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What started as an unusually quiet hurricane season this year took a vicious turn just over a week ago.
Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a massive category 4 storm with winds of 140 miles an hour destroying homes and devastating countless other towns and cities across six states.
This type of storm used to be quite rare, but it's becoming more and more common.
And scientists say a big part of the reason is climate change.
This is an issue that concerns many people, including kids.
So today on Kid News Convos, I'm having a conversation with Tom Diliberto, a meteorologist and climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
Thanks for joining us today, Tom.
Thanks for having me.
You are the perfect person to be our guest on this topic.
Let's start with Hurricane Helene.
How does this storm historically compare with others that have hit the U .S.
in terms of size and damage caused?
Sure. So when we rank hurricanes, when we say category one or category two, it goes up to category five.
And that only really refers to the max wind speed of the storm.
This was a category 4 storm, which is something that we call a major hurricane, anything above a category 3.
And these storms don't happen more than a handful of times every single year, sometimes don't happen at all in a given year, let alone making landfall across the United States.
So just by that, a category 4 storm making landfall anywhere in the United States is a rare event.
However, in the last five years or so, we've seen a whole bunch of different major hurricanes make landfall along the Gulf Coast.
The other thing to kind of make this storm so rare and historic was just the size of this thing.
It was huge. Now, hurricanes can come on all different sorts of sizes and you can have different wind speeds associated with those different size and the small hurricane to a really big one.
But because this storm was so big, it meant that the winds were very, very strong over a much larger area, which meant as it was coming up the Gulf of Mexico, it was able to push so much more water up into the coastline of Florida.
So even in areas that didn't see a direct hit by a hurricane, maybe didn't even see that much rainfall still saw record flooding along the coastline because the storm was still pushing so much water.
Now, what made this storm also historic was just how much moisture it had.
We often think about hurricanes and we think about the coast.
We think about the big waves crashing into buildings.
What we don't often think about, but which is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, is inland flooding associated with hurricanes.
That the storm doesn't end once it makes landfall.
That storm keeps going.
What this storm ends up doing is basically pushing all of this warm, moist air right into the southern Appalachian Mountains.
And the mountains basically acted like a ramp.
Like, if you're on a skateboard and you're going up a ramp, you're going to go up.
And that's pretty much what's happened with the moisture.
It hit those mountains and then it went up.
And when moist air goes up, it usually leaves the rain coming down.
And we had a huge amount of moisture being constantly pushed up against the southern Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee and in North Carolina and in South Carolina and in Georgia.
So while they may have seen 120 mile an hour winds, they instead saw 15 to 25 inches of rain over three days.
And I don't care where you live, nothing can withstand that much rain falling in that short amount of time.
And the flooding that we saw associated with that is the likes of which have never been seen in a lot of places in the southern Appalachians.
Yeah, boy, some of the video is just so shocking and tragic.
I mean, it'll take years for some of these people to get back on their feet.
So Tom, I've heard that hurricanes are fundamentally changing.
That they used to be primarily wind events.
Now they're mainly water events.
Why is that? Yeah, so what's happening is that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, more water in it.
So like if you create a better sponge, which is our atmosphere, and then you ring out that sponge, that's what the hurricane is doing.
You're going to get more rainfall.
So we've seen and the expectation is that as we continue into the next century, as we continue to warm our atmosphere, hurricanes will get wetter.
And that leads to there being a whole host of issues of fact that, you know, yes, wind is a concern.
Yes, still, coastal flooding from storm surge concern, but torrential rainfall and more of it can cause a tremendous amount of problems over a much wider swath of land than just the coast.
And I think that is certainly what we're seeing.
And it's certainly what we're expecting to see more of in the future.
Yeah, so basically keep an umbrella handy, right?
And just to be clear, when we talk about climate change, climate and weather are not the same thing, right?
Can you explain the difference?
Sure, yeah. So weather, I always say weather is if you go outside right now and you look up, that's the weather.
You look out a window right now, that's the weather.
So if you're, let's say, but now let's say I tell you to close your eyes and imagine southern Arizona in your head.
Why do you have that image in your head?
That's climate. The image in your head when you think about an area is climate.
