By Nathaniel Weinzapfel

Introduction:

First held in 1970 and recently reaching its 50th year anniversary, Earth Day is an annual holiday held to demonstrate support for environmental protection and celebrate life on our planet, with over a billion people participating in related events worldwide. This holiday has been extended to encompass all of April, in what has been aptly named Earth Month. In celebration of Earth Month there have been a series of news stories that began last week focusing on how Indiana is likely to be affected by climate change. Researchers have rigorously studied what Indiana’s future will entail, and these stories will cover the likely outcomes and provide some specific context. This is the second episode of the series, with this one being based around another discussion with Professor Ben Kravitz, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University, who helps explain why we know climate change is occurring that will allow us to explain specifically the relationship between climate change and Indiana.

NBC News Report Segment:

From horrific tornado damage…

“It just looked like a battlezone”

…to historic flooding…

“You couldn't see anything but water. nothing but water”

…and raging wildfires…

“Got everybody out. But it's heartbreaking” 

The UN's latest most in depth scientific report on climate change warns the dangers are immediate and growing more acute.

History of Climate Science:

Climate science and the general knowledge we have about climate change didn’t begin with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The history of the scientific field goes back about two centuries ago, when French physicist Joseph Fourier first proposed the idea that Earth’s atmosphere acted as a greenhouse, and allowed the planet to remain consistently warm. Irish scientist John Tydall would later begin to determine what the composition of the greenhouse was through laboratory experiments in the 1860s. These tests found that compounds related to coal, including carbon dioxide and methane, were excellent sources to absorb energy from the sun. Three decades later Svante Arrhenius discovered that the decreases and increases in global CO2 levels could cool and warm the planet respectively. However, the connection between these discoveries and the growth of the industrial world was not made until the 1930s when British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar realized that average temperatures in the United States had warmed since the industrial revolution, and that the Earth as a whole is likely warming.

Modern climate science has its origins in the founding of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii which began to record atmospheric CO2 levels consistently since 1958. The information gathered at the observatory is depicted in the most famous of climate diagrams, showing CO2 levels rising every year since the record began. This is called the Keeling Curve.

Professor Kravitz & Climate Modeling:

The Kneeling Curve and the climate models that followed all sought to understand the relationship between global average temperature and the different impacts humans have on the global climate. Professor Kravitz knows this topic all too well. His 15 year career began by solely focusing on math, before becoming interested in atmospheric science and how equations can be used to predict weather and understand climate change. The professor explains exactly what his area of focus is when it comes to climate change.

“I tend to be really interested in the physical climate. So basically, the way I describe it is when you push the Earth system, how does it respond? We call that radiative forcing and climate response. I'm interested in feedbacks. I'm interested in exploring the Earth as a system and how we can get strange responses ...