like. And now we have satellites and we've got, you know, ⁓ I I went to grad school in Reno and ⁓ at the Desert Research Institute, they actually had one of the machines that analyzes ice cores and melts them and and ⁓ just it's just an incredible thing. We we've come really far, I guess, to say that ⁓ and and people are still observing, looking at the world around them, you know, taking notes that way. But we just we have really come quite far ⁓ in the last two hundred years. Yeah. And if you think about it in the grand scheme of things, like that's not that long, you know, we think about the history of the world. It's such a short time period. So when we talk about like climate change over the past 250 years, and you know, there's arguments out there from people saying like that's nothing. Like if if we're warming over the past 250 years, that's who knows like if that's really concerning. So how do you address that? Yeah, I think that, you know. One thing that is really important to, I guess, acknowledge is that yes, the climate has changed. You know, we know through millions and millions of years of data that we have seen really warm years. We have seen times where the the parts per million of carbon dioxide was really high. ⁓ but it's important to also acknowledge that what's really important here is the rate of change. So, really, like most of all of this massive change has really happened in the last 50, 75 years. ⁓ if you look back at just like annual carbon emissions over over time in the US and in the world, you go back to 1750, 1776, and basically for a century you don't really see much change. ⁓ and and then really in the last 50, 75 years, you just see a massive amount. I think in ⁓ I think it was in it the early ⁓ 1770, 1750, 1776 times, ⁓ they say that there was ⁓ Only 14, 15 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year around the globe. And now we're almost at 39 billion. So, like there's a massive amount of there's a huge change, and most of that change has happened in the last 50, 75 years, ⁓ which is just really remarkable. ⁓ so I think yes, we know that naturally there there are there's ⁓ variability in our climate. There's Lots of natural forms of variability like El Nino, things like that. And those are important to acknowledge. But we do know that it's something very much related to directly related to our actions. We've we've looked at all different kinds of things that would change the climate, all the natural things that could change the climate. ⁓ and and none of them can quite explain the change that we've seen. And when we go back and we look at how humans have emitted carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And you look at that trend, it directly tracks with our temperature change. So, ⁓ yes, the climate changes, it's natural, but the rate of change that we've experienced is definitely not natural. And that is what is so concerning, I think. It's not just that it's, you know, 1.3 degrees Celsius above, you know, the pre-industrial average. It's that we've seen this massive change in such a short period. And I was thinking about someone had asked me about 50 years from now, like our 300th birthday. And I was thinking about 50 years in the past. And so thinking about where we were in 1976. And like most people didn't know the climate was really changing, you know, like that, like so much we have learned so much in the last 50 years. And I I yeah, it it's just kind of a trip to think about that. I mean, there were definitely some people who knew the climate was changing at that time, but just the general population. You know, I think that it was just starting to be tricky. I didn't learn about it in school. Like I didn't grow up knowing what climate change was. I knew about the ozone hole, but I didn't know climate change. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's like, you know, when you put it and like we think about that way in the last like 50 years, all of this has happened. We've learned so much about the climate, but we've also learned about how our actions influence the climate in just 50 years. And And that is just a pretty remarkable rate. ⁓ when you consider how long humans have been around. ⁓ and you think back to, you know, the founding era of our country, we didn't have these kinds of emissions. We weren't impacting the atmosphere in the same degree. ⁓ you know, we were definitely clearing eastern forests at that time. So that was a kind of deforestation that did, you know, affect ⁓ carbon emissions. But It's just such it's so dramatically different. And when you think about the time scale that all this happened in basically the last like fifty ish years, ⁓ it it's pretty remarkable. So that almost makes it sound like hopeful, like you think the science might progress and people might progress in the next fifty years and it's not hopeless. Is that what you're saying? I'd say thinking fifty years into the future. That is about the time when our ⁓ general projections that we've been looking at kind of diverge. ⁓ We know that there's a period of climate change, a period of warming that's baked in over the next ⁓ couple of decades. But what's going to happen in this that later part, next 50 years, when we turn 300, ⁓ that is a story that we are writing right now. Because the actions that we take today, that Is really what matters. That's why our projections diverge, because we don't know what humans are going to do. We have an idea and we we have different scenarios to kind of try to give a range of ideas of what could happen. ⁓ but you know, there is a pretty dramatic difference in in the kind of impacts that we are going to see in 50 years, depending on what we do right now. So I think that's hopeful. I think that knowing