The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Episode 142 - Carl Parker's 2024 Summer Weather Outlook

DON

Every year about this time, we like to check in with our friend Carl Parker of The Weather Channel to find out how we're doing going into the hurricane season and the summer, which is usually wild with weather in the last few years, and part of that is climate change. There are high temperatures, there are wildfires, there are very fierce storms. We've already had a lot of tornadoes this year, and the weather is becoming a very big factor in how people live their lives. So, we'll check in with Carl and see what we have in store for us this year. Carl, how are you doing?

CARL

Really well. Thank you for having me once again. Appreciate it.

DON

Let's talk about this year, because it's already off to a roaring start. As I said, we've had a record number of tornadoes in the Midwest, and they've done a lot of damage. And the predictions from the National Weather Service, and from other predictors, for this year's hurricane season, which has already started, it’s underway as of June 1^st, is huge. They're talking 23-25 storms, several of them named, several of them major hurricanes. What do we have to look forward to this year in the hurricane season?

CARL

 Well, you know, there are a couple of things that we're looking at right now, one of them is that the ocean temperatures around the planet, but also in the North Atlantic and in the tropical Atlantic, are really, really warm. And if you were to look at graphs of ocean temperatures over many decades, you would see this sort of gradual warming that's been going on for a long, long time where, you know, you have some lines that are kind of moving along just ticking up ever so slightly from the 70s through the 80s, through the 90s, through the 00s. And. This kind of rate of warming continued for a long, long time, and that rate of warming was essentially .2°C per decade. Well, what happened last year is that we warmed by .5°C just last year. And the cause for that is not entirely understood. About 40% of it can be attributed to El Nino. El Nino is a, as you know, it's a warming of the equatorial waters in the central and eastern Pacific, and tends to release a terrific amount of warmth into the atmosphere. So, in the years following an El Nino event, we tend to have the warmest years, and the opposite is true. With La Nina, we tend to have cooler years. It's kind of this up and down thing, not always that way, but it often is. But, of course, the entire trend has been trending upward. So about 40% of that was attributable to El Nino. Then you also had minor contributions from a lessening of the aerosols in the atmosphere because of regulations in the shipping lanes, for example. They have regulations to reduce the number of aerosols coming from ships in their exhaust, and those aerosols actually reflect sunlight. And because there are fewer aerosols, they were not reflecting as much sunlight. Which is allowing more sun to heat up the earth. That's sort of the paradox of reducing emissions. You're reducing the heat trapping gases, but you're also reducing the reflectivity of the atmosphere. And then another thing was the Hunga Tonga Volcano, which was a submarine volcano in the Pacific, and that released a terrific amount of water vapor into the atmosphere. And that may have played a minor role as well. So those three things probably accounted for about half of the warming that we saw last year, but then the other half remains unexplained. And so, the question for climate scientists now is, are we going to return to this more traditional, if you will, rate of warming, or is this something new? And we don't really know what the answer to that question is. And the warming continues this year in the Atlantic Basin, continues to be very, very high. So, you know that, in and of itself is a really troubling sign for the hurricane season this year.

JOHN

UN Secretary General António Guterres, just  concluded a speech at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in which he noted that each of the last 12 months starting from last June, to just this last May, was the hottest such month ever recorded. That was breathtaking to hear him say it, because that means that we have gone through the hottest year that has been recorded, and we're sure it's not the hottest year that Earth has ever had, but the hottest year that we have on record. So, I'm just wondering for you, are we involved in that unexplained 50%?

