(cheerful instrumental music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H. Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much for joining us.

On the commercial television stations, you have an opportunity numerous times a day to watch the weather forecast, and what's the weather going to be for tomorrow for the next week.

We're not going to be talking about that.

We're going to be talking about climate and what the difference between weather and climate is and where we are going with our climate, most notably, the climate here in Illinois.

And to have that conversation, let me introduce to you first Ed Shimon.

Ed is the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

Thank you for joining us.

- No problem.

Thanks for having me here, H. - And Dr. Trent Ford is here.

Trent is the Illinois state climatologist.

Thank you for joining us.

- And thanks for inviting me.

- And I kind of tease the difference between weather and climate.

Could we start with just a real quick definition?

What's weather, what's climate?

- Yeah, weather is the day to day, you know, atmospheric conditions.

It's just basically your highs, lows, precipitation, and you know, that sort of information, whereas climate is a scan of what's occurred in the past.

It's looking back and not looking forward.

Weather is now and forward.

Climate is looking back, yeah, generally 30 years is our climate, is our climate estimates for, and we update those every 10 years just to say what's happening on average over a 30-year cycle.

So it's trends.

How are we, you know, how's the weather been occurring over 30 years in general for highs, lows, precip, and that such.

- This past week has been rather warm for a June.

That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a climate change.

It's just this particular pinpoint in time.

It's hot.

- Yeah, that's right.

So I mean, you know, we have our climate and often we define that as our averages, our normals, as Ed mentioned, but we have the variability on top of that, and that variability is driven by lots of things, right?

You think of variability as the likelihood of having any sort of weather condition.

So the likelihood of getting a 90 degree day in June is fairly high, and getting a 90 degree day in Peoria in January is very, very low.

And so, yeah, this is part of that variability.

At the same time, though, our climate also really drives how likely those things are.

And if we see an increase in temperatures of our background climate, then we can get an increase in the likelihood of these sorts of heat waves.

- So you mentioned a 30-year average.

We're watching this trend.

Can we talk about trends in several areas, number one, rainfall?

And if we can, Illinois is where we wanna be talking about.

- Right.

- But what have we seen with rainfall, the type of rainfall, how often it occurs, et cetera?

- All right.

- Well, we generally have seen with increases in temperature that the air mass can hold more water.

So any individual system that comes through has been having the ability to drop excessive amounts of rainfall over shorter periods of time than we've seen in the past, creating situations where, you know, you have very intense rainfall filling basins and generally giving you higher rainfall totals because the air can hold more water with being in a warmer condition.

- So with the intensity of the rainfalls, are they happening less often, but more intense, or does that just depend on the year?

- Certainly the intensity is increasing.

There was recent research and reports done in the last few years.

It shows that the intensity of rainfall in Illinois from pretty much you think about a one hour rainfall, so how heavy it does it fall, how much rain do we get in one hour, all the way out to 10 days, that intensity is increasing all across the state.

The frequency of rainfall, it is changing, but it's depending on the seasonality.

So for example, in the summertime, that's when we're seeing a few fewer days where we get rainfall, but more intense rainfall over.

So our summer total rainfall isn't really changing all that much here in Illinois when you think about a statewide.

What it is doing is becoming more intense and less frequent.

We contrast that with the winter where rainfall's just increasing overall.

We're not getting any less rain or less precipitation in winter time.

It's just more overall.

- So the amount of water that we're getting in Illinois, in rough, the trend is that we're not getting a whole bunch more.

It's just that it's coming in these intense rainfalls and the rainfalls are less often.

- Yeah, well, and that's really, that's a good description for summertime.

And this is where we talk about the differences in seasonality for temperature.

Precipitation has a big seasonality as well.

So the summertime change is that way where it's not really changing all that much total precipitation.

You know, we're still getting anywhere between, let's say, nine and maybe 15 inches in the summer.

It's becoming more intense, but less frequent.

In the winter, we are seeing an actual increase in the overall amount of precipitation that we're getting.

- I think most people, when we talk about climate change, if we may use that term, think in terms of the thermometer.