It makes up all of the weather.
It makes up everything.
It's what's quote unquote normal.
That is what climate is.
So while, you know, I'm asking you what it might be like where you live in December of this year, you might be able to give me a ballpark figure about what it may be because that's what normal is.
That's what climate is, even though we know that the weather itself that day may be very different.
But if I asked you right now, that would be your best guess.
And that's climate.
So we talk about climate change.
What we're saying is that our, what we expect to be normal is changing.
And if you want to change what's normal, that means you got to change all the weather that goes into what's making that normal, right?
So a little change in the climate is actually reflecting a big change in all of the weather that gets the beat that makes up what normal is.
What is the proof that manmade climate change is to blame for these weather extremes?
I mean, hasn't the earth seen fluctuations before where it gets hotter and then colder, like having ice ages, right?
Earth is 4 .6 billion years old.
It's been through a lot.
And it's yeah, you're right.
It's warmed up a lot.
It's cooled off a lot.
Now, the reason why we've seen these natural climate changes in their past are due to things like volcanic eruptions or dealing with how the ocean changes, how it moves its water around so the currents can change.
But also the way Earth revolves around the sun.
We're sometimes in more of an oval shape around the sun, sometimes more in a circular shape.
Earth is tilted sometimes the way we're tilted shifts as we are to the sun.
And then earth actually wobbles in space.
We don't feel it on earth, which is good because I get motion sick, that'd be the worst.
But it wobbles and the amount of that wobble can change.
Now, those happen over 10s to hundreds of thousands of years.
And each of those can change how much energy Earth receives from the sun, which can change our climate, it can lead to there being warm periods, it can lead to there being ice ages.
The difference nowadays is that we're seeing changes happen much, much, much, much faster than we've ever seen them happen before.
We know all those natural ways of changing our climate are not happening now.
There are no changes in the sun's energy in a large trend since we've seen our warming trends since about 1950, 1970 to today.
And we know for a fact that the rise in greenhouse gases and the rise in carbon dioxide, which is the number one greenhouse gas that we often talk about, is due to human activity.
Because when you burn fossil fuels, which is basically dead plant materials from the dinosaur era, when you burn that, it's different than this carbon dioxide that is emitted from plants and from our natural cycles.
It's like there's a fingerprint on it.
So you are able to tell that the rise in CO2, the carbon dioxide is due to human activities of burning fossil fuels.
So you put all those things together, it's the only thing that makes sense and all the evidence backs it up in a lot of different ways.
Huh. So you talk about the evidence and scientists looking for those fingerprints.
So what are some of the ways scientists are studying the weather here and all over the globe?
Sure. Yeah. So right now at NOAA, where I work, National Geometric Atmospheric Administration, we have not only observations across the United States, but we have satellites across in space that are looking at every aspect of our planet.
We're also working with all countries around the world to help basically create this tapestry of observations on the ground everywhere that we can then look at and compare to our satellites.
We have like 24 sevens sort of monitoring of our entire planet.
That is a ton of data.
We take all of that data and we can put it into basically what we call weather models or climate models.
So basically, you can think of those as basically our computerized representations of our planet, like a video game basically of what Earth is going to do.
And we have all this great data.
We can put it into our models and we can get predictions about how our atmosphere is going to work, whether it's over the next 10 days or so, whether it's going to be over the next decade or 50 years or a hundred years.
Now you might be thinking, you just mentioned about how Earth is 4 .6 billion years old and changed over a hundred thousand years.
How the heck do scientists know what happened a hundred thousand years ago?
This is some really cool stuff.
While we're pretty young on this planet, there are things right now on this planet that are really old and we can sample those really old things and they can give us hints and they can tell us what was going on way back when.
It's like a diary hidden among Earth.
Ice, for instance, there are glaciers on our planet that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.
So you could actually do an ice core, which is basically just drill down into that ice core.
And when the ice forms, it can trap air when it forms its little bubbles.
And then we can sample that bubble and we get an idea of what was the atmospheric representation thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago.
And because greenhouse gases are what we say, well mixed, they're kind of the same everywhere around the planet, we can get a good idea about what the mix of was during those time periods.