CARL

Yeah, I mean, you know it's, there are a lot of eyebrow-raising things going on right now, and, you know, the oceans take on more than 90% of the warming, and, you know, the oceans have a very long memory as well, so you know they're taking on all this warming. And then there's this unexplained aspect to it. So, you know, we're not precisely sure where we're headed right now. There is a little bit of a schism, I think, in the climate community. There are some scientists who are, sort of, like, banging the gong and, like, you know, freaking out a little bit. And then there are others who are saying, you know, hold on. This is within the range of what was predicted. Happens to be along the high end of the range of what was predicted now, because we are going into La Nina, we do expect that there is going to be a cooler period, relatively speaking, a cooler period coming up here in the next couple of years. But then the other part of La Nina is that we tend to have less wind across the Atlantic Basin, which is more favorable for the development of tropical cyclones. So, between this La Nina and the boiling temperatures in the Gulf and the Caribbean and the tropical Atlantic, we could very well be looking at a really, really busy hurricane season now. I do want to point out that, you know, one thing about these hurricane forecasts is they're not really that useful in terms of what the impact to you is going to be, because we've had years where we had a lot of storms, and we had a lot of impact. I mean, you know, tens of billions of dollars. We've had storms, we've had years where we had a lot of storms and relatively little impact, maybe less than $5 billion. We've had years where we had, you know, very few storms, and a huge impact. 1992 comes to mind. We didn't have a storm until late August, and that was Andrew. So, the number of storms doesn't really have a good relationship to the level of impact. I mean, it's, theoretically, if you have more storms, you have more opportunity for there to be impact, but there are all kinds of other things that are superimposed on that. You can get a ton of storms developing, and (get) most of them recurving and going out to the north Atlantic. But you know, I think one thing that that would trouble me about the upcoming hurricane season is that there is a really strong relationship between the level of warmth in the ocean and how intense storms can get. We're seeing a greater proportion of high end storms. We're seeing a more rapid intensification occurring, and so storms can just blow up overnight, and - there was one last year, you may remember, I think it was last October, south of Acapulco, it was a tropical storm in the morning, it was a category 5 at night, and the models missed that. So, the forecasters missed that, and, you know, granted there's not as much data, so the modeling is not going to be as good there as it is for the US, but can you imagine the outcry if something like that were to happen? I mean, it was devastating for Acapulco. All those buildings were rated for earthquakes, but not for hurricanes. So, you had all these high rise condominiums, and their windows were all blown in, and they were just cleared out, from that, you know, 150 plus mile per hour wind. And if something like that happened in Florida, where we missed the development of a category five that occurred in the space of a day, I mean, you know, people would be so upset about that. But that made a lot of us in the forecasting community kind of look up and go, whoa, this is really, you know, how did that happen? How did the models, you know, whiff so badly on that storm and also, you know, the fact that it just got so strong, so fast, and that's all about the amount of energy that's in the oceans. Not just at the surface, but also down to some depth, because when storms get stronger, they start to churn up the water and they bring up the water from below, which is typically cooler. But if it's still warm enough to support the maintenance of a tropical cyclone, that's about 80°, that figure varies, but that's about what it is, then there's nothing holding it back. There's no reason for it to, you know, not just keep going forever.

DON

And I do remember that there were a couple of storms last year – I'm thinking, was Iris last year, was that one of the storms? And it was a category two or category three when it was in the Gulf, but by the time it got land, it was category four. It had increased over a very short period of time. And that's one of those situations where maybe everybody's boarded up and ready to ride it out as opposed to evacuating, and that's probably not a good idea with a category four or five, because not only do you have the winds, but you have the water. And the storm surge comes up.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So, right, the big thing about hurricanes, that we've said for a long time is “hide from the wind and run from the water.” For the most part, you know, barring the very most high end hurricanes, you can survive the wind. I mean, there's going to be some exceptions to that - if you're in the eyewall of a category four or five, then, yeah, that's, I mean, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that. But, you know, if you're in a hurricane shelter, for example, you're probably going to be OK as far as the wind is concerned. Surge is a whole different ballgame. And we've seen some really spectacular examples in recent years, where, you know, the surge got to 10 or even 15 feet. And there's just, it's just not survivable. I mean, it is if you can get to a second or a third floor of a very sturdy building. But you know, that is one of the really big worries, you know, water is the number one killer in hurricanes, about 75% of deaths are due to water, about half of them are due to storm surge fatalities, another 25% due to inland flooding. So, it's, you know, it's certainly the thing that you want to be most wary of.

JOHN

We've been seeing this sort of implacable series of storm fronts crossing the Midwest, and coming through the South, and we out here on the East Coast, sort of get the tail ends of them, although even at the tail ends, we've been getting some pretty spectacular thunderstorms. I'm wondering, how well did the prognostications do for that?

CARL

Well, for what exactly? Just the level of storms that you would get this year?

