Wisconsin will Experience Heat Waves and Other Extreme Weather, State Climatologist Predicts

In Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, Steve Vavrus, 57, works two professional roles as the director of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office and co-director of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) [pronounced like Wiki]. Both positions are part of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and WICCI is also in statewide collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The Wisconsin State Climatology Office collects data and climate information for community climate science education and research. While WICCI works with the Wisconsin DNR to evaluate climate change, generate and share information, and foster solutions. Media Milwaukee journalist, Nicholaus Wiberg, sits down with Vavrus to discuss his work with as Wisconsin State Climatologist, our current climate and the societal impact on the future of Earth’s changing climate.

Wiberg: The director position, that is a newer position for you, isn’t it?

Vavrus: January of last year [2023], I assumed this role. The [Wisconsin] State Climatology Office was the beneficiary of some federal funding which provided, finally, some financial support for it. With that came a change in director and the hiring process. We are able to do a lot more than we ever could before.

Wiberg: Give me a high-level rundown of where your research is focused and what you do here at the University of Wisconsin.

Vavrus: I’ve been at the university for many years as a researcher and done a lot of different types of research on meteorology and climate, usually involving climate change. Typically involving computer climate models to estimate what the climates were in the past and what the climates are likely to be in the future. So, a lot of my career has been tied up in predictions and modeling. Over time, a lot of the research became more geographically involving the Midwest, the Great Lakes and Wisconsin. So, gradually shifting to a more local focus. Climate change is the overarching theme to my research. The [Wisconsin] State Climatology Office deals mainly with historic climate change and present-day weather and climate variations. WICCI, the other organization that I am in, focuses more on future climate change and what we can do as a society to help prepare for that.

Wiberg: What contributes to the overall changing climate? Name a few facets that cause the issues that we are seeing and that we are predicting?

Vavrus: Broadly speaking there’s two types of climate change. There is natural climate change, like the changes we’ve seen in geologic time periods, the warm climates of the dinosaurs, the cold icy climates we had 20,000 years ago when half of Wisconsin was under ice. Those all fall into the natural climate change category. Then recently, just in the hundreds to thousands of years, humans have assumed the steering wheel of global climate change. Unlike the distant past, when natural factors like variations of the Earth’s orbit, or volcanism affected climate primarily, now humans have come into the mix and had a big enough influence producing heat trapping pollution, that now we’re the ones who are really dictating the direction of climate change. We are seeing this is the warming of the planet, we’re seeing this in the form of more extreme weather events, we’re seeing this in the form of more expensive weather disasters in recent years. So, all those things are part of human induced climate change.

Wiberg: In the context of human induced climate change, what have we seen change over the years?

Vavrus: The most obvious is the warming global temperatures. We’ve been measuring those with pretty good accuracy year by year since about 1850. We defiantly see, especially in the last 40-45 years, a real ramp up to the point where we’re setting temperature records for the globe every year or were close to it every year. In the last 10 years or so, every one of those has been in the top 10, if not the top five, warmest years on record. We are seeing it on the ground too. We are seeing it in terms of reduced ice cover. For instance, in the Arctic the amount of ice cover on the ocean has shrunk way back, seeing it in the form of less snow in high latitudes as well, and seeing it in the form of sea level rise. That’s a big one, although were protected here in Wisconsin, many coastlines around the world are seeing serious sea level rises due to the warming climate that is causing big problems and flooding those areas. There is a lot of different ways the climate is affecting us, more heatwaves for example, more heavy rainfall events, flooding events around the world. So, all these are all ways the warming climate is affecting our weather and affecting us as a society.

Wiberg: What is the current data telling us about the future of our global climate?

Vavrus: In terms of projections for the future, we rely a lot on computer climate models. Those are tested and calibrated based on past climate variations, which we know. Then we get a sense of reliability of the models based on how well they can predict the past and present climate. Then, with that kind of trust, we have more faith in their ability to project for the future.