We can also tell temperatures by doing ice cores, but also tree rings.
You can tell the tree rings.
We can also understand through what we call sediment samples, mud.
You can drill down into mud too and get an idea about what's going on.
And there are scientists kind of exploring and looking at all these areas and taking these samples and giving us a good representation of what's going on across the entirety of Earth's history as best we can and allow us to give us a sense about where we are now compared to where we were in the past.
Boy, it is just fascinating how scientists can peek into the past and collect all that data.
We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'll have some questions that Kid News listeners asked about climate change and also what all of us can do to help improve the health of our planet.
Kid News Convos continues in a moment.
Today's Kid News Convos episode is brought to you in part by a generous donation from the Nicholas B.
Ottoway Foundation, committed to improving communities and impacting lives through three unique philanthropic efforts focused on education, journalism, and community impact.
We are grateful for their support and the support of all our generous donors.
And we're back with Kid News Convos.
I'm Tori. My guest is Tom DiLaBerto, a meteorologist and climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
So Tom, let's dive into questions from Kid News listeners.
And first of all, I'd like to thank all of them for taking the time to write in, even though we couldn't get to every question.
So first off, Nelly from Annapolis, Maryland, wants to know how fast are glaciers melting now versus 50 and 100 years ago.
Yeah, they're melting faster in a lot of different places.
That doesn't mean that every glacier around the entire planet is melting.
Sometimes it can be really localized effects.
It might lead to some glaciers growing actually.
But overall, globally, glaciers are melting faster now than they've melted over the last 50 to 100 years, kind of an acceleration of melting.
Allowing that again is due to our warming of not only the atmosphere, but also of the ocean.
I might be thinking, how does that work if glaciers sometimes are on land?
Well, sometimes those glaciers, especially in Antarctica and Greenland, they can actually kind of end off in the ocean.
And if the ocean is warmer, it can kind of loosen up the glacier at the very base of the glacier, which can help to accelerate like a slip and slide it off into the water.
So we are seeing glaciers melt faster.
And we're seeing it contribute more to sea level rise than it has in the past.
And a related question.
Harry from Tampa, Florida wants to know how will climate change affect Arctic animals who need the cold to survive?
Very, very true. Arctic animals, animals everywhere.
We're animals too. It's going to affect us.
So yes, when you change an ecosystem that has been pretty stable for a very long period of time, where animals have gotten used to living in that ecosystem, if you change it really, really rapidly, it's not great for the animals that live there.
And we've seen that where we've seen animals like polar bears move further and further away looking for food as their food sources disappear or polar bears have to swim farther and farther to reach the seals that they're trying to eat.
Normally, they could sit on sea ice and do that.
The sea ice is melting faster.
So you're affecting the hunting range.
You're affecting a lot of these different ecosystems.
Fast changes aren't usually a good thing, Grant.
Yeah, like you said, it's hard for animals to adapt and that includes humans.
So speaking of that, Palmer Davis and Hudson, all from Nashville, Tennessee, ask, how can we protect our homes from storms?
That's a great question.
So the time to start protecting your home from a storm is when there's no storm going on.
It's preparing ahead of time.
So if you know that you tend to get storms and say you're more worried about hurricanes, the time to prepare for a hurricane is in December when there's no hurricanes.
You don't want to be prepared for something when it's bearing down on you.
Or if you're more worried about flooding.
So what you can do is know what sorts of extremes normally affect you.
And then if you know what normally affects you, you can kind of plan to those.
If you're worried about flooding, know what areas of your community and your house tend to flood more than that.
You can protect those areas.
Have supplies at the ready for extreme weather.
If you know that you might be out of power for a week, you have batteries, you have flashlights, you have food, you have water.
Know the emergency numbers that you need to know.
If there is a concern, do you know how to call the fire department and the police department?
Do you know how to contact neighbors if you know that there are people who might need help in your community?
So there's lots of things that you can do ahead of time.
In terms of your house, you can make sure that your windows are protected.
You can make sure that if there are leaks in your house, you can plug them before there's lots of rain.
Or if you know there's strong winds coming, you can make sure that you can protect your roof and anchor it down.
So there's lots of things to do.