JOHN

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Did that, were we within the margin of error, because this, we haven't seen a tornado season like this in a while.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so, you know, severe - if you look at the relationships between warming and weather phenomena, obviously, you know, heat is the big one that you can tie to warming. Tropical cyclones, pretty strong relationship there, heavy rain, very strong relationship. It is a little harder to tie warming, but not impossible, a little harder to tie warming to cold outbreaks and winter weather, and also to severe local storms. There's been a lot of research on this question. What we haven't really been able to figure out is whether or not there is a detectable change, and that means that, you know, we just don't have really detailed records of exactly what was happening in terms of severe weather going back many decades. I mean, you know, for one thing, there have, you know, never been a ton of people living in the middle of the country, and certainly less so as you go back further in time. So, there's less reporting. Generally it is felt that a warmer, more humid environment will create more environments for severe thunderstorms. Certainly you know just on a gut level, it feels that way to me, you know, just looking after looking at this, you know, for so many years, I've been doing this for 33 years now it looks like it to me like, you know, we're watching these incredible thunderstorm complexes - you know, there was one that came through Houston recently. And it produced winds of over 100 mph in downtown Houston. You probably saw, it blew out windows of skyscrapers and things like that.

JOHN

Right.

CARL

You know, that's just not something that you see very often, and that complex was fueled by this really warm and humid air coming off the Gulf of Mexico. And, so, what the modeling has shown is that we probably would see an increase in the number of days with these severe thunderstorm environments. There may have been an increase in tornado power as well, an increase in the number of night time tornadoes, you know, being more warm and humid at night. So, you know, we're sort of nibbling around the edges of this issue of severe storms, we don't really have a, you know, slam dunk in terms of, you know, whether it is happening now, it's being affected, the severe weather is being affected now. But, you know, I think that it makes a lot of sense, because that's one of the big things that you need for severe storms is warm and humid air. And there's absolutely more of that.

DON

Yeah, definitely, because the heat is coming up more and more often as a problem. Again, we're talking now, we're dealing with forecasters saying that there's a huge heat dome headed for the southwest part of the country. We've seen it in past years attack the northwest part of the country, which was not ready for it - the northwest is usually cool, and when the temperatures got up in the hundreds, there, a couple of years ago, people didn't have air conditioning, it was just, it was fatal to a lot of people. So, the southwest is maybe a little more inclined to handle it, but still, with temperatures in the 100 and 125° range and that heat dome moving across into the Midwest, that sets us up for some more severe weather I'm sure. Can you explain a little bit about what a heat dome is exactly? And why it's it sticks around for so long?

CARL

Well, you know, it's just an area of high pressure and, you know, within an area of high pressure, you have gradually sinking air, which is a warming process in and of itself. And you know, sometimes you'll have what is called a long wave pattern that, you know, sets up and is relatively static for days or even weeks at a time, in some cases. And you know, that has a lot to do with, you know, much larger teleconnections that occur, you know, across the globe. And, you know, things that are happening even at the very high latitudes, you know, the way that these patterns get stuck. We have noticed that these stuck patterns are also occurring more frequently, and a colleague of mine has actually been doing a lot of work on that, trying to quantify that. Because, there does appear to be, there appears to be a warming link like, you know, we're just seeing more of that kind of thing. But yeah, it's just an area of high pressure. So, gradually descending air, which is the opposite of what you need for clouds and rain. And so you tend not to get any weather, it's just hot and it's sunny and it gets, you know, hotter and hotter. And, you know, there's a feedback as well from the land, because when the land is drying out, the sun's energy is not going into evaporating moisture. It's just going right back into heating up the air. So, that, too, can keep these things sort of in place. It becomes self reinforcing. But yeah, what's been going on in the West is really scary in a lot of ways. I mean, you know, water is, you know, becoming more and more of an issue. And you know, you have these fuels that are drying up. And, you know, at the same time in California, you'll have winters - you know, we've seen winters where storms are just, you know, blasting in, which makes a lot of sense, they’re right next to the largest ocean. And so, when the pattern is right, they're going to get a lot of weather there. And that allows all the, you know, fuels, the brush and the trees to grow like crazy. And then by the time you get into July and August, all that stuff is drying out. So, you've got even more fuel. And when it's hotter and drier, there's greater fuel aridity, which allows the fires to burn hotter and to burn larger. So, we've seen about a tenfold increase in the amount of area of wildfire burned in the western US over the last several decades, and, you know, I think the most - you know, one of the signs of a changing climate are these orange skies, which so many of us have seen now, you know, across the Midwest and Northeast and even in parts of the South. You know, when you see this sort of a, you know, deep orange, almost reddish sky. You know, I don't ever remember seeing anything like that when I was young. And I think that is definitely one of the indicators of where we're going.