What kinds of changes have we seen with temperature in Illinois?

- In general, I think based on some studies that Trent has produced, at least the information that our nighttime temperatures have generally been slightly warmer, although there's not as a significant for the daytime highs, but, you know, we are definitely seeing a trend upward.

I know in Peoria, our nighttime lows seem to be definitely warmer in general.

I did a study with some TV meteorologists looking back 20 years, and it's generally, you know, we're seeing that trend in the nighttime temperatures more than the daytime highs.

- So nighttime actually is where we are seeing the most significant change historically?

- Yeah, historically over the, well, the last 30 years, last hundred years, we wanna go back, yeah, nighttime temperatures, the minimums have increased the most.

Now again, the seasonality is really important there because in the winter, our daytime temperatures have increased at close to the same rate as nighttime, but not quite.

It's day and nighttime temperatures still overrunning.

In the summertime, nighttime temperatures in the last 50 years have increased at four times the rate of daytime temperatures.

So it's really, those warm nights have become a lot more frequent.

- I wanna go back to this intense rainfall.

Have we seen a corresponding issue with flooding along rivers in Illinois with regard to those intense heavy rainfalls?

- Flooding has increased across the state at a general level.

It's not at the same magnitude of a change in precipitation.

And the reason being is that, if you think about the steps necessary.

So as Ed mentioned, you need more water vapor in the air, more water in the air, to produce more rainfall.

That's one step.

You get that rainfall.

How that translates to flooding depends on the land cover, the topography, how close you are to rivers and streams, how wide of an area that storm covers.

And so what that means is is that let's say an X change, a one unit change, in precipitation is not gonna yield the same exact change in flooding.

So in some river basins in Illinois, we've actually seen a larger increase in flooding than in precipitation, which is interesting.

In some river basins, we've actually seen a bit of a lesser increase in flooding than we have seen in precipitation.

- Are there certain river basins that, you know, the Mackinow or the Spoon or things of that nature, or is it just dependent on that particular storm?

- At that, I haven't seen studies.

Maybe Ed can chime in.

I haven't seen studies at that level of watershed, like the smaller watersheds, like the Mackinow and Spoon River, things like that, the Kickapoo.

However, the upper Mississippi basin, which you can think of kind of north of St. Louis all the way up to the headwaters in Mississippi, that is one basin where flooding has actually, or flooding, I should say, that the stream flow, the amount of water running through that river system has actually increased more than the total precipitation of that whole area.

- Yeah, some basins have a higher response rate for smaller amounts of rainfall, just due to the size of the rivers and the amount of area that is in that basin.

I know that the Mackinow, and even the Spoon, we've seen those flash up pretty quickly after very intense rainfalls that have hit the basin.

So obviously your Illinois River basin is much wider for a larger portion of that river.

So the response rates for the Illinois are slower, but they, you know, still it does see a flooding situation develop on the Illinois because they have so many tributaries feeding it.

But those high, rapid, like the Kickapoo, we had a very intense rainfall in McLean County, and it drained right down into Logan County.

And we had parts of I-55 wash out, you know, in McLean County due to the very intense rainfalls.

- And to your point, the Illinois has a huge watershed.

So rain up north could actually impact the Illinois River down here in Peoria or Beardstown, what have you.

- Yeah, that's what we saw in 2019.

I mean, 2019 down to the lower Mississippi, you know, from basically St. Louis down to Cairo, that part of Southern Illinois, you know, it was in flood stage for, you know, three or four months.

And part of it was, yeah, it was very wet in that area, but also part of it was at the upper Midwest had near record snow pack all the way to late March, and that rapidly melted and sent a bunch more water down to that river basin.

So your point is well taken that what's going on as far as flooding in Peoria, locally does matter what's going on in Peoria, but also matters what's going on upstream and downstream because there's gotta be space for that water to go to.

- Let's look at Lake Michigan.

Have we seen less ice cover in Lake Michigan, or is it, I mean, we're talking about trends now.

We're not talking about a specific year.

- Yeah, I grew up in Wisconsin.