And a key thing to start is when there's nothing going on.
Nora from Albuquerque, New Mexico has a pretty fun question.
How are the names of each hurricane chosen?
There actually is an organ at the World Meteorological Organization is in charge of creating the lists of names.
And the National Hurricane Center too, a list of names that go out into the future.
So while we don't know how many storms are going to happen next year, the year after, we know their names already.
And you can go actually go to the National Hurricane Center website and actually take a look at the list of names that happen that are planned to be used for the future for the next four or five years.
Now we actually retire names too.
So if a storm is particularly historic and damaging, we don't want to have that used for another name in the future.
So oftentimes you'll have those hurricanes retired.
For instance, there will never be another Hurricane Katrina.
And that decision is made after the hurricane season is over.
And I imagine that Hurricane Helene will be the last Hurricane Helene in the Atlantic.
Yep, that certainly makes sense.
Now, Dylan in Singapore asks, in 2050, will it be safe to eat any fish from the ocean?
I sure hope we can eat the fish in the ocean in 2050.
And there's a lot of people working to make sure that we can.
But you're right, there is plastic pollution that is going into our ocean.
All the plastic that we see, sometimes it breaks down, but it doesn't break down entirely into kind of these microscopic bits, which can be eaten by fish.
And then we can see that, it gets eaten by bigger fish, and it gets bigger fish, and then eaten by a marine male, and you can actually see it in their stomachs.
But there are ways of cleaning up our oceans that are actively being done across the entire world.
NOAA is certainly one of the folks who are working very, very hard on that.
And we're also making sure that our environment and our oceans are healthy enough to support plenty of fish so that folks around the entire world can continue to eat fish well into the future.
And be healthy at the same time.
Now, this all sounds a little alarming, but there must be some action that all of us, including kids, can take to help improve the situation.
In fact, Owen from Madison, Connecticut, and also Kellen from Washington, DC, want to specifically know, how can we stop climate change?
Sure. So climate change is a big problem with a simple answer.
The hard problem is getting to that answer.
The simple answer is we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases.
We do lots of things that emit greenhouse gases.
So that's the hard problem.
So we have to figure out ways that we can stop emitting greenhouse gases.
Here's the good news.
If we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, temperatures around the globe will stop rising within five to 10 years.
So we just need to figure out ways of stopping to as many greenhouse gases that we're doing.
And greenhouse gases can come from lots of things.
It can come from cars and transportation.
It can come from our buildings.
It can come from the way we get our energy.
It can come from food, the way we eat our food, the way we manage our food.
So all these different ways that we know greenhouse gases come from that we can all work on depending on where you live.
So maybe it'd be biking more and driving less if you have a gas car.
It could be using more mass transportation.
It could be using a bus as opposed to driving or walking more often than that.
It could be things like making sure your house is more energy efficient.
So if you live in a really drafty house, like you ever been up to your attic and it gets really, really hot in the summer and really, really cold in the wintertime, if there's a way of making sure you can lock that in there, that means you use less energy.
You use less energy, it means that you're probably giving you less greenhouse gases because you're using less potential energy.
Also things like eating less, a little bit less meat can actually reduce greenhouse gases too.
A lot of greenhouse gases are admitted when we're talking about meat production, whether it's cows or pigs or whatever it may be.
I was not saying everyone's a vegetarian, but I'm saying if you eat less, that's a good way of actually helping to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases.
And so plenty of yummy foods that you can eat that don't have all that meat.
So there's lots of different things that you can do on a personal level.
And you can always just talk about it.
And I think that's really important too, is just being able to talk about people and why you're concerned about it and know that there's lots and lots of people around this entire world who are as concerned about it as you are and who are working for a better future.
Well that's a nice note to end on.
So thank you so much for talking with Kid News today.
And thank you for having me.
Our guest has been Tom de Liberto, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
And thank you for listening.
If you have any questions or comments on this episode, or if you'd like to suggest a topic for a future Kid News Convos episode, please have your parent or teacher send us an email to wehearyouatkidnews .org.
And remember to tune in for our regular Kid News Podcasts every Monday through Friday.
I'm Tori. Have a great day.
