Rebecca: Forecasting the weather was difficult enough. Then came climate change and things just got worst from there. Hi I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and today we’re speaking with weather guru and climatologist David Phillips about weather prediction and how it’s affected by global warming.
David: Weather prediction has been going on for centuries. In terms of a scientific basis, probably only the last hundred and let say 40 years and right now I mean its so different now compared to what it was, my gosh! Even 10 or 15 years ago, we have monitoring the world better now than we ever have before. I mean the models have improved marginally but really you know the oceans can’t burp without just knowing about it. Now we’ve always been trying to forecast what the conditions are going to be in the next few minutes. What is change is that people were satisfied is it gonna rain tomorrow; now they want to know is gonna rain after 2:30 tomorrow afternoon because they plan their day accordingly. It won’t be ever perfect, you know, we’ll always have jobs for meteorologist because nature is very chaotic and try to figure out how the weather gonna do to us still one of the great mysteries of science.
Rebecca: There’s no longer a debate, climate change is a reality. What isn’t question is what’s causing it?
David: The world is warming up faster and greater now and has a long time. I think its fairly clear and neither people who think climate change is a lot of hot air. Even they have to recognize that when you stick a thermometer in the planet it will seek global fever, it definitely is warmer. And it’s warmer in every corner of this planet and what we’re seeing is not just that temperature’s rising, we’re seeing ice melting. We’re seeing species are changing but also I think the extremes. Neither storms getting stormier, droughts - droughtier, and floods – floodier. This is the fall out of climate change. So after debate is polarized between, you know what’s natures fault, you know it’s nature on steroids, they say and people say they no, no, it’s our fault, we’re doing this to ourselves. Well, I say it’s both. Nature is always change the climate and now we are too.
Rebecca: Phillip says we need to get used to the idea that the future will be warmer. Not only that, but climate change will bring a new unpredictability and severity to the weather.
David: I’m very hopeful about the future, I’m not a doom and bloom artist. I feel that this saying that the world is gonna end 2056, what a terrible thing to say to young people that the world is gonna end in your lifetime. That’s not going to be the case. I think we saw acid rain and the ozone depletion. I think that we know we know the science is. We know what the solution should be. It’s a matter of getting on and doing something about it. Now the truth is, the future is warmer we’ve seen the future it is definitely going to be warmer because you see the CO2 that we emitted with the atmosphere for all this several decades, as a residence time it stays in the atmosphere half century to a century. So even if we plug all court, all the smoke stocks and stop all traffics and ground all planes, we’re still committed to warning. We need to cut back to our fossil fuels I think there are several reasons or we may save a couple of years in the climate but its not going to save the world. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for our health and it’s also a depleting resource. I think the challenge will be to adapt to ever changing kind of climate. And I think we’re up to it. The more we can do in terms of building design and building structures in safer communities, I think we’ll be able to weather the storm so to speak.
Rebecca: Well, thank you very much.
David: Thank you Rebecca.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services