JOHN

It's interesting that you mentioned the fires, because it almost seems like we're talking about today's headlines, which we sort of are. There was just a very large fire in the interior valleys of mid-California. And that was preceded, and succeeded, by - I mean, it was in the middle of a heat event where it was from 98 to 115° or something like this. And I think today in Phoenix and in Las Vegas, they're going to have triple digits. And it does seem as though many of the things you just spoke of were being enacted in today's headlines.

CARL

Yeah, it's, you know, it's definitely among the one of the more troubling aspects of climate change, and particularly in in places where they're not used to that at all. There was an interesting case, I was taking an environmental ethics course a couple of years ago, and there was a very interesting case in the Pacific Northwest, where a teen threw a firecracker into a ravine, in the Pacific Northwest, and that ended up causing this huge fire, and 150 people or so were trapped for a couple of days and, you know, parts of the nearby town burned down. And, you know, the question was, what level of punishment should that teen face? And what made it interesting is that, in the climate that most people grew up in, in the Pacific Northwest, that really wasn't an issue before. You know, it used to be that you could throw a firecracker into a ravine in the northwest, and for the most part it probably wouldn't do as much, But because the climate is so different now, because this, you know, area which is, you know, formerly mostly cool and moist forest, you know, an area where, you know, things just wouldn't catch, is suddenly different, and it's hotter and it's drier, and all the fuels are drying out and suddenly it's a tinderbox, when it never was before.  And, yeah, in so many ways, these are, you know, parts of the country that are having to adapt very rapidly. I mean, yes, they don't have nearly as much air conditioning up there. And you know you have all these, these really dense, lush forests, and when they dry out, the fires are enormous. That's what we have seen in Western Canada. I mean, some of the fires there have been just, you know, biblical. They had, a few years ago, a little town in British Columbia reported the highest national temperature for Canada, I think it was 121 or 122 -  Lytton, British Columbia - for three days in a row, it set a new record for the highest Canadian temperature ever recorded. And then on the third day, the town burned down. And, no one's ever been back to the town. It's just a ghost town now.

DON

Well, you know, and we were talking to another friend of ours on the podcast not too long ago, who deals with the wine industry. And he said British Columbia had a real, real tough time over the winter because, in going from winter into early spring, they had a huge frost event that killed off a lot of the grapes up there and dug into the wine industry, so the people in British Columbia must be going nuts because the weather is nothing like what it's been over the last 100 years or so for them up there.

CARL

And, you know, you brought up wine, you know, it's going to be increasingly difficult to grow wine. It's going to be increasingly difficult to grow coffee. You know, they're having to move up to higher and higher elevations in parts of South America to grow coffee. Beer is also going to be affected. I mean, a lot of things that we have sort of, you know, we've taken their abundance for granted are going to be, you know, a little bit harder to acquire and a little more expensive in the future. There's a lot of upheaval.

JOHN

I just kept thinking, while you were saying this, Carl, I kept thinking, in the back of my mind, our demand for these products needs to be figured in the mix somehow. You can't, obviously, you can't say, and capitalism is 10% of this, but, the fact that demand drives the cultivation of these, I mean obviously you need so much water to grow grapes, and a certain amount of heat is really good for them, but they're also sensitive plants. And there's been some die off, I've heard, in in Napa and Sonoma this year. But people don't know about that, and if wine next year goes up 10%, they'll probably pay the 10%. So, the demand will still be there.

CARL

Yeah. And water is such a big part of what drives agriculture in this country. I mean in the Central Valley in California, I think they produce a quarter of the nation's fruits and vegetables. It's shocking, just that one little strip of land. And you know,  that's a big part of why they've had so much difficulty with water out there. So much of it has been diverted for agriculture. That's what's going on in the Colorado River. And, you know, Vegas has come very close to running out of water. So, there are a lot of, you know, there a lot of legal fights going on out there. You know, water and agriculture is going to be just more and more of an issue in the future.

DON

Right. Yeah, because I know every few years they have to look at how that water from the Colorado River is divided up among the various states and municipalities down there and  people who have been getting a huge lion's share of it for years, you're right, because of agriculture and stuff, now suddenly have a smaller pie to be dividing up. Also, you know, when we're talking, you mentioned coffee. Cocoa is another crop that is very dependent upon climate, and the cocoa climate down in South America, and in parts of Africa, is also being affected by this. So yeah, commodities that you take for granted, and you go to the supermarket and figure there's always going to be a chocolate bar, there's always going to be six types of coffee. That may not be so in the future, because of the dictates of the climate.

