As a meteorology major, Monday’s freak snowstorm was a big deal. I’m a member of the Penn State Storm Chase Team, whose large GroupMe chat was remarkably active all day and throughout the weekend leading up to the severe weather event. All of my friends always ask me for my input when they start to hear buzz about an incoming storm. With an event as unexpected as this one, I completely understand why it was such a hot topic on social media. However, I saw a number of people bring up the “global warming isn’t real if there is snow in April” argument, which gave me the idea for this blogpost.

While the effects of climate change used to be referred to almost exclusively as “global warming,” the phrase “climate change” has generally replaced it as a more accurate way to describe the widespread effects of unsustainable levels of human emissions. When scientists use the phrase “global warming” they are typically referring to human-induced global warming as opposed to the natural warming of the planet. This warming comes from a rapid increase in the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and gas. Global warming in itself refers to the rise in the average global temperature, while climate change is a more all-encompassing way of referring to the resulting effects of this warming.

Along with this distinction is also the difference between weather and climate. While weather is the short term atmospheric conditions that are taking place at any given time, climate is the overall patterns of this weather, including temperature, humidity, precipitation, etc. over longer periods of time like years or decades. While weather is extremely variable and has numerous factors that effect it, climate is much more predictable and constant. This makes it easy to track variability in climate and see it change over time. This is the case with climate change throughout the twenty-first century, because the temperature can be see increasing at much higher rates than it should be expected to. While climate naturally fluxuates over time, it does so gradually and with a certain pattern–recent trends have not lined up with these patterns at all and make it abundantly clear that it is the fault of human emission levels. The current increase in temperature is faster than any interglacial warm periods over the last million years, and the warming period aligns with the evolution of human agriculture and manufacturing.

Another aspect of climate change is its widespread effects on weather, making severe weather events more frequent and more severe than ever before. This means that there are record temperatures of both high and low temperatures, along with freak heatwaves and freak snowstorms. There are more frequent and intense tropical storms and hurricanes, along with increased numbers of both floods and droughts. This means that an unprecedented snowstorm in April does not mean that global warming or climate change are not real–if anything, it helps to prove their existence.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing and evaluating the state of the world in terms of climate change, recently released its sixth assessment report. This report is a fully comprehensive evaluation of mass amounts of science and research that is packaged into seventeen chapters and almost 3,000 total pages. It covers current trends and how they are predicted to continue in the future. Emission data is examined across a number of different domains, including agriculture, energy, urban systems, transportation, and more. Of course, there is also a heavy focus on the negative impacts that these trends are already having and the multitude of possible future detriments. A number of the later chapters of the report focus on potential policy changes that can be made in order to mitigate the potential risks, both at the global level and on smaller scales. However, there is a large focus on international collaboration and consistency in order for the changes to be the most effective.

The goal that the proposals aim to reach is limiting the effects of global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Humans have already raised the temperature by about 1.1 degrees, primarily because of fossil fuel usage. Although there was a significant decrease in emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic resulting from much lower rates of transportation and manufacturing, levels have been spiking recently in the post-pandemic world. The United Nations is now referring to the current climate situation as “an emergency.” Scientists are adamant about the fact that every fraction of a degree is extremely significant at this point, and the more we can do to get to net-zero emissions, the better.

A major focus of the policy suggestions in the report is the transition to clean and sustainable energy. Keeping the temperature below the 1.5 C degree level would require fossil fuel emissions to peak in 2025 and decrease by 43% by the end of the decade. This would require a significant increase in the amount of our energy coming from renewable sources like wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal. There is also the possibility of storing carbon either underground or underwater with the use of facilities that have the technology to capture and convert the excess Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere into something that can be more easily stored. There are plans for one of these facilities to be built in Scotland by 2026, and research is actively being done into placing them in other parts of the world. In my research lab, I’m currently helping a team that is looking at the possibility of placing one of these facilities in the Chesapeake Bay that would store the Carbon Dioxide in the water.

While the IPCC’s report should serve as a wake-up call, many of the largest difficulties with solving the climate crisis center more around overcoming political opposition as opposed to the inability to solve it from a scientific standpoint. There is also the issue of people considering it to be an issue in the distant future that they do not have to attend to now, but rising sea levels and more frequent and more severe weather events are beginning to make people take the issue more seriously and increase their sense of urgency. The report does overall present an optimistic viewpoint, with the rate of growth of emissions continuing to flatten out, and presents a plan for the future that is beginning to appear more and more achievable with increasing technology.