With climate models, we estimate changes in the composition of the atmosphere. For instance, more heat trapping gases in the future. Then we ask the climate model, given those estimates of more heat trapping gasses in the atmosphere, what is the likely climate effect going to be? That is kind of how we have our crystal ball, as best we can about future climate change.

Of course, there is a lot of uncertainties with that as well. We don’t know how much carbon will be released in the future. It’s up to us as a society. So, we can say, if we release carbon in the future the way we think we will, this is the likely climatic impact. But it all depends on us. There’re some other factors too, volcanism, disasters or whatever might happen. But our best estimates are based on projections of carbon emissions.

Wiberg: So, we get or data from history, and computer models?

Vavrus: History is useful because that is the testbed for the computer models. The computer models are sets of equations that describe the behavior of the atmosphere. The ocean, ice covers and vegetation, they are very complicated. That is an approximation of the whole climate system. Because it is so complicated, you really need to test them. The obvious way to test them is to see how well they can replicate the past, which we have good data for. Certain models do better than others, and we put more faith in those. Then using the present day as a starting point, we run the models into the future, and say over the next 100 years, what is the best estimate of where we’ll be? Not just in terms of global average temperature, but heatwave days, flooding events, droughts, ice cover and so on.

Wiberg: How are scientists presenting data about climate change for mass media?

Vavrus: Well, in different ways. Sometimes it is interviews like this. Other times, it is more proactive approaches. It could be podcasts, blogs, op-ed pieces, scientific papers, reports, it’s a whole slew of things. Sometimes it is very academic oriented, like a journal article on some discovery about climate change, or a conference paper that’s presented to peers. Other times, it could be interviews that scientists like me have had with newspapers, radio or T.V., or public presentations of campus. There’s lots of ways for the word to get out there.

People seem interested in this topic [climate change] based on my experience. It’s not just meteorologists that care about this, the general public seems very interested and concerned. So, this is a great opportunity to have this conversation with people. First, to try and explain in ways that scientists understand climate change, and then to find out from the public, what’s the most interest to them? What are they most concerned about regarding climate change, and how can we better communicate about it?

Wiberg: What is your number one, so to speak, thermometer or measure of climate change?

Vavrus: Literally speaking, they are thermometers around the world, over the oceans, over the land [even ice sheets]. So, when we come up with our best estimate, those are the thermometers we are using. So, then we can come up with a pretty good estimate of a global average temperature. But that’s just a number, right? It doesn’t tell us what is happening on the ground. There are other ways, that’s probably more relevant, for people on the ground. For instance, here is Wisconsin, we have a lot of lakes. Records of lake ice cover. Lake Mendota [Madison] here, just out the window, we have over a 170 yearlong record of ice cove on Lake Mendota. That provides an indirect thermometer to tell us, based on the duration of ice cover in the years past compared to now, we can see that the climate is warmer now than it used to be.

That’s the sort of thing that’s probably more relevant day to day because that dictates whether you can go ice fishing in the winter. It wasn’t a good winter for ice fishing this year. Or, in the Great Lakes, by Milwaukee, the fact that there wasn’t much ice coverage meant that the conditions for big waves was more favorable. So, if there’s a storm with an open lake, you can get big waves, erosion, and property damage. Whereas in a typical winter, when there’s enough ice cover surrounding the coastline, that helps to suppress waves. Even if there is a big storm, you don’t have the impacts as bad. So, there is the numbers about climate change, how much warmer we are today than we were 50 to 100 years ago. But, I think what people care about are the societal impacts near them.

Wiberg: For example, like coral reef bleaching and ocean water temperatures?

Vavrus: Yep, and sea level rise if you live near a coast. A lot of coastal communities are experiencing what they call sunny-day flooding. Which means that, not because of a storm, simply because the ocean level is rising so much that even on a clear day they can have inundation of ocean water in parts of their community. Because the community wasn’t built for the ocean level of today.