CARL

It's just, you know, that's the thing that I think a lot of climate scientists want to emphasize, is disruption. You know, there's also, there's been a big rift in the community about what's called “doomism.”  Where you know, there are some climate scientists who want to say that, you know, we're on the precipice of something horrible and terrible, which, I guess, I couldn't rule out. But I think most climate scientists occupy this space where that's not really the issue. The issue is disruption. You know, it's about disrupting your life, you know, making it more difficult to, you know, acquire certain things. Or more difficult to live in beautiful places like Florida, because the insurance has gotten so expensive, or because it's so hot, or because, you know, flooding is becoming more and more of an issue, nuisance flooding is becoming more of an issue. It's really about disruption. And displacement is another thing too. You know, just the throngs of people that are going to continue to come from these very hot locations where it's harder and harder to grow crops. You know for us, you know, we're thinking about what we, you know, like to buy at the store, and what we can acquire, but in other parts of the world you know, many people are subsistence farmers. Whatever yams they can grow that year is what they're eating. And if they suddenly can't do that, because the rains have dried up, then they're gonna have to leave. And you know, that is also a huge part - it's become a political, you know, firestorm here, and also in Europe, and many other parts of the world. And that's not going away. It is not going away anytime soon. It's only going to become more and more of an issue.

JOHN

I understand about “doomism” that, to some extent, first of all, there's a “cry wolf” kind of thing, where people get inured to hearing about warnings all the time and they get less and less responsive to them. So sure, “doomism” really doesn't work to get people more aware and change whatever habits we can change to help the climate situation, if there are habits that we can change. And so, “doomism” doesn't really help that much. But there's also the idea, there was a rhetoric for many years about always talking about, well, it's coming. But our talk today sort of suggests that, well, no, it's here, all these things that were talked about in the 80s, for example in the 70s even. Well, they're all happening, right? You know, water, water levels are rising. We're getting strange weather, etcetera, etcetera. I'm not saying this to cause a feeling of doom. I'm just saying it seems as though we're in the middle of something. We're not looking, we're not being afraid of it. It's with us.

CARL

Yes, it's with us. This is, you know, no longer a conversation about the future. It is to the extent that we want to limit the damage. And we want to change the trajectories. But yes, we're starting to see it now. But absolutely, you mentioned, you know, whether there are things that we can do. There are all kinds of things that we can do. Fortunately, there are much larger global forces that are moving really quickly right now. The biggest, most important one, to my mind, is that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, by far, by leaps and bounds, and for that reason alone it's taking off. It's skyrocketing all over the world, so it's really a race now between renewables and between what's going on with the planet. So that's really encouraging. And as far as things that that we can do in our lives there, there's so many things that are, you know, actually really interesting that that most people aren't thinking of. I mean, yes, if you can afford to get solar panels, that's great. If you want to drive an EV, that's great. And by the way, I have one. And I’d love to talk about it, if you want to.

JOHN
Absolutely!

CARL

It’s so much fun to drive! But there are other things that are that are kind of, I'd say, under the radar for most people. One of the very biggest personal things that you can do is not waste food. Because there is so much energy in every single bite of food, if you think about it, what it took to grow or raise, and then to process, and then to transport, and to market, and to store, and to sell. I mean, all of that energy went into that food, and we discard 40% of our food in this country. It is a shocking figure, and we all do it. And so, if we just think more carefully about not doing that, that's a huge lever, personal lever. Another big one is beef and not everybody wants to hear about this, but beef is incredibly not-climate-friendly, because of land use, and also because of methane - dairy products, to some extent, as well. So, there's a really interesting list of the best things that you can do personally at Project Drawdown, and they've got them all ranked by the amount of potential emission savings, and you know a lot of the things that most people think about, like EVs or solar panels, are farther down in the list. And there's some things that are sort of non-traditional at the top of the list.

DON

It is interesting that the things that we can do, immediately, to help, are things that would not occur to you. For example, like you said, food waste, or how you how you put together the landscaping around your house, those kind of things are things that you could do to help the environment right away. There are things individuals can do close to home that help out a lot.

CARL

No question about that. I mean, I that's something that that I've been doing, and it’s funny, ‘cuz, you know here in the South, the sort of micromanaging landscaping is a common thing, where you beat every last thing on your, you know, lawn to into submission. You know, you've got these tiny little round bushes and things like that and, I've never been a fan of that. I mean, coming from the northeast that you know, I've always loved this sort of secret garden kind of thing where, you know, everything's grown up around the house. And so I let that happen around my house. I've got this, all these trees around the house, and suddenly there's not nearly as much sun falling on the House. So yeah, there are a lot of little things like that that you can do that can really help out.

