Climate Cast

Almost 15 million acres in the Midwest grow corn on the same land year after year. That’s about 20 percent of all Midwest cropland.

Growing corn in this way produces more greenhouse gas emissions than crop rotation because it releases more nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

That’s according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group.

But cost-effective, climate-smart practices can reduce these emissions in a big way.

Anne Schechinger is lead author of the analysis, and she shared more about the findings as well as solutions to offset the climate impacts of continuous corn with Climate Cast host Paul Huttner.

Click play on the audio player above to listen to this episode, or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Seasonal migration is underway, and Minnesota's landscape is playing an important role in guiding birds down south.

But milder winters across the state can impact the migration process, as well as disrupt food availability and breeding opportunities.

“This [is] what we call migratory connectivity,” said Lynn Schofield, a biology instructor and staff biologist at St. Olaf College, “which is to connect all the dots between where the birds are spending their summers, where are they spending their winters and all of the places that they need to go between their summer and winter habitat.”

MPR News meteorologist Paul Huttner talked with Schofield about warmer winters in Minnesota and how it’s disrupting summer and winter habitats.

Click play on the audio player above to listen to this episode, or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Federal tax credits for solar projects are expiring at the end of this year, and some smaller towns in rural Minnesota have tapped into the benefits.

For Climate Cast this week, MPR News meteorologist Paul Huttner talks to Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Kristoffer Tigue about the skepticism around solar power that many small and local governments had adopted over the years and the economic benefits that changed their minds.

Minnesota continues to bask in warmer temperatures, blurring our seasons together.

“If you break it up month by month, the biggest change we've seen is Septembers,” said Pete Boulay, assistant state climatologist with the Minnesota State Climate Office. “September is evolving into an extension of summer.”

Average temperatures for the fall season have been warming up about one degree a decade since 1970.

“Averages used to be, statewide, about 55 degrees,” Boulay said. “Now we’re about 61 degrees for September temperatures, and we’ve had a lot more warmer than cooler Septembers since 2010.”

MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner talked with Boulay about the state’s fastest warming month and how it could impact fall colors.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

New research indicates warmer oceans may change ocean currents and atmospheric patterns in a big way.

In this episode of Climate Cast, MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner continues his conversation with John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas about shifting currents in the Atlantic Ocean and the importance of measuring ocean temperatures.

Climate scientists have known about connections between oceans and the atmosphere for decades, but new research indicates warmer oceans may change ocean currents and atmospheric patterns in a big way.

MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner talked with John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas about shifting ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity. Click play on the audio player above to listen to this episode, or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

There’s what's called a conveyor belt in the ocean, and this is water that travels up the East Coast of the United States and then goes toward Greenland, Iceland and Northern Europe. The water gets cold, sinks to the bottom of the ocean and then it travels backward.

It sort of goes in a like a loop — or a conveyor belt. That passageway of water is really, really important because it brings heat up to Europe, and it’s the reason why England’s temperatures are much more mild.

These scientists discovered that this conveyor belt of water is slowing down, and it will likely stop in the future. It's going to have really crazy consequences for our climate.

This event will likely make Europe colder. If this current shuts down, the heat from the ocean won’t go up all the way to Europe. But the paradox is that this is a result of global warming. So, as the Earth warms, we’re going to have some parts of the planet get really, really hot, and we’re actually going to have some parts get colder.

Europe will be one part of the planet that will have this paradoxical outcome of getting colder as the rest of the world gets warmer.

It's going to make our weather more wild. We’re going to have more extremes, especially the hot extremes. It’s going to increase temperatures in the Midwest, and it’s going to also make precipitation events more extreme. In Minnesota, we’ve seen this weather whiplash recently — where we go from cold and dry to hot and wet, back to maybe hot and dry — and we go from one extreme to the other. That is going to become even more significant as climate change continues.

But one of the problems we’ve found is what's called a tipping point. And it’s a tipping point where, once you cross it, you can’t stop. It's like a locomotive going down a train track. You can’t just pull the brakes and stop it instantaneously.

So this process has started, and it’s going to evolve over about 100 years. Even if humans take drastic action to reduce greenhouse gasses, that’s not likely going to stop this shutdown of this current.

It looks like we’ve passed over a threshold, and the natural tendency of the ocean is to change its circulation in a way that redistributes heat. It looks like there’s not much we can do to stop it.

The second part of this conversation about shifting ocean currents and climate change will be published next week.

The jet stream, a fast-moving river of air thousands feet above Earth, steers storms and weather systems around the globe.