that the future isn't totally like predetermined and that there's no hope. Like we do have this period of time where we can actually change what that future looks like. And I think it's it's really a a great time to reflect on what kind of world we want to live in and what kind of world we want to leave behind for future generations, for our children, our grandchildren. ⁓ And and and I think that now is is a great time to think about that and to reflect on what's possible. But I do think It's it's urgent. Like I don't think that we can wait 25 years to to start acting. We ha really have to start doing that now. ⁓ a lot of the things that we are hoping humans will do takes time. ⁓ and you know, we're talking about energy transitions, things, you know, like that. And and it's really going to be something that takes a long time, but it needs to start soon. So so I think that yes, there's hope. I think it's still very urgent, but I think People should feel empowered to know that we we get to decide what kind of future we want and what world we want to leave behind. We get to decide that. We still do, we still have time. but we're not always going to have time to do that. And so I think that it's never going to be it's never going to be cheaper, it's never going to be easier than it is right now. yes, there's probably going to be some and I'm sure there'll be inventions and and things like that, but. That all takes a lot of time and it also costs a lot of money. And most people like that's kind of my problem or my beef, I guess, with a lot of like climate solutions in terms of individuals, because they all like cost money. And I guess not all of them, but like when people talk about like, ⁓ you can switch to an electric car or you can put solar panels on your on your house. Like I rent an apartment. I can't decide whether I have solar panels on my on the house here. Like that's totally out of my control. I cannot buy a new car right now. So it's it's really kind of hard in those in that sense to feel like there's a lot of options. And I think really like the best thing you can do is ⁓ talk about it because I think it's important to let other people know why it matters, why it matters to you. and and every single person on this planet has something that they care about that's being negatively impacted by climate change. Every single person. ⁓ And so I think there's a way to kind of ⁓ establish more of a community that we've kind of lost in recent years, ⁓ ever since the pandemic especially, ⁓ to kind of talk about about this. And and I think it's important to use our voices and to make sure that we are using all the tools that we have to let people in power know ⁓ what is important to us and and what matters. So those things do give me hope, but I I I don't want to make it sound like we're gonna be fine. It's no big deal. It is a big deal and we might be fine, but really we're writing that story right now. Can you give me some specifics? Like in fifty years, I'm thinking about like my kids will be like retirement age probably in fifty years. Like what they might realistically, not an extreme situation, one direction or another, but realistically what they might be dealing with specifics as far as climate change impacts. Yeah. So again, it's it'll really depend on on how much Much we emit into the atmosphere. I think right now, general feelings, there's about maybe two to three degrees warming that we'll see by that time, which is a significant amount of warming. I know it sounds like a little bit to people, but just think about when you get sick and you take your temperature and how just a little bit of a temperature change can really cause a lot of chaos inside your body and the earth is the same way, right? So ⁓ yeah, you know, I What exactly that two to three degrees looks like will not be great. ⁓ there is going to be a lot more extreme weather across the world. So a lot more of what we've already seen. and there's, you know, a lot of threats to our food supply, our water supply. ⁓ there's the expansion of things like vector borne diseases, mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have been awful this year where I am at in ⁓ Sacramento, like all through the winter, which is nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And So I think I think that that we have to accept that there it there is going to be more of that. And there are going to be more challenges, but we can still avoid like some of and when I say the worst impact, some the worst impacts. What we still can avoid is ⁓ unnecessary hardship and damage done to both, you know, our natural world, ⁓ just the human world to our our society. and I think that, you know. Yeah, a lot of people want to know like what's it gonna be like in 2050? I mean, you tell me. Like we we all ha are gonna have to decide what that is. What I hope is that we have limited warming. I hope that we have we are able to keep it as low as possible. ⁓ I think that's a pretty optimistic ⁓ view, I guess. ⁓ but but what I would hope is that we have transitioned more to using green energy. That is like a huge thing. Even small changes in people's diets, for example, eating less meat, that actually has a huge impact ⁓ on global emissions. ⁓ But I also want to stress that it's not just us and the individual like society that can change. We really need, we really need action at all levels. So, like corporations, governments. We really need this kind of collective will that we need to have to make this global change. But you know, you talk about like you the ozone layer. That was like a crazy thing for a lot of people to realize. Like, ⁓ we're actually changing the atmosphere. A lot of people didn't think we could change the atmosphere. But like, what did