DON
 We'll return to our talk with Carl in just a moment, but first, this soothing musical interlude

JOHN

Carl Parker joined The Weather Channel as an On-Camera Meteorologist in 1999. He joined the Expert Team in 2011, where he can be found doing in-studio analysis for major weather events. Carl has also been focusing on extreme weather and climate change for several years.

DON

From 1995 to 1999, Carl was with KPRC-TV in Houston, TX, garnering both personal and professional experience with tropical storms and hurricanes.  Prior to Houston, Parker worked for WHTM-TV and WHP-TV in Harrisburg, PA. He began his career in 1991 at WTVA-TV in Tupelo, MS, while working on his B.S. in Geosciences at Mississippi State University. He also has a Graduate Certificate in Climate Adaptation from NC State University, and holds the American Meteorological Society’s Seal of Approval.

JOHN

You can follow Carl by tuning in to the Weather Channel, or by visiting their website, weathergroup.com.

DON

And now, back to the Musical Innertube, already in progress....

JOHN

So, Carl, this is your chance. Talk about your car.

CARL

Oh, yeah!

JOHN

What did you get? I'm really curious!  Which EV did you buy?

CARL

So, I got a Polestar 2, and it is Volvo's sub-brand. And, it's just a, I just love the car so much. I mean, I've always enjoyed driving and, you know, I thought about this for a long time and I, you know, wasn't quite ready to take the plunge. And I had all the same worries that everybody did about range and expense. As it turned out, I just snuck in at the last minute to get the tax credit, so it wasn't as expensive, and it ended up being about the cost of an average new car. But the thing that I, there are a lot of things I love about the car, but I think the thing that I love the most about the car is it's just a different way to drive. It really is. If you really enjoy driving. It's quiet, of course. There's this really strong low-end power this torque. So you know off-the-line power. Which you don't even, it's not as though I'm running around stomping on it all the time, it's not that. It's just, you know, here and there, you can just really feel and kind of enjoy the tug of that. And the other thing is this one pedal drive, which I don't know if you guys have heard about. But one pedal drive is, I guess, they have something similar in golf carts, I haven't really driven golf carts very much. But, it's this thing where you press down to accelerate, and then you let off, and the regenerative braking kicks in, and it's so effective that I literally, I'm not exaggerating, do not use the brakes on the car. So much so, that I have to stomp on the brakes maybe once a month or so to get rust off the rotors. I mean, it's really, really amazing, you know, you'd let off and comes to a complete stop. And what it does is it encourages an entirely new way of driving. Because, if you're in traffic and you feel like you want to go real quick for a second, and then you want to back off, and then you want to go real quick again, and you want to back off, you can do that. It would be completely ridiculous for you to do that with two pedals. You'd be constantly going back and forth, and tiring, and annoying. But you can do that with this car, with one pedal drive, and it's no big deal at all, so it's just a different way to drive. But it's also - so, I'm coming up on two years with this car. I have replaced the tires. And the windshield wiper fluid. And that's it. And the cost to charge it - so, I think we're paying $0.26 or $0.27 a kWh normally with Georgia Power, and the cost to charge it overnight is $0.02 per kWh. So, I saw a calculator that estimated that I might be paying somewhere in the order of $10 a month to do 1000 miles. So, so already and this is the, when they talk about total cost of ownership, because people say, “Oh well, they're so expensive.” Yeah, but you're not going to have to do any maintenance. That's basically it. I mean, that's all you're looking at, is tires and eventually a brake job and brake fluid. But otherwise, there are 40 moving parts on an EV, as compared to 4000 with an ICE. So, your total cost of ownership is actually going to be lower, even though you pay more upfront in a lot of cases. And that's changing too, by the way. Those costs are going down too. You know, in terms of fuel and maintenance, it's just going to be a lot lower. So, I'll also offer this: because it is not a Tesla, it's a little trickier to find charging for long distance, so I haven't taken it on a real long trip like down to Florida.

JOHN

That’s my next question.