One of the most impactful, and most clearly visible, effects of climate change is the increasing rate and severity of extreme weather events. Recently, there has been a new push for expansive early warning systems that will allow for detection of major events across the entire world. Currently, there is a third of the global population that is not covered by the warning systems, and the overwhelming majority of the whole continent of Africa does not have any coverage. The United Nations has recently announced that they plan to get these widespread detection systems operating within the next five years. Over the past fifty years, there has been one extreme weather event somewhere on the globe every single day. While these events are beginning to increase both in frequency and severity, this could not be detected based solely on the number of deaths due to severe weather, since that is going down because of the advanced warning that weather warning systems are able to provide.

The problem is that while this coverage and early warning has been proven to be effective where it is readily available, it is not accessible in all areas of the world. The warning system in the United States is very effective, as was shown when Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana in 2021. It killed less than 1oo people despite being the fifth strongest storm on record to hit the United States. The massive storm had sustained winds up to 150 mph and was just shy of reaching Category 5 level severity. This shows the progress that has been made with the early warning systems and how helpful they can truly be in order to predict weather events and take appropriate precautions and evacuations.

However, Cyclone Idai in 2019 was a massive disaster that killed almost one million people in Africa, mostly in the regions of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. It is considered to be one of the worst severe weather events to ever hit the Southern Hemisphere and its effect on the people in the region was catastrophic. At least 1.7 million people were in the direct path of the cyclone in Mozambique and just below one million in Malawi. Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Ida are two storms that are extremely comparable, with similar sizes and similar wind strengths. Both of them wrecked havoc when they struck land, destroying buildings and homes and resulting in severe flooding. The one major blaring difference between the two is the death toll, and this can be directly attributed to the advanced warning technology that exists in Lousiana but not in Mozambique. While in the US people were given advanced notice of the storm and were able to evacuate and get to safety, the majority of Africa is not currently covered by these sensing technologies, which accounts for the massive discrepancy in death toll between the two.

The United Nations’ push for the early warning weather systems is something that will, unfortunately, become more and more necessary in years to come as extreme weather events become more severe and more frequent. As the temperature of the ocean increases and therefore warms the air just above the surface, more air will rise and lead to convection over the water that is in the prime condition to create and fuel dangerous storms like hurricanes, cyclones, tropical storms, blizzards, etc. However, if the widespread systems follow the trends that have been shown thus far in their areas of coverage, the number of total deaths due to severe weather might be able to decrease even further than it already has. As shown by the effects of Hurrican Ida versus Cyclone Idai, this advanced warning technology has the ability to save millions of lives. Although the exact impact of climate change on severe weather is unknown and cannot easily be predicted, it is a good sign that scientists are becoming more and more accurate in their prediction and detection of the storms and that preventative measures are being taken in order to save lives.

It is common knowledge that the climate crisis is going to continue to worsen unless something is done to correct it. However, there is no concrete plan in order to do this, from the action itself to the implementation of it. The politicization of climate change also makes coming up with a solution exponentially more difficult, because bills to help ease climate change often result in votes that have clear splits based on political party. Recently, President Joe Biden has proposed the $2 trillion “Build Back Better” Act. This funding and these efforts would push the United States in the direction that they announced they would be moving in at the 2021 United Nations Climate Summit in Glasglow, UK. The proposed plan would put the US at 50% below the levels in 2005. The legislation would allocate $550 billion to energy and climate programs, with the research and development budget more than doubling if it passed. The climate change portion of the bill constitutes the majority of it, and if passed, it would become the largest climate change law in the history of the United States.

 

These proposed efforts are projected to reduce annual emissions in the US by about 700 million to 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030. This reduction, well below 2005 levels, would help to keep the Earth from surpassing the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase that is predicted to cause catastrophic results. The bill would also increase the funding and the efforts toward capturing greenhouse gasses emitted by factories and power plants. It would fund clean energy, like wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear power. There would also be tax breaks for those taking advantage of renewable energy resources like electric cars.

 

Included in the plan is also an expansion of health coverage, investment in affordable housing, and increased taxing on the wealthy and on corporations. However, while the bill was able to pass through the House in November, Democrats currently lack a majority in order to get the bill approved in the Senate. A few Democrats are also in opposition of the bill because of their links to industries like coal that would be cut down by the bill’s renewable energy initiatives. Without the bill, major emission cuts would be placed on the shoulders of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but their efforts do not have anywhere near the amount of authority that a bill like this does. However, there is some hope for emission reduction, with new policies recently put in place that aim to make the industrial sector more sustainable.