we do? As, you know, a species, we came together, we decided that this is a problem and that we needed to fix it. And there's been a lot of healing of the ozone layer because of that. So we can change it back, you know? Like there's a lot of good that we can do. And I think that's important for us to remember. I wonder why though, like it, and maybe I was young, so I didn't really. grasp the full scope of like CFCs and the emissions there. Why did everybody believe that? But like not everybody believes the carbon emissions. I think there's a couple of different things. one of the big differences is that phasing out CFCs does not does not force the kind of change that ⁓ carbon emissions phasing out carbon emissions would, right? So like when we are talking about reducing carbon emissions, we're talking about massive change in our lives, in our daily lives, things we like to do. And a lot of people didn't really know what CFCs were. They're like, ⁓ okay, well, you know, just fix that. We will have less CFC CFCs. ⁓ it and it didn't really cause a lot of people to really change ⁓ things about their lives that were really important to them. And that's not where we're at now. We're really at a point where we have, you know, we haven't, we've delayed a lot of our action. And I think a lot of that's important to to acknowledge it's not just because people don't care. It's not because people are are like stupid or anything. There's been ⁓ a lot, a lot of coordinated there's been a coordinated campaign to try to confuse people about what the science says and to in infuse doubt. And it's so easy to cause someone to doubt something. ⁓ and it's so hard to gain that trust back. And so I think that there has unfortunately been a lot of people who benefit from climate change financially. And those people have been pretty intent and pretty coordinated on trying to infuse a lot of doubt and confusion into what the science says. Do scientists agree? Is it us? And so, you know, we also have a lot of things like social media we didn't have like back then that allow information to travel a lot faster, misinformation, disinformation. So unfortunately I think that we are we are facing a much bigger beast now. ⁓ and it does it does require people to to change the way that they live and the way, ⁓ yeah, I mean it there it's it's but I think when we we we really think about what we're changing for, like what we're really giving up is so small when you think about what we could be gaining. Just like look at one year of extreme weather events and talk to people who have lost everything. ⁓ that was just one event. They lost everything. And if you think about a future where we're seeing more hurricanes, more wildfires, you know, more droughts, more severe storms. it it's just, I don't know. I think that if we could look into that future, if we could actually see what that looked like, like it was a movie and and really believe that that's what was going to happen, I think we would really quickly change and and kind of make these bargains, I guess, that are are relatively very small, but it they feel big, you know, they're they They feel important. And I think that's basically why things are so different is because ⁓ it causes a causes us to change a lot of things about the way that we live that we don't want to. And I think also ⁓ there's just been so much confusion about you know, are we is this happening? Are we the cause? Do scientists agree? which yes, and yes, and yes, the yes, it's us and scientists agree, and it is happening. So ⁓ can we dig into the the numbers for a minute? Because I do want to kind of focus on like ⁓ parts of the United States because I noticed in some of the data that was released, there were different impacts felt in different parts of the country. Can you talk upon those and like where maybe this change is happening faster in some spots than others? Yeah. So ⁓ you know, we ⁓ we looked at this data set that kind of goes back to like 1781, I believe. ⁓ And looked at basically 20 year averages ⁓ starting from 1781 and going all the way up until I think 2021. and and there are definitely different parts of the the the country that that are highlighted. ⁓ but I would also note that it's we there's not consistent data across all those years. So sometimes you might not see that there's a lot of warming. That's because there haven't been You know, there haven't been ⁓ observations then. so you know, we've seen a lot of like periods of warming and cooling, that kind of natural variability. ⁓ we've seen periods of warming during like the dust bowl, things like that. But really what you start to see ⁓ as you know time goes on, especially when you get into like 1781 and onwards, is that there's just pretty widespread warming across North America. And we know that. the higher latitudes are warming faster than the lower latitudes called Arctic amplification. and that is happening because the Arctic is kind of like, you can think of it as like our global thermostat. ⁓ things that are really bright colored, ⁓ particularly ice, ⁓ are reflect a lot of the sun's energy back out into space. Things are that are dark colored, things like the ocean, actually absorb a lot of heat. So in the Arctic, we have a place that had a lot of sea ice. So it was reflecting a lot of the incoming solar radiation back out into space and basically helping keep the planet cooler. But with climate change, as we started to add more carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we've started to warm. And that has caused sea ice to melt a lot quicker. So now instead of having the sea ice that would reflect incoming solar radiation back out into the into space, now we have dark ocean that's basically absorbing more of the heat. So it's