Wiberg: What are you watching closely, as far as on the ground impacts?

Vavrus: Around Wisconsin, one of the things that’s on people’s minds is all the heavy rainfalls we’ve had lately. Granted, we had a drought last summer, but we also had some months with record amounts of precipitation. In the 20-teens, it was our wettest decade on record in Wisconsin, and was also our second warmest. We had a combination of really wet and really warm. So, a big concern is flooding, because that is expensive when you have flood damage, it can even be deadly.

Then heatwaves, we’ve largely been spared so far of increases in heatwaves in Wisconsin. But I think our luck is going to run out, because the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, has been experiencing more heatwaves. There is no reason to think that we are going to be immune to it. That’s another big concern because that has big public health issues surrounding it. Heat deaths and sending people to the emergency room and so forth. Another big concern, for instance, is drought. Which we had last year. That can be really harmful for agriculture and other growers. It also has some human health ramifications.

So, I would say it’s the extremes that probably have a disproportionate impact. Those are the things that really catch our eye to the extent that climate change is altering those [extremes] and making it more frequent and intense. That’s something that the climatologists really look for.

Wiberg: Are humans causing climate change, or exacerbating it?

Vavrus: We are. We know this from lots of different lines of evidence. We can run computer climate models with, and without, the human induced increase in heat trapping gasses, and we just don’t get the observed warming that’s taken place to date. We can look at satellite images and look at the top of the atmosphere, how much energy is coming in from the sun and how much, what we call terrestrial or longwave energy is going out from the Earth’s atmosphere. We can see there’s an imbalance, there’s more heat coming in than going out. That’s because of these heat trapping gasses in the atmosphere acting like a blanket and thwarting the heat loss that normally would go off to space and balance the energy at the top of the atmosphere. So, there’s no question that the Earth is warming and that humans are responsible for the warming trend.

But it’s difficult, if not impossible to show exactly how much of the recent warming trend is caused by human activities from carbon emissions versus how much would have occurred naturally. So, every year that passes that we stay warm, or record warm, is another piece of evidence that humans are really in the driver’s seat. As scientists, we’d like to be able to say 90% of the warming is due to humans, or you know 87%, some sort of quantification, but I don’t think we’ll ever be there exactly. The vast body of evidence is that humans are responsible for the majority of the warming that we’ve seen in recent years and decades.

Wiberg: So, how are we exacerbating global warming? I know you talked about our albedo [Earth’s natural ability to reflect light and heat, or solar radiation, back into space]. But how are we [humans] exacerbating global warming, or the global average temperature increases?

Vavrus: Mostly because of heat trapping pollution, carbon dioxide and methane primarily, chlorofluorocarbons, and some other trace gasses. Carbon dioxide is the biggest contributor, and that of course comes from all sorts of different sources. That’s the effect globally.

Locally we can have an impact in different ways. Like in cities, we build cities with asphalt and concrete, that creates heat trapping during hot days. So, places like Milwaukee and other cities develop urban heat islands and it gets hotter in the city than it does in the adjacent areas. It especially causes the cities to stay warmer at night. Whereas the rural areas might get hot during the day, the cool off at night. In the city all the heat from the day gets trapped by the asphalt and concrete, all these buildings and houses. It makes it difficult to cool off at night. That creates bad sleeping weather, people have difficulty sleeping during the heatwaves.

There [are] other ways too. Deforestation is another way that humans are affecting the climate. It’s a little complicated to determine exactly what the climate effect is. If you deforest the tropics, you’re taking a cooling mechanism, because vegetation transpires. If you replace it [tropical forest] with just bare ground or shrubland, you don’t get that evaporative cooling effect. That can make it even hotter than it would have been.

So, changing the composition atmosphere, changing the built environment, and then changing the vegetation cover are all ways that humans can affect the climate locally and globally.

Wiberg: What does a 1.5 decrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels really mean?