Everyone knows that the COVID-19 pandemic had effects on nearly every aspect of life in the United States and all over the world, as well. However, something that few people expected when the pandemic began was the effects that it would have on pollution and the greenhouse effect. With stay-at-home orders, quarantining (both voluntary and involuntary), and businesses and schools closing, the amount of transportation and vehicle usage was dramatically reduced. This meant that the pandemic had a massive effect on the environment because of the lack of vehicle emissions–a large contributor to both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

 

The graph above shows the dramatic drops globally in carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, especially during the peak of the pandemic in March through June. It is pretty common knowledge that vehicles are large contributors to air pollution and to carbon dioxide emissions, but looking at actual data of what emission rates look like when vehicle usage is dramatically reduced is still somewhat shocking. The drop in carbon dioxide emissions during the pandemic even looks dramatic when compared to other significant events in history that caused downward spikes, like the Great Depression and World War II.

The obvious question after hearing this might be about whether or not the cut in emissions during the pandemic was significant enough to have a lasting effect on overall emissions. The problem is that scientists do not yet know, and research into this exact idea is ongoing. The lab that I have an internship with recently got a large grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to research this subject. The project is being led by Penn State but is also in collaboration with multiple research groups across North America, including teams from the University of Colorado, the University of California San Diego, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University. It is focusing on the rapid changes in emissions and the consequent effects on local and regional air quality. The study is being done primarily with the use of observation towers located in major cities, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston, Toronto, and Indianapolis. These are all areas where COVID-19 mitigation efforts had massive effects on carbon dioxide and methane emission levels because of the massive drop in commuters compared to usual. In addition to looking at how large of an impact the drop in emissions had on the cities’ pollution levels, the project also aims to test how well the towers were able to detect the drop since they are using a lot of new equipment and monitoring networks. And unfortunately, while the potential for lasting effects of the drops in 2020 is still being investigated, emission rates consequently appeared to skyrocket in 2021 in comparison.

I recently got an internship in a research lab, which is really exciting, especially as a first-year student. The lab centers around land-atmosphere interactions and has a focus on carbon emissions and fluxes. Whenever I tell someone that, it almost immediately sparks a climate change conversation. Don’t get me wrong, as a meteorology major, climate change is an extremely prevalent issue to me. It is something that people assume that I am some kind of expert on when they hear my major. However, I’ve never really been able to understand why there is such a debate about climate change and why it is so polarized based on people’s political views. I wondered why my scientific research had an inherent political association that went along with it, while my friends that are doing other types of research did not find themselves in the same situation.

One of the interesting things about the issue is that the politics that hover over climate change really only exist in the United States. 99% of world leaders and 99.5% of scientists agree that something needs to be done to prevent human-caused climate change. Though it is based upon actual scientific data, the issue of climate change has become just another aspect of the polarizing two-party system in the US. Disagreeing about climate change has just become another dividing factor for the two parties, as opposed to something that people consider based on real data. Additionally, the frequently-used argument that there is disagreement within the scientific community as to the existence of climate change is also a misconception. The more research that is done, the more obvious and irrefutable the results become.

Climate change is a problem that is affecting everyone, whether or not they want to admit it. Even some governments in predominantly Republican states have begun running initiatives generally regarded to prevent climate change. However, they instead labeled them as initiatives meant to help things like economic development, resource management, or public health. The governments recognize that these are common values that next to no one would oppose, unlike the underlying environmental protection efforts that would be immediately shot down as soon as the communities heard the phrase ‘climate change.’ The citizens therefore appear to be in support of these initiatives, but they are unaware of their true intentions.

 

A recent study found definitively that news coverage of climate change is completely dominated by partisan division and the two sides tell very different stories about it. While prior to 2000, the majority of climate change articles from major news sources cited and mentioned scientists, starting in the early 2000s, more politicians than scientists were explicitly mentioned. This simply does not make sense when climate change is a scientific issue at its core, not a political one. Instead of serving as some kind of political litmus test, climate change should be regarded as a valid scientific issue–and one that will continue to negatively affect us more and more if we do not make an active effort to prevent it.