So I've seen, you know, Lake Michigan have significant icing years, and we haven't seen that intensity of ice.

And then I lived in Duluth for nine years and Lake Superior as well, had some years early on when I was up there in the early two thousands where it was nearly fully iced over.

And we just haven't seen that kind of ice levels be reached, you know, in the last 10 years or so.

- You're nodding in agreement, Trent.

- Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the southern part of the Great Lakes basin, southern part of Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, they have seen an overall decrease in ice cover and the persistence of ice cover.

So it's not just how far does ice cover the lake, but also when that ice forms.

So we're seeing more winters where we go farther into winter before ice really significantly forms in the lakes and a shorter earlier melt time for that ice as well.

- Let's turn to more than a 30 year history, if we can.

- [Trent] Sure.

- Primarily we've been talking about what impacts the atmosphere, and that is fossil fuel burning, CO2 being put into the atmosphere.

That doesn't mean that we can't talk about NOx or SOx or methane, et cetera, but how do we know that, and where are we with CO2 levels right now, Trent?

- So the last, we average it for the month.

So there are regular observations taken on Monaola in Hawaii.

And so the last month, the average was exceeded 420 parts per million for the first time since observations had been taken at least since the late 1950s.

- And do we know further back than that the levels of CO2?

- Yeah, so actually it's interesting.

So we think about the climate, right?

We have to, we don't wanna just think about the last hundred years, but also really the whole climate of the earth and the earth history.

And so the thing is though, is that we haven't been taking observations for more than maybe in some places on earth, 500 years.

That's the very longest.

And so we wanna get back way before that, we have to use things called proxies, paleo climate proxies, past climate proxies.

And in many cases, we have to use those to estimate what temperature was like, what rainfall was like.

Tree rings is a good one that kind of most people know about, you know, the width of the tree determines how much rainfall fell.

One unique thing about ice core is you take a big core down in either ice sheets or glaciers, mostly in Antarctica or Greenland.

When you pull that out, it's not just ice that's contained in there, but air bubbles that are trapped within that ice, and those air bubbles formed at the time that the ice formed.

In many cases, we can take those and actually record those back 800, 900,000 years before the present.

So when we take out those carbon dioxide, we can take test the chemistry of the atmosphere, take out the carbon dioxide level and actually measure what carbon dioxide levels were like, not estimate, measure what they were like 800,000 years before the present.

So that way we can have that super long record of directly of carbon dioxide concentrations.

And what we know from that record, from many cores around Antarctica, is that in the last 800,000 years before the kind of post-industrial sort of increase in carbon concentrations, our concentrations never exceeded about 300 parts per million.

And as I've just mentioned, we're now over 420, and we've seen that increase of about a hundred to 150 parts per million just in the last 60 years.

- [H] Ice proxies, proxies?

- [Trent] Well... - Is that something we need to know about, or is that just, we can talk about samples?

- Yeah, yeah.

A proxy is really just a sample.

Yeah, the idea about proxy is it's not a direct measurement.

- Yeah.

You're basically estimating it from a secondary source, i.e.

the ice and the air in the ice, instead of actually just taking a measurement of current conditions.

- So we're really measuring the air that's inside that ice.

- Correct.

- And it's accurate measurement.

- Correct.

It is, it is accurate, because when you capture that air, it is not deteriorating.

It's not decomposing.

It is in ice.

It is basically perfectly preserved as best as you can possibly get, you know, going back 800 to 900,000 years.

- The state of Illinois, the governor signed what's called the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act last September.

And I don't wanna talk about the equitable jobs portion of the act, but can we talk a little bit about the climate portion of that act and what it might mean for the state of Illinois?

- I mean, our main goal is to reduce our carbon footprint, not only as individuals, but as, you know, as communities and as a state.

And the goals of that bill are definitely getting us in the right direction, getting people in the mindset.

You know, we, as a weather service, we say weather aware.

Well, you gotta be climate aware, you know, in terms of how am I affecting my existence on, you know, the climate.

So having the goals of reducing the amount of fossil fuels burning is gonna be a big positive, you know, whether we reach exact numbers at the 2030, 2040, and 2050, you know, we have to look at, you know, achieving that as best we can, and, you know, it will make an impact.

