Climate Cast

Hurricane Dorian thrashed the Bahamas for three days, whipping structures with winds as strong as 120 mph and dumping nonstop rain on the low-lying islands. James Kossin, a hurricane and climate expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said climate change is fueling more of these slow-moving storms.

“If we look back over the continental United States, which is where our hurricane data is best, and we look all the way back to the year 1900 to the present, so about 120 year, we see a clear slowdown of 17 percent,” Kossin said. “That’s a long enough period to say that this does not appear to be natural variability.”

​Paul Huttner, MPR chief meteorologist, talks climate change with polar explorer Ann Bancroft and Jesse Schomberg of Minnesota Sea Grant.

Bancroft was the first woman to reach the North and South poles. Schomberg lives and works in Duluth.

​"​We’ll talk about how climate change in Minnesota is impacting outdoor recreation​," Huttner says. "We’ll explore how Minnesota’s outdoor economy is adapting. And, as always, ​w​e’ll talk about climate solutions and the opportunities they generate.​"​

​The discussion is a production of Climate Cast and The Water Main. It was recorded at the Minnesota State Fair on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg arrived in New York this week after completing an emissions-free voyage by boat across the Atlantic. She traveled to take part in a United Nations climate summit, and to draw attention to the amount of carbon travelers emit when they hop on a plane.

Estimates vary, but plane travel represents a significant portion of carbon emissions each year.

So what do you do if you can’t set sail like Thunberg? One option is carbon offsets.

“A carbon offset is really just a purchasable greenhouse gas emissions reduction,” said Maggie Lund, a manager with Center for Research Solutions Green-e certification program. “So as a consumer, you can go out and buy a carbon offset to negate your carbon emissions.”

Lund said that could look like paying $5 to $7 to help block deforestation after a flight across the country. Your flight emitted a lot of carbon, but your offset saved trees that will continue to suck carbon from the air into perpetuity.

“One of the core principals of carbon offsetting is that without the revenue from the carbon offset or the carbon credit, the emissions reduction would have never happened,” Lund said. “So your investment as a consumer into that carbon offset is driving the emissions reduction to happen in the first place.”

Methane is more than 100 times more potent that carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas emission, and it’s been on the rise for about a decade. Scientists have been debating what’s behind the spike — wetlands, cows and landfills all emit methane. But a recent study by Robert Howarth, an ecology and environmental biology professor at Cornell University, in the journal Biogeosciences ties much of that increase to shale gas released through fracking.

Howarth found his culprit by lifting chemical fingerprints from methane in the atmosphere. The emission’s chemical makeup varies slightly depending on the source, and Howarth found at least a third of new methane has a lower proportion of carbon-13 in relation to carbon-12 , suggesting it came from shale gas.

“Shale gas is the methane that’s been trapped over geological time in the shale, and it’s released only when we use high-volume hydraulic fracturing — technology that’s only been in widespread commercial use for the last decade or so,” Howarth said. “Conventional natural gas is methane which broke free from shale, migrated through semi-porous rock materials like sandstone over periods of tens to hundreds of millions of years until trapped inside some sort of a cavity. That migration … results in a loss of the lighter carbon-12 isotope.

“So the conventional natural gas that we’ve been harvesting in the 20th century ends up having more carbon-13 than shale gas from fracturing,” he said.

Shale gas is released rapidly, so it hasn’t lost carbon-12.

Howarth said his paper underscores the importance of reducing use of natural gas.

“Reducing methane emissions offers us a real chance — the only chance, I would say — of reaching the UN COP21 target of trying to keep our planet well below 2 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial baseline,” he said. “I think the way to go is to move as quickly as we can away from all fossil fuels. We need to do so anyway to get rid of the carbon dioxide, but a lot of times people say let’s focus...

Heavier rains are driving historically high water levels and more frequent flooding in cities across the United States. Earlier this year, an overflowing Missouri River blocked off bridges and roads in Nebraska and Iowa, disrupting businesses and residents for several weeks.

