You may or may not have noticed, but according to NASA chief scientist and senior climate adviser Kate Calvin, airplane rides are more turbulent now than ever.
Calvin blames climate change for the phenomenon.
During an appearance on Sunday’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Calvin said research backed up her claim.
“So, NASA has been doing these reports where you’re crunching some of the data to understand how to plan going forward,” CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan said. “I was looking at one of them. It says there’s going to be severe turbulence with airlines over large regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Are we already seeing that? And why would that happen?”
“So, we are experiencing impacts of climate change everywhere around the world right now,” Calvin replied. “There’s different impacts in different regions. I think what’s important to keep in mind is that climate change is more than just temperature. It’s also affecting things like the water cycle. So we’re seeing more heavy precipitation events, more droughts. We’re seeing increases in extreme events like storms. And we can see those, and those impact how we track travel, human health, agriculture, and all aspects of our lives.”
“With the planes, how certain are you that this will happen, or is it already happening?” Brennan asked.
“So, there’s studies that indicate that you can see increases in turbulence linked to climate change,” Calvin responded. “At NASA, some of what we do around aircraft, we have a large aeronautics research team, but we’re looking — we look a lot at how transportation affects climate, so not just climate affecting transportation, but also how it affects it. And so we do a lot of research into making planes more efficient, so they use less energy and generate less emissions and contribute less to warming in the future.”
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