It will.

Reducing that amount of fossil fuel emission is going to be, even if it's just Illinois, you know, you gotta start somewhere.

And the example will be set.

Other states can see that and start to react and start saying, "Hey, you know, maybe we can make a difference too."

- And the coal powered plants are, and well, they have the option.

They can significantly reduce emissions.

They'll have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do that.

But in all likelihood, those plants will be closing with the exception of two plants, Springfield City Light and Power and Marissa?

- Yeah, I think maybe Baldwin, I think is the other one, Baldwin, in Marissa, Illinois.

Yeah, in Southern Illinois.

Yeah.

- Okay.

So Ed mentioned individuals.

What can I do that might have an impact on climate?

- Yeah.

Well, and this is something that we talk about.

There's a lot of talk about kind of the carbon footprint.

We can measure a carbon footprint of really anything.

You know, if you get, for example, go and pick up a bundle of asparagus at the store, there's a certain amount of carbon that went into the production of that asparagus, right?

That's through the production, the water, the transportation, you know, everything, right?

So everybody has that sort of carbon footprint.

And so individuals who are interested in doing so in adjusting lifestyle to reduce the amount of carbon that's emitted as a result of their lifestyle can do that.

For example, if it's possible to drive less, that's something they could do.

If it's possible to get an electric vehicle and charge based off of a carbon, a low carbon source of electricity, like solar, wind nuclear, things like that, that's something they can do.

If it's eating less carbon rich foods, that's something they can do.

Also things that people can do if they're just kind of, you know, hit across the head of all of this climate change information and all these things that they should be doing and a lot of guilt that can be thrown onto people by saying, "Hey, you should bike instead of driving," and things like that, what people can do is get involved with local community organizations that are doing things that we can consider climate friendly.

So, you know, in conversations before, you talked about planting a tree.

We can plant trees, right?

Native plants and building up native ecosystems to help sequester that carbon, but also create a positive impact on our communities.

We can also be politically active.

There was the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, IPCC report, big UN organization studying climate change, all the world's experts there.

They basically flat out concluded that the problem with solving the issue of climate change is not a lack of solutions.

It's a lack of political will.

And so, and that's a global level, but also at the international or the national level.

So, you know, having that, having those, you know, the pushing your leaders to do things that can create solutions is also a really important thing as well.

- Electric powered cars haven't come down in price yet.

They're a little on the steep side.

So not everybody's gonna go out and say, "I wanna reduce my carbon footprint by buying an electric powered car," but they can do other forms of transportation, as Trent alluded to.

We can bicycle.

- Yeah.

Especially carpooling, reducing the number of vehicles that are out on the road and using public transportation as much as you can, whether you have, even if you have a car just, you know, opt to not be that extra person on the road, because, you know, right now, you know, the gasoline powered cars are definitely one of the number one ways we are, you know, burning fossil fuels across the United States and the world.

- And this is also, taking it back for a second, thinking about urban design too, and our design of our transportation systems.

You know, I heard through the grapevine that there may be a possibility of being able to safely bike over the Bob Michel Bridge from East Peoria to Peoria at some point in the near future.

And if that's the case, you know, setting up our urban systems so it makes it safe and easier to switch from a car to bike is a way that cities can kind of incentivize their folks from doing that.

So, as opposed to just saying, "You should bike," well, I've been across the Bob Michel Bridge.

I wouldn't bike across it at this point.

I wouldn't feel safe doing that.

But incentivizing that to do that, that's one way of helping kind of setting up the system to help folks make those decisions.

- And with regard to cars, instead of saying, "Well, I need a gallon of milk," and you run out and get the milk, and then you get home and you say, "Well, gee, whiz, I need to go get, you know, a pair of pliers," consolidate your trips.

- Absolutely, yeah, plan your day.

Make sure that, you know, anytime you need to get out, make it a one trip deal.

Yeah.

- There are individuals who are not in a total agreement with the two of you.

An individual by the name of S Fred Singer has written a book called "Hot Talk, Cold Science.

