Climate Cast

Minnesota has more than 100 closed landfills, but there is an approach to deal with the waste sites that also brings the state closer to energy independence. It involves repurposing these landfills into solar farms. The Anoka-Ramsey landfill has now been covered with nearly 9,000 solar panels that help power 750 nearby homes.

MPR Chief Meteorologist Ben Cathey spoke with the CEO of Connexus Energy, Brian Burandt, and Hans Neve, a program manager with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, about how closed landfills can be transformed and what benefits they can bring to a community.

“Up front, people often say, ‘I don't want to live by solar,’” Burandt said. “Then after the system goes up, we've seen housing development go all around it. And when the University of Minnesota came out and did some study and talked to those homeowners, they were happy to live by it. They now know what their neighbor is for the next 30 years. It's something that's silent. There's pollinator habitat and people tend to be happy to be living adjacent to a solar system.”

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Correction (Oct. 27, 2026): A previous version of this story misspelled Connexus Energy and Brian Burandt. It has been updated.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of an antique combine east of Moorhead, Sam Stueber can see the past, present and future of Minnesota’s changing environment.

On this day, she’s working in a field of ancient and unspoiled prairie in Clay County, rounding up thousands of pounds of wild grass and wildflower seeds at the Nature Conservancy’s Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area. It’s one of the few places left where you can see the sweeping native prairie that once covered much of western Minnesota.

Beyond their beauty, these lands are helping in the larger fight against climate change. Grasslands are one of the world’s best places to store carbon. University of Minnesota researchers found an acre of prairie grassland can pull a ton of carbon out of the air each year.

The roots of wild prairie grasses can extend 15 feet down into the dirt, trapping the carbon underground. If a wildfire comes along, grasses will burn and some carbon will escape but most of the carbon stays underground.

The Nature Conservancy along with other nonprofits and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service collects about 15,000 pounds of wild grass seed each fall using special Allis-Chalmers combines, which are lighter than modern combines that can rut the sandy soil.

Keeping the ancient prairie healthy and growing into the future is vital. As we humans continue to dump carbon into the atmosphere, trapping carbon is crucial to the future of our warming planet.

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The colors of fall foliage are important to many Minnesotans, and timing for peak colors is wrapping up in the northern portion of the state. But future generations may get to enjoy those vibrant colors later in the year.

MPR Chief Meteorologist Ben Cathey spoke with Brian Schwingle, forest health program coordinator with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, to see how climate change is delaying when leaves change.

“Peak color since the late ’60s up until 2025 has delayed about almost two weeks,” Schwingle said. “There are two main factors that control leaf color change: day length ... and temperature in the fall. Temperature, specifically minimum night temperatures in September and October.”

The delayed timing doesn't necessarily mean Minnesota's fall color season will become shorter. But as autumn temperatures continue to warm, the state's annual display is likely to keep arriving later in the year.

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Runners can expect seasonably cool temperatures for the 2026 Twin Cities Marathon. But the early October tradition will be moving back a week starting next year. Race officials have stated health concerns due to heat as a reason for the change.

Between 1961 and 1990, October temperatures never touched 90 degrees in the Twin Cities. But, since 2010, there has been two instances of 90-degree temperatures in October. And now it’s twice as likely to hit temperatures over 80 degrees than 50 years ago.

MPR News meteorologist Sven Sundgaard spoke with distance runner Jeff Denney and Jacob Kastner, the medical co-director of the Twin Cities Marathon, about how a changing climate is impacting long distance runners.

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The University of Minnesota is recognized as one of the top apple breeding and genetics research programs in the country. It developed the Honeycrisp apple and other flavors like the Big Flirt and the SuperSnap. But a warming climate makes the university’s work more difficult.

MPR News chief meteorologist Ben Cathey spoke with Matt Clark, the director of research at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, and Sarah Kostick, a member of the University of Minnesota Apple Breeding Program, about how climate is changing apples and the way you buy them.