Vavrus: That’s been a commonly used threshold at which the worst effects of climate change start to become evident. It’s a little misleading because it’s not like it’s binary, that until we get too 1.5 degrees [Celsius] warming thigs are okay, and beyond that things are terrible. It’s much more gradual than that. But research has found that roughly around that level you start get sort of an inflection point on some of the societal impacts. Flooding events may get a lot worse beyond 1½ degrees warming, or heatwaves may get a lot more intense, hurricanes may develop more strongly beyond that point. It’s a little bit of a misleading concept because this term has been used a lot, like the 1.5-degree limit. It’s really more of an amplification of the impacts once we get beyond1.5 degrees.

Wiberg: Do you think we are on track to net zero by 2025?

Vavrus: I would like to believe it, but I’m not seeing it, unfortunately. There has been a lot of pledges saying, a city makes a pledge to go net zero, a state or a country, maybe even the world depending on the climate treaty. But talk is cheap, and until there is evidence that we’re really changing our ways enough to get down to net zero, I am skeptical. But we can do it! It’s up to us, we are in the driver’s seat for better or for worse when it comes to the climate crisis.

What we need to think about is like a speeding locomotive. The first thing to do is to slow it down, and then bring it to a stop, and then back it up. The net zero is looking ahead, not just to the slowdown part, but the stopping part. I think we are quite aways off from that. There’s been some great technological improvements, a lot of energy efficiency measures that are all great. So, in a lot of ways, we’re heading in the right direction. But we need to go a lot faster, harder, if we’re really going to reach net zero by 2050.

Wiberg: Do you see misinformation about climate change in the media?

Vavrus: Yes, but it depends. Almost completely, my experience has been in interacting with the media is that reporters want to get it right. They genuinely are trying to understand it, and they are doing their best to report it. I have had great experiences interacting with the media, they fact check, they want to make sure they understood correctly.

However, in the media environment we live in, it’s very polarized. You can go online and spout whatever you want, right? I think a lot of the misinformation can be spread that way. There are certain media sources who are quite biased, there are individuals who have a certain position they want to promote. So, there is misinformation that abounds. Just like any other topic.

So, this is a role for climatologists who are trained, and to try and be honest broker and explain. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and know what is reliable, and what isn’t, and why it is reliable and why certain information isn’t. That seems like the best role we can do, and one of the goals of reporters is to try and be honest brokers as well.

Wiberg: How is change affecting the polar regions? What brings this up is in 2019, here is Wisconsin we experienced a polar vortex. I read that that was caused by the polar cap being knocked of kilt by atmospheric waves. Can you tell me what that means?

Vavrus: It’s a bit complex. One thing we do know is that the arctic is warming way faster than the rest of the world, about two to four times faster. If you look at how much warming is taking place in the arctic and how much is expected in the future, the arctic warming is amplified compared to the rest of the world. That’s fully expected in large part because of the darkening of the surface.

Some of the newer research, in the past decade or so, suggests that the amplified warming in the arctic could also affect our atmospheric circulation patterns, our jet streams that steer our weather in middle latitudes like Wisconsin. So, one of those hypotheses out there is that because the jet stream winds from west to east, that they are sort of the highway for our weather systems to ride on. The strength of that, and to some degree, the waviness of it, is depended on the temperature difference between high latitudes and low latitudes. The bigger the temperature difference between cold poles and warm tropics, generally the stronger and the straighter the jet stream is from west to east. So, if you warm the arctic more than the lower latitudes, you’re reducing that temperature difference, which should weaken the westerly jet stream and tend to make it wavier. We know that slower wavier jet streams tent to coincide with certain types of weather extremes. Like droughts, heat waves and flooding events. The concern is that weaker, more wavier jet stream, can help to allow cold arctic air to sink more readily into middle latitudes.

That’s the basis for that hypothesis, that ironically, in a warming climate, we may actually see conditions more favorable for cold waves, like we did in 2019, we also did in 2014. Overall, those polar air masses are getting warmer. Even if they come down more readily, they won’t be as cold as they used to be.

