Laundry's Effect on Climate Change; Traffic Cameras Saving Lives

Scientists say climate change is accelerating, but their voices are getting drowned out. Might using the drier while doing laundry be counterintuitive, or helpful, in slowing climate change. We also dig into the effectiveness of traffic cameras and Gen Z's relationship with live sports. Lara Williams, David Fickling, Justin Fox, and Adam Minter join. Amy Morris hosts.

Transcript: 00:01Speaker 1 You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast count US Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. On this week's show, we'll look at what's better for the planet running the dryer or using a clothesline. The answer might surprise you. Plus, since the beginning of the pandemic, traffic deaths in the US have risen sharply. What will it take to get those numbers back down? And finally, if Taylor Swift can't bring gen Z to the NFL, who can? But we begin with the heat. The global temperature continues to rise and scientists are beside themselves. Officials from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say this past July was the hottest month for the Earth on record. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson certainly is self evident that the Earth is heating up. And what we find is that July of this year the temperatures are the hottest ever on record, and last month was the hottest September on record by far. This past June the warmest June ever recorded. Yeah, we're seeing the trend. Let's talk with Bloomberg opinion columnist Laura Williams, who covers climate change, and scientists are using some pretty unscientific language to describe the temperatures that they're seeing. If your column is any indication, Laura, what have you heard? Yeah, so we've had dobsmackingly bananas. We've had astounding, staggering and nerving, bewildering, flabber dusting, dusting, distrioting, dobsmacking. Scientists have been really, really surprised by the kind of the level of heat that we saw in September compared to previous records. It is a bit alarming that they seem so surprised by this because they've been calling attention to climate change and climate change issues and the effects for years. Why did this catch them so off guard? Yeah, it's just because it's half a degree celsius higher than the previous record in twenty twenty, and so when we see these records getting broken, they're not usually broken by that margin. And so it is a kind of market in Greece, and it looks like it could be. Some are saying an acceleration in the rate of global woman which would be worry. Yeah, I wondered was this an outlier, was just this is a one time thing. Is there's something that caused it specifically, or are we seeing an acceleration. It's going to just get hotter and hotter and hotter in the next few years. So that's something that scientists are debating. So there are two camps of scientists. The first camp and I spoke to sociologists and he'd kind of terms these guys accelerationists, and they are concerned that this is an acceleration. Basically, what we've seen, particularly this year, is there are these sulfur dioxide emissions which are comes from like crew like cruise ships and you know, ships like taking all our stuff across the oceans, and they've cleaned up their act and so we're seeing way fewer aerosols being emitted into the atmosphere. So that's a good thing for our health. But those aerosols have historically served to mass human induced climate change because they reflect the Sun's heats back into space, and so the fewer thing fewer of those that we have, the more solar radiation reaches the earth surface. The scientists that think that we've seen an acceleration point to that trend of you know, sulfur emissions going down, and point to the trend of you know, these these huge temperature records that we've seen over the past few months and say that it could be an