CARL

I did take a Tesla to Florida, and I stopped twice, once for 40 minutes, and once for 20 minutes. It was no problem. Felt more confident about doing that because there are so many Tesla charging stations, as opposed to the other kind, and I have run into cases where it said there was a charging station, but it wasn't working for some reason, so. But, the thing is, 95% of driving is under 50 miles. So, you know, I'm thinking about this as my in-town car. And you know, I'm thinking about it as my mostly my commuter car or maybe my day trip car. So, that too has not become an issue. And then just in terms of, I'll add one last thing, in in terms of, you know range, anxiety, it's just about rewiring your brain. You try to live in the middle of the battery range. You want to be as close to 50% as much of the time as you can to prolong the life of the battery. So, I, you know, get down to about 20 or 30, plug it in every two or three days, get back up to 80. And I'm just thinking in those terms. OK. Hey, I've got 32%, tonight's going to be the night when I plug it in. I'll jump, you know, get back up to 80. I've rewired my brain that way. I'm thinking about what my range is.

DON

Kind of thinking of electricity in the way you used to think of gasoline.

CARL

Yeah, exactly. It's just not as convenient. And it's not as quick as it used to be, but it's very doable. It's just a matter of just training yourself to think in those terms. May I also add, if you are interested, for whatever reason, I think, and here's what I think it is - I think that people are afraid of used EVs, because they're worried about, oh, I've heard these stories about having to replace the battery, and it might be twenty or thirty-thousand dollars. And that kept me from buying a used EV. But the used EV market is the most affordable car market right now. And I think that's it's because that thinking is pervasive. So, you can get a used Polestar right now, with 20 or 30,000 miles on it for 25 to $30,000, which is about half of what they sold for two years ago. The deals right now are unbelievable. I mean, you know, it hurts me a little bit to know that, but I'm not selling anytime soon, so, it's no big deal. But, if one was interested in getting into one, that would be the way to do it, and as far as battery life is concerned, there was a study that came out recently that suggested that batteries are probably good for 2000 charging cycles, or around 500,000 miles, so in most cases they'll probably outlast the cars themselves.

DON

Okay, so listen very carefully to used car salesman Carl Parker. Go out there and get yourself an EV.

CARL

It's pretty cool.

JOHN

Life is changing rapidly.

CARL

Yeah, yeah.

JOHN

It's changing rapidly, and I think in good ways. I think the things that we can do, and we'll  find out about more things that we can do as we go on. You know, I still think the glass is half full all the time, and you're a good example, Carl, you really are.

CARL

Thanks very much. Yeah, you know, I do think that we're gonna find our way out of this. You know, I want to leave you with one really encouraging thing that I came across in the last couple of years. And, you know, that is that, the thinking is that once we get to net zero - net zero being the point at which we are no longer producing more emissions than the Earth can take on – and, already, fossil fuel usage is starting to level out. A lot of people think that we're peaking right now, and we're going to begin a long, slow decline after this, because of the affordability of renewables and the, you know, explosion of these new technologies and EVs  - we may reach this point, this net zero, within a couple of decades. Somewhere around mid-century. And once we get to net zero, the thinking is that warming will stop at that point. So, you know, we've warmed by 1.2 to maybe 1.3°C. So, you know, maybe we're closer to 2 by that time. But once we get there, then it stops, and it begins to gradually decline after that point. And you know there will be feedbacks that continue beyond that. And I don't want to sugarcoat it. I mean, you know, there's going to be things like, you know, ice melt and sea level rise that continue well beyond that. But a lot of the other impacts can then also, you know, begin to come down as well, once we start this long, slow process of cooling. And you know, some of the other studies that have come out have shown that that the Earth is very resilient, and that it's going to be able to bounce back pretty quickly once we stop this relentless, you know, feed of heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. So, you know that to me was one of the most encouraging things that I had read, that our future is still very much in our hands. We have the ability to change the trajectory of this, this thing, and it's happening already, and it's happening because of economics. You know it's it doesn't even, it's kind of out of our hands to an extent, because it doesn't even matter whether we have policymakers that are doing things or not. Once it becomes cheaper to do the right thing, that's the way it's going to go. That's just how the world works. And that's happening now, and it's happening more and more rapidly all the time. So, I do think, you know, we're gonna be in for a wrenching period. There's no question about that, but I think that, you know, things will eventually go the right way.

DON

And we're hoping that you're absolutely right. Thanks very much Carl for being with us today.

CARL

Absolutely!

DON

Carl Parker of The Weather Channel, for giving us those horrible statistics, but also, the encouraging news at the end there. Thanks very much for being with us today.

CARL

Absolutely happy to do it.