Futuristic and creative 3-D weather graphics like you've never seen before light up the screen in today's impressive
forecast for September 23, 2050
released by the Weather Channel. The video was made in response to an
appeal by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to television
weather presenters world-wide to imagine a “weather report from the year
2050,” based on the best science we have as summarized in the 2014
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. If humanity’s
current "business as usual" approach to emissions of heat-trapping gases
like carbon dioxide continues, the average temperature of the Earth’s
lower atmosphere could rise more than 4°C (7.2°F) by the end of the 21st
century. But what does a global average temperature rise really mean?
How would we experience it on a daily basis? Each day between now and
the convening of the key 2014 climate summit in New York City the week
of September 21, 2014--when the leaders of the world will assemble to
lay out the road map to the crucial December 2015 climate negotiations
in Paris--the WMO will release a new "Weather Report From 2050" on
their website. Today's
video from the Weather Channel
imagines a future when it wouldn't take a landfalling hurricane to push
water levels two feet above normal in Miami Beach--the onshore winds of
a hurricane passing 400 miles offshore could cause that level of
flooding, due to sea level rise. The report also envisions that the
current 15-year drought affecting the Southwest U.S. will continue into
2050, becoming a decades-long "megadrought". On the lighter side, we
hear about a new baseball team called the "Alberta Clippers" (named
after a type of fast-moving snowstorm that originates in Alberta), and
see Jim Cantore calling up hurricane tracking charts on his outstretched
hand. It's a unique and impressive effort well-worth checking out, and
will air on The Weather Channel's cable station throughout the day today
(Wednesday.) I'll be featured in a separate behind-the-scences look at
how we came up with the weather stories featured in the video.
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