He's an astrophysicist.

And he suggests that CO2 is not causing temperatures to rise.

How do you respond to Mr. Singer?

- Well, you know, the world is a big place with lots of diverse thoughts and opinions.

However, and of course, Dr. Singer is a scientist, and he's of course, you know, has his right for his opinion, but unfortunately the last almost 200 years of science has proven that thought wrong.

We have known as scientists of the temperature response, the global temperature response to carbon dioxide concentrations going all the way back to the 1830s, 1840s.

When Eunice Foote was doing her ground breaking work showing that if we increase carbon dioxide in a contained environment, like the earth system, temperature goes up.

And we have done nothing to disprove that.

All right, in science, remember, it's hard to prove anything, but you disprove things.

And we haven't in the last 120 years.

All we've seen is evidence after evidence grow that as carbon dioxide concentrations have increased in the last 150 so years, global average temperatures have increased as well in a way that was entirely predictable by those groundbreaking scientists, you know, 200 years ago.

- Let's set aside the CO2 question for just a moment and talk about urban heat islands, because there are people who would disagree with you at least to a degree by saying, "Well, when we measure the average temperature, we really haven't moved a lot of those temperature stations.

And as the urban areas expand, that creates a higher temperature because it's an urban heat island.

So those temperatures are going to go up anyway, because of that urban effect."

How do you counter that argument?

- We definitely have an urban heat island in certain places, but it's not as big of a, you know, picture.

We have many climate sites, you know, climate history sites that go back hundreds of years that are not anywhere near cities.

And we have one in each major, you know, metropolitan area, but there are hundreds and thousands of observation platforms that are not affected by the heat island effect.

And that basically washes out, you know, some of the heat island, you know, argument there, because you just have way too many additional observation platforms that are not affected by the heat island effect.

- And then let's add the CO2 back into the discussion.

CO2 is responsible for rising temperatures.

- Yeah, at a global level.

And then we see because the earth system is complex, different climates react in a different way.

However, the vast majority of earth has warmed at nearly if not a higher rate than the global average temperature over the last 150 years or so.

- You're responsible for, I think on an annual basis, developing maps that show by colors the heat intensity in the state of Illinois.

And in looking at those, it doesn't make much difference what season you're looking at.

It seems that your home county of Woodford and McLean County and Tazewell, there seems to be a target on those counties in the state of Illinois in terms of temperature increase.

- Yeah.

- Is there a reason for that?

- Not anything that I can explain.

So what's important is that the overall average rate of warming is similar, although it does vary between counties, but every single, all of 102 counties in Illinois have warmed over the last 150 years.

Those three counties do stick out at a bit of a higher warming rate.

And I haven't really been able to figure out why that is.

It could be just an artifact of the data where you have one hot year in 2020, which is where the time ends, and that's what shows in those counties versus other counties.

But that's something that still has to be explained.

Certainly if we were to see at the end of this last year and 2022, 2023, 2024, if we see that, that still that bullseye pop up year after year, it may deserve a bit more kind of analysis.

- So is the pace of temperature change increasing?

Are we seeing a faster increase in temperatures compared to 150 years ago?

- Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, and I think one of the studies that Trent has put out at where we've increased about one degree Celsius in general globally over about 150 years, but, you know, the more recent CO2 levels, since they're, you know, higher than they've ever been before.

The increase of temperature rate is definitely on the upswing, and it's, you know, the slope right now is going up exponentially instead of linearly.

It's definitely something we're gonna see show up more significantly over the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years.

- And with that, that is our crystal ball estimate.

And we'll have you back in 50 years.

(Ed laughing) See about that.

And with that, let me say thank you to Ed Shimon, who is with the National Weather Service in Lincoln, Illinois, and to Trent Ford.

Dr. Ford is the state's climatologist.

Thank you both for being with us on "At Issue."

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

And we'll be back next time with another edition of "At Issue."

This time we're going to be talking about, well, there's an increase in temperature, but a drop in population in Peoria.

We're going to see what we can do about increasing the population on the next "At Issue."

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