starting to warm up more, and that's causing a lot of sea ice. And that basically causes their sea ice to melt and that causes a positive feedback loop. So the more that you have less sea ice, the more that you have dark ocean, that more that absorbs heat, and then the less sea ice that you have, and it kind of keeps going and going. So that's just the need to note about you know some of the patterns that we see. ⁓ land also heats quicker than than water. ⁓ so our you know, our oceans do absorb 90% of the the extra ⁓ emissions that we have released, but ⁓ it takes a lot longer for the ocean to heat up and the land heats a lot quicker than that. So you also see that pattern just generally as well. but there's also a lot of things I think it's really important for people to begin at this question a lot, like why is this place warming faster? Why is it not warming the same everywhere? and one of my favorite things that I learned in one of my geography classes was about climate controls. And it sounds like an HVAC thing. It's not, ⁓ it's not like some kind of heating and cooling thing. So these are just basically the natural things that kind of determine why we have the weather and climate that we do where we live. These are things like latitude, elevation, topography, how close you are to large bodies of water, ⁓ ocean currents, and atmospheric currents. Those are like the main ⁓ six ones. And ⁓ and so all of those things kind of come together to give you the the the climate that you have. So for example, like in Phoenix. Phoenix is in a latitude where you have a lot of hot desert like conditions. but when you also look at, you know, the atmospheric patterns and stuff, you kind of makes more sense why Phoenix is ⁓ why it has the kind of heat and and aridity that it does. And you look all around the world and you see it at kind of like these, this ⁓ this latitude range. But there's things like San Francisco, for example. It's right on the water. Its climate is a lot more moderated. ⁓ the closer you are to large bodies of water, you're gonna have like a less of a temperature range compared to somewhere in the middle of the country, like in Missouri or Kansas, you're gonna have a much larger temperature range. You're gonna have much colder winters and you're also gonna have much warmer summers. ⁓ so when you're close to large bodies of water, that kind of ⁓ limits the ton of temperature range that you that you have to experience. So we're not all starting from the same baseline, right? Like we all we're all kind of in different spots, we all have different vulnerabilities. And there's also different patterns of natural variability that affect different parts of the world at different times. So there's there's a lot of ⁓ diversity, I guess you could say, going on in our climate system. ⁓ and there are there are reasons why, but ⁓ the earth is warming all around. But I think that some places, some places spirits is less warming, you might have some natural variabilities playing a larger role there, right? So I think people are always wanting to know, like, why is it different here? Why is it not warming the same amount? everywhere. ⁓ that's kind of a general why we we why things warm differently in different places. ⁓ but we we definitely see warming in the southwest. So like this is the in like high desert places like Reno, ⁓ places throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, a lot of warming in Nevada. and we don't see as much warming in like the Great Lakes, for example. So like that's where it's not quite as ⁓ as quite not as quite extreme as right now. you mentioned the Dust Ball. Has your American history been beefed up a little bit because you've like pinpointed these certain events that are kind of coinciding with warming or cooling trends? Yeah. I mean, we we get a lot of get a lot of people that write into us about the Dust Bowl a lot at Climate Central. So ⁓ it's something that has I've been very aware of just from working there, because people say, Well, what about the Dust Bowl? What about the Dust Bowl? ⁓ yeah, it was a period that was really dry and hot for sure. ⁓ and you can see that in a lot of the data, right? ⁓ but But yeah, looking back and and looking at all the different things that have impacted our our climate, like volcanic eruptions that have happened in different parts of the world that still impact us in the US, the Dust Bowl, ⁓ there've been a lot of droughts. ⁓ you know, just looking at over time, there's been a bunch of hurricanes throughout our time. So I like the Galveston hurricane was I think in 1900, ⁓ somewhere around then. ⁓ but we basically had these, you know, big, big events that have happened. We have heat waves, we had droughts. ⁓ More hurricanes, ⁓ Hurricane Andrew, ⁓ in in the early nineties. and then, you know, like that that really horrible heat wave in Chicago in the mid 90s. but what you see over time, if you just go back and you think, okay, like what are big climate or weather events in the US? And you try to start making a list of them. If you start back at 1776, you'll notice that like you'll have an event and it'll maybe 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. But then right when you get back basically into the the middle of the 1900s, you start having them a lot more frequently, a lot more frequently. You'll see another hurricane, you'll see another heat wave, ⁓ you'll see a superstorm, you'll see a fire. ⁓ and you know, when I I focus a lot on fires, and I'm actually from a very small ⁓ foothill town in Northern California called Placerville. it's not too far from Paradise where the campfire was in 2018. ⁓ And I I lead a lot of our fire weather work. And whenever I talk to people about fires, they say, like, ⁓ you're