Scientists have been studying how climate changes impact the jet stream for decades. Now, one study in the scientific journal Nature, discovered a jet stream behavior change.

“The jet streams are shifting,” said Larry Di Girolamo, professor and climate researcher with the University of Illinois.

Di Girolamo worked with NASA to gather statistics from Earth’s atmosphere through the launch of a satellite carrying a Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer. Over the span of 25 years, his research showed that both subtropical and polar jet streams are shifting position and speed, leading to a change in weather patterns.

“And this will continue as long as we continue to increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Di Girolamo said.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Summer is in its waning weeks and weather at the Great Minnesota Get-Together has been fair — for the most part. 

MPR News meteorologists Paul Huttner, Sven Sunggard and Mandy Thalhuber hosted their annual Climate Cast conversation in front of an audience at the Minnesota State Fair. 

Together, they reflected on weather patterns from all four seasons. Audience members shared their questions, too, about Minnesota’s changing climate and shifting climate patterns.

This discussion was recorded at the Minnesota State Fair on Aug. 27. To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Fireflies across the U.S. have seen a robust surge in growth this summer in part to a wetter weather pattern.

But those fiery little critters — which some call lightning bugs — might be in a steady decline.

“Insect populations are known to vary from year to year,” said Eric Berger, a freelance journalist for The Guardian. “A one-year increase is not enough to indicate that there has been a reversal in the downward trajectory of fireflies.”

Berger added that scientists do not have baseline data for firefly species and only recently started to monitor populations.

“A lot of what they're using is anecdotal evidence, but they have started to set up monitoring sites to inventory fireflies so that they can determine whether the population has increased or decreased,” he said.

Of the studies conducted so far, Berger says fireflies face a number of threats from extended periods of drought due to climate change, light pollution, habitat destruction and the use of pesticides.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

The smoky summer of 2025 has produced a near record number of air quality alerts for Minnesota.

Most of this summer smoke has drifted in from these massive Canadian wildfires where more than 16 million acres of forest has burned in Canada this year.

MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner talked with Matthew Taraldsen, a meteorologist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), about poor air quality and reason behind the state’s smoke-filled summers.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity. Listen to the full conversation by clicking the player button above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Yes, it definitely can. The areas that have been on fire have also been extremely dry, and so it likely isn’t enough to put out the fires, but it will definitely kind of dampen down the fire activity and limit the amount of smoke that the fires do emit.

We’ve had 19 alerts this year so far. Our current record is 53, so we’re not quite to record, but we’re above record pace. We’re higher than we were at 2023 at this point in the season. No matter how you cut it, it’s a very high-impact wildfire season.

The short answers is, it’s definitely on the rise. There’s been plenty of research out there in the western U.S. that the wildfire trends are growing as our climate warms. In Canada, the data until last year was a little bit more ambiguous. But there’s definitely a signal that what we’re seeing is likely being influenced with climate change.

I think what what we’re seeing this year is likely still going to be an outlier. But I do think going forward, we’re likely to see at least some smoke impacts every year.

We’ve also been having volatile, organic compounds inside the smoke that have also been serving as a pretty powerful base for ozone formation and seeing higher ozone days in ways we haven’t seen before. It’s kind of a one-two-punch.

You don’t, is the short answer. In Minnesota, we think of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area as being remote, and it is to an extent. But Canada takes it to a whole new level.

Canada has remote areas the size of the state of Texas and when you get a fire that starts there, there is no easy way to put that fire out, unless you air drop in firefighters who will then hand dig fire lines. This year, you have fires that are burning roughly the size of the state of South Carolina — think of how long it would take to hand carve fire lines around an entire U.S. state.

On the other side, when those people are out, far away from civilization, if something were to happen more locally, they’re no longer on the field and you have to bring them back. So they’re letting them burn just because they don’t have the manpower to extinguish them all.

It’s a multifaceted problem, but I think people lose sight of just how incredibly large this area is with no roads, no water lines, nothing out there. Your tools to control those fires are very limited.

The other point is that this is not just impacting the U.S. In Flin Flon, Manitoba, the air quality last month was over 500 for the entire month. So this is impacting people in Canada as much as it’s impacting people the United States, and no one’s happy with it.

I think the big thing to take away is to be vigilant. We’ve heard from a lot of people that checking the air quality has really become of part of their daily routine — just like you would check the normal weather forecast.

That’s probably the most prudent thing. Check the air quality, have a plan to deal with smoke, wear a mask. It will protect you. Be prepared if you are outside in the smoke, and listen to your body.