Climate Change in Indiana

by WFHB Environmental Affairs Correspondent Nathaniel Weinzapfel

Introduction:

In 2022, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that urgent steps were needed to be taken in order to limit the warming of the planet to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, which would require an immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across the world. While the subject of climate change may seem distant to some, even the state of Indiana has begun to notice the effects. In order to properly understand how climate change will impact the state, WFHB presents “Climate Change in Indiana” a multi-part series first providing background about climate change before addressing how Indiana is likely to be impacted. Researchers have rigorously studied what Indiana’s future will entail, and these stories cover the likely outcomes and provide some specific context. Time is of the essence, so a knowledgeable foundation about climate change in Indiana may help spark future action.

Episode 1: Mock Climate Change Debate

Episode one, the Mock Climate Change Debate with Professor Ben Kravitz, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University. The Professor and I went back and forth with myself portraying a climate denier asking him questions or making statements that are skeptical of climate change. The Professor, with his prior experience with climate change skeptics, was able to explain why common climate myths are incorrect. Ideally, you listeners out there can understand his arguments and hopefully be able to debate your relatives more effectively at the next family gathering! Now without further ado, here is the Q&A.

Q&A Section:

I'm going to ask the professor questions that a climate change denier would say or comments, they would say, so that we can see how a climate scientist would respond so that you listeners at home can be able to tell your relative why they're wrong. So…. 

I'll do my best. 

For this first one it is. So it was such a cold winter, there was a big snowstorm at the beginning of February, surely global warming can't be happening if it is still so cold.

Well, winter is always going to be cold. We're not talking about winter, suddenly becoming summer. And also, one of the most important words in the phrase global warming is global. A snowstorm in one place doesn't necessarily mean anything. What we're looking at is large scale changes over a long time period, which is what's happening under global warming, and how those changes might affect individual locations.

And so when it comes to global climate, some people say the climate is always changing. The Earth goes through a series of warming and cooling periods. There was a cooling period during the medieval times. Would it be possible that right now we're just going through a warming period?

So it's absolutely right that the Earth's climate has always changed, and we've gone through warming and cooling periods. And in fact, the periods that we've gone through in the past, the warming periods, some of them have been a lot warmer than what we're experiencing now. So that's not the issue. Usually those warming periods take 10s of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of years or some major event like a huge volcanic eruption or a meteor hitting the Earth, we're not seeing any of that. What we're seeing is very rapid changes in a very short period of time. And also, we have a mechanism for it like we understand the physics of what happens if you put large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We've known about that since the mid 1800s. This is 19th century science. Right now, that's what we're seeing, we're seeing the effects that we might expect from doing those sorts of things. So I mean, science doesn't prove anything, it is always possible that this could be due to natural causes,