from El Dorado County and Placerville has some like the highest ⁓ like basically risk of wildfire. and they say, you must be just so used to fires. Like you grew up there, so you must have seen them a bunch. And we didn't have fires for most of my life. I think the first time I can actually remember a big fire impacting us was like After I graduated high school and then after college was in I think 2014 maybe. And ⁓ but yeah, I was born in 1987 in Placerville. And so like there was a huge amount of time where we were not affected by these big giant fires. Not that there weren't ever fires, but if you look in the last 10 years, it's just been really dramatic that change. ⁓ and that's just you know happening in it's just fires and just happening in my part of the world. But you see a lot of these kinds of patterns in places, different types of extreme weather and things like that, where you start to see it speed up over time. Start to see more events, larger events, more destructive events. and and that is the pattern that we're seeing with climate change. And that is what ⁓ what unfortunately we can expect to continue if we if we don't really start taking ⁓ it it more seriously. Caitlin, is there anything else you want to share about this release from Climate Central? Or what you've learned in the process? Even though there's this is a data, obviously data driven analysis. I think that it's been of all my time at Climate Central and my eight years of doing climate matters, I think this is the one that has made me just kind of take a a step back and just think about, ⁓ be a little bit more reflective of where we are and where we're going. And I think that it's really hard in today's world to kind of deal with a lot of the stresses that we have going on, right? There's a lot of things that can stress someone out today. And people fear feel very kind of like maxed out with what they can kind of process. ⁓ and I know climate change doesn't seem like the most important thing that we have to deal with first, right? ⁓ but really what we're doing is we're really doing putting in work now so that when we hit 300, ⁓ we're really giving ourselves a gift of having fewer extreme weather, having fewer diseases that have spread ⁓ through mosquitoes, when we're having, you know, more s more ⁓ stability in our food and our water systems. and it's not something that will happen right away, but I just encourage people to remember that we are writing that story now. And it is important that we remember that we have agency and that we have power when we ⁓ work together and use our voices. So I I just hope that we can I hope everyone can be as reflective of of this and think about not only where we've been, but but where we're going and the kind of world we want to leave behind. Is that how you personally deal with it? Is you put forth this effort into the work you do? I don't yeah, maybe. I think it's it's very hard to it's hard to to it's hard to work on climate change every day, right? Like it's it takes a real mental toll, I think, ⁓ on people who are been doing this a long time, way longer than I have. ⁓ you know, people who been trying to s you know, spread the word, trying to get people to to understand that there's this huge danger and try to prevent a lot of the damage that we've already seen. I think that that's just very stressful and a lot of anxiety and a lot of like, I don't know, there's like a lot of like personal like where you feel like you've let people down. Maybe you haven't talked about it right the right way, or maybe you haven't talked about it enough. Like and and so I I I think that it is really hard to be in this kind of work because you see this thing coming and You try to help people understand this coming and there's stuff we can do to avoid it, but you're up against so much, right? And and ⁓ I I do think that the thing that has helped me the most is being able to talk to people about it. I really like genuinely believe that. ⁓ and it's really become the best part of my job, I think, is being able to talk to people who care about this and talk to people who are doing things about it. because that that really is what gives me the most hope. Thank you so much to Caitlin Trudeau for joining me on this episode of Atmosphere. Caitlin and the whole team at Climate Central were instrumental in providing the articles that I use to write today's episode. If you have any questions about today's show or weather and climate in general, you can always find me on social media. On Facebook, I am Meteorologist Emily Gracie. And on Instagram, you can find the show Atmosphere Podcast. And guess what? Atmosphere is now on Substack, so if you want to take a deeper dive into the science and the stories that I cover every week, head over there and subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow Atmosphere on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts so you never miss a new episode. Leave a rating or review. It just takes a second, but it really helps support the show and it helps other curious minds find us. And of course if you loved it, please share this episode with a friend. Atmosphere is a production of Mike Burst. It's produced, edited, and hosted by me, Emily Gracie. If you're looking for even more weather content to close out your week, make sure you check out the weekly weather brief, a quick rundown of the week's biggest weather and science stories, hosted by me and my fellow meteorologist Karen Jerriman. New episodes drop every Friday on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. You can get caught up before you head into the weekend. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Thanks for taking the time to slow down, stay curious, and explore the atmosphere.