North Carolina’s warmest year in recorded history was 2019, and more broadly the second-warmest year globally in NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) records. Moreover, the year was also marked by extreme natural disasters, high ocean temperatures and movement of regional diseases such as Zika Virus and dengue fever, according to NC State climate scientists.

Jay Levine, Walter Robinson and Roberto Mera, Climate Change and Society at NC State’s department head, professor and associate program coordinator, respectively, said the number of extremely warm days greatly outnumbered the cold days on earth, and the extremes have contributed to the current wildfires in Australia.

Robinson said the warmer climate is causing more extremes in weather patterns, including longer heat waves, extreme rain, hurricanes and salt water traveling into estuaries.

The North Atlantic region had 18 named storms in 2019, which was above the average between 1981-2012 with 12.1 named storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The natural disasters, such as hurricanes Matthew and Florence, mostly affected low-income areas in North Carolina and areas that already flood easily such as Lumberton and Crabtree valley, according to Robinson.

“While we’ve always had hurricanes in North Carolina, the big effect of climate change — global warming — is increasing the amount of rain that falls in the storms,” Robinson said. “And every little increment of rain event. The flood cut a little higher. There’s a lot of additional damage because we’re seeing flooding now that’s completely unprecedented.”

Robinson said one extremely warm weather event does not necessarily prove that man-made climate change is real, and one cold event does not disprove it, but a pattern of significantly warm weather events show man-made climate change exists.

Ocean temperatures for the top two kilometers (about 1.25 miles) reached a new record. This has resulted in fish species moving to new regions, such as lionfish moving to the coastal Carolina region, according to Robinson.

Levine, an epidemiologist, pointed out the movement of diseases that generally remained in certain regions. He made an example that Zika Virus has moved north and that mosquito-borne illnesses have been seen in the US or Europe, places with little or no immunity to these diseases.

With a warmer earth, insects can travel to new places and therefore spread insect-borne illnesses, according to Levine.

Heat-related illnesses such as heat exhaustion for the elderly, are also a growing concern for public health, according to Levine. The difference in temperature is shrinking, meaning there is little relief from extreme heat in warmer seasons at nighttime, according to Mera.

Despite the current issues and past disasters, Robinson said the climate crisis is still able to be fixed, but the earth will continue to warm for a few years.

“It’s like driving a car up a hill, and you’re driving fast enough to take your foot off the gas,” Robinson said. “Your car still continues for a while. The climate system has a lot of inertia. So if we were to shut everything down now and stop putting CO2 and other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the temperature would warm up for some period of time, couple of decades probably, it would rise maybe another degree Fahrenheit.”

As temperatures increase, some of the problems described will get worse, Robinson said. Many solutions to decreasing greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions already exist and could be more widespread, Robinson said.

“We can invest,” Robinson said. “The things you need with renewable energy are power transmission and storage. We know how to do those things. Batteries and technology is improving rapidly and even with the existing technology, we know how to transmit power without losses … We know that agricultural practices will take carbon out of the air as opposed to putting it into the air. We know how to build buildings that use less energy, we know how to build vehicles that burn less gas, or [that] burn no gas.”

NASA and the NOAA revealed an analysis on the climate for the past year, which can be viewed on the former’s website.