This could be a new normal for the Midwest region, where cities must now prepare themselves for the economic and environmental impact of climate change.

MPR News’ Paul Huttner, filling in for host Kerri Miller, spoke with Forbes Tompkins, officer of flood-prepared communities at The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Mayor Errick Simmons of Greenville, Miss., about how cities across the country are bracing for more climate-driven flooding.

Later, as part of the Climate Reality Panel, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter joined Paul for a discussion on combating climate change in the Twin Cities.

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Kerri Miller podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts , Spotify or RSS

The state of Minnesota spent $9 million more to plow snow in 2019 than it did the previous year. A 2018 rockslide cost St. Paul taxpayers more than $1 million. And prolonged river flooding cost those same taxpayers $3.5 million this year.

With cities bearing the cost of climate change, they can’t escape being part of the solution. Severe weather is taking out aging infrastructure; cities are getting smarter about what they put back in.

That was the topic of a talk with St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey at the Climate Reality Leadership Corp training in Minneapolis Aug. 4.

The Minneapolis Foundation has awarded its first round of grants to involve low-income, diverse communities in climate change initiatives. More than $67,000 from the Minneapolis Climate Action and Racial Equity Fund will help nonprofits retrofit North Minneapolis homes and businesses with clean energy solutions, engage youth in decreasing the carbon footprint of their houses of worship, and bring electric car sharing to low-income communities in the Twin Cities.

Such communities are some of the hardest hit by climate change — a federal report says they’re disproportionately affected by environmental hazards and take longer to recover from natural disasters. But they’re also some of the hardest to engage around climate change solutions.

“[Electric car] charging infrastructure could be seen as a first foot for gentrification,” said Paul Schroeder, CEO of HOURCAR, the nonprofit working to bring electric car sharing to low-income communities. He said he recognizes that residents who have struggled with rising housing costs and watched other transportation initiatives, such as the Green Line and Interstate 94, disrupt their communities are likely to be skeptical of new green amenities.

That’s why HOURCAR and its partners on the project, the city of St. Paul and Xcel Energy, are starting the initiative with an outreach campaign and listening sessions.

“What works? Ask me in a year,” Schroeder said.

Shamar Bibbins, a senior program officer at the Kresge Foundation, just wrapped an initiative that supported climate change efforts in 15 low-income communities across the country over four years. She said what works is connecting climate change to the lived experiences of residents.

“There’s been a framing of climate that has not necessarily resonated with these communities,” Bibbins said. “But when you engage these communities and really connect the dots to the economic, social and public health issues that they’re facing everyday, they become your strongest advocates.”

Former Vice President Al Gore called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz a “climate hero” Friday. Gore introduced the governor at a three-day event in Minneapolis tied to The Climate Reality Project.

The environmental leadership conference brings an estimated 1,200 activists to the Twin Cities and features dozens of speakers, including New York Times author and Minnesota native Thomas Friedman, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter.

MPR News chief meteorologist and Climate Cast host Paul Huttner sat down with Gore on day one of the conference.

This week, the Norwegian Polar Institute reported the largest die-off of reindeer in a decade. Researchers found 200 dead reindeer on an isolated chain of islands in Norway, called Svalbard. And they believe climate change was at work; a wet winter resulted in a thick layer of ice that plants — the main food source for reindeer — couldn't poke through.

These arctic ecosystems are some of the hardest hit by climate change, and that's what Amy Martin sought to document in season two of her podcast, Threshold. It includes dispatches from an island in Alaska that’s washing away, a Russian community struggling to speak up about climate change despite crackdowns on dissent, and Svalbard, where herding reindeer is a way of life for indigenous families.

“Getting out onto the land and meeting people where climate change is visible right in front of them, it’s not necessarily coming top-down from an academic but just from, ‘I know this place. I know how it used to be, and I know that it’s changing.’ I think those are powerful stories.” Martin told Climate Cast host Paul Huttner.

“Oftentimes in rural areas, people are more deeply connected with the land, and so in some ways I feel they’re the canaries in the coal mine, and we need to listen to them,” she said.