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Invasive species play the long game. They travel well, dig in to survive wherever they’re dropped off and then start multiplying, making it nearly impossible to root them out.

Scientists looking now at the current state of the Strait of Hormuz see a recipe for invasive species spread. Giant ships are stuck in the warm waters there amid the Iran War and they’re collecting critters in the ballast water and on their hulls.

Those invasive creatures will end up in ports around the world once the ships start moving again, likely creating a global superspreader event, Mario Tamburri, a marine ecologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told MPR News.

“What makes a good invasive species is one that's sort of very tolerant to extremes and robust, and that's why the the organisms we have in the Persian, Arabian Gulf are particularly concerning because they they live in really hot water, really salty conditions,” he said.

“That might make them more invasive, more able to to withstand new conditions,” he added, “but what it also means is that they can bring those traits of being tolerant to higher temperature to the new environments.”

In the case of freshwater Lake Superior, it would take a longer time to see impacts from the Strait of Hormuz. Many of the big boats on Superior travel domestically, but don’t head out into saltwater. Plus, the Strait of Hormuz is much warmer than the Duluth harbor.

Lake Superior has seen invasives take hold, including lampreys and zebra mussels.

The bloody red shrimp is the latest local example. Twenty years after reaching the Great Lakes in the ballast water of cargo ships, the crustacean native to Europe and Asia has now colonized Lake Superior, despite years of effort by ecologists to keep it away from Duluth.

That pattern is unlikely to change anytime soon. New research from scientists at Toronto’s York University found Lake Superior is one of the fastest-warming big lakes in the world.

Research led by a biologist at the State University of New York-New Paltz found Lake Superior has lost more than two months of ice coverage per year since 1857.

And when there’s less ice coverage in winter, we also see faster winter warming on land, perpetuating the cycle a University of Minnesota research team found.

Creatures living in the saline waters off the coast of Iran are incredibly resilient to climate change and able to survive in extremely tough conditions, and that could keep them alive in places like the Great Lakes one day, Tamburri said.

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Derechos are devastating, fast-moving bands of thunderstorms capable of producing destructive winds. Minnesota has experienced several, including the Boundary Waters blowdown in 1999. But research suggests derechos could become twice as common in a warming climate.

MPR News chief meteorologist Ben Cathey spoke with members of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota in Roseville about the impacts these storms can have on wildlife.

He also spoke with Logan Bundy, a meteorologist at Northern Illinois University, about what derechos could look like in the future.

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If you’ve attended or played in a softball or baseball game this summer, you likely share something in common with a lot of Minnesotans. The intense heat, coupled with the high humidity, has led to delays and sweltering conditions for fans, players, and umpires alike. That comes at the end of July 2026, which will go down as the warmest month in American history.

There are plenty of church leagues and beer leagues around the state, but one group that meets in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul is a little different. They have team names like the Grand Slamphibians, Tree Huggers, and Straight A Sluggers.

These aren’t just your average Joes. These players are almost all state government workers. Many of those folks work directly on climate issues at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

So we ventured out to the Dunning Fields on the hottest evening of summer to talk to the experts while they were off the clock.

What would you guess is the deadliest disaster in Minnesota history? A wildfire? Blizzard? Tornado? It was none of those. In 1936, a long-term heat wave killed at least 900 across Minnesota.

Heat is America’s top weather killer, even in the age of air conditioning and community pools.

For the return of the long-running Climate Cast, we wanted to revisit the terrible cost of the 1936 heat wave that hit 90 years ago this month. On July 14, 1936, experts estimated a person was dying every three minutes in Minneapolis alone as a direct result of the heat.

In this episode, MPR News chief meteorologist Ben Cathey speaks with with Geoff Williams, the author of a new book, “The Summer of Death.” Williams calculates that at least 12,000 people died across America. He thinks Minnesota’s official death toll is likely severely under-calculated.

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