Wiberg: What are some environmental issues from fracking? Also, how is natural gas consumption impacting the climate?

Vavrus: Natural gas consumption is a mixed bag. On one hand, it does produce less carbon that coal production. So, it’s a better fossil fuel for the climate crisis that burning dirty coal. But it’s still a fossil fuel. It’s not nearly as good as renewable energy. More and more, we are learning about how much seepage there is of carbon during the production of natural gas, and oil production and probably coal production too.

Natural gas, especially because it’s been touted as a good bridge fuel between coal and renewables, it too has its problems. Both with fracking, which could negatively impact the water supplies, but also how much methane is released, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not on purpose, during the production process. Sometimes it’s cheaper for companies to just burn it and flare it. Then boom, you have heat trapping methane in the atmosphere. Other times it’s unintentional. There [are] leakages in the supply lines, those can be fixed. Some companies are more conscientious about correcting these than others. But it does seem like there is a significant leakage effect from natural gas production that enhances the carbon emissions from it.

The nice this is, that with satellite imagery, we can detect these things [leaks] a lot better than we could. You can just zoom in and say, right there, that oil field or natural gas field, that’s where we are getting this big release of methane. Then try to get the company to fix it. So, it’s harder to hide than it used to be, which is good news. But those little leaks [residential and commercial distribution], what do you do, it’s not worth fixing every single one. The big ones are the ones to go after.

Wiberg: Give me a high-level rundown of your interests, and weather and climate variability in Wisconsin.

Vavrus: Long standing interests. I’ve been here since 1990, when as a graduate student, I started here at UW-Madison. So, I’ve been personally interested in weather and climate in Wisconsin. My whole life I’ve been fascinated with weather, growing up in the Midwest in Indiana. This is a lifelong passion. It was initially more weather oriented than climate. Then with climate change concerns, it’s broadened into that too. This position, Wisconsin State Climatologist, is a really great one for me to be in. I am very thankful to be in that position. In part because I can do what I am interested in, and hopefully help Wisconsinites understand weather and climate better, to use this information more effectively.

Wiberg: What does reduced ice cover mean for the Great Lakes? I read some media reports that we only had about 5.6% Great Lakes ice coverage between January and March. What does that mean? And what are the future impacts?

Vavrus: This was an exceptionally low year, probably a record low year for ice cover on the Great Lakes. It’s sort of shocking to see in the middle of winter how little ice cover there was on all the great lakes.

There is lots of different impacts. One of them is lake effect snow. If you don’t have ice cover, you have better weather conditions for lake effect snow. If you have a cold polar air mass coming over the Great Lakes, which we had very few of this winter, but we had a few and we had some good lake effect snowstorms as a result. Coastline erosion, if you don’t have the ice cover to suppress the waves on the lake you can get bigger waves and that can cause coastline erosion and property damage. There’re also ecological impacts, a lot of aquatic species depend on that ice cover. In part because it affects the temperature stratification, or the temperature change in the water column in a lake. Having an unusually warm winter like this affects the ice cover and the temperature distribution within the lake. So, that has ecological impacts. It also can impact how quickly we warm up in the spring. When we get that shallow layer of lake water in the summer that can quickly warm up, we may set that up earlier this year. Just because the winter warming being so pronounced.

Wiberg: How have weather patterns in Wisconsin changed or become more extreme? For example, in February [2024] we saw a tornado in Evansville. Would that be considered a weather extreme?

Vavrus: Yeah, that would definitely be considered a weather extreme. That was almost surreal to think that, in early February, we had these two tornadoes. One of which was quite strong in southern Wisconsin. It was just warm enough for it to provide enough fuel for tornadoes to happen. The fact that it was the first recorded tornadoes in February in Wisconsin’s history, tells you that we don’t normally get warm enough to fuel thunderstorms that lead to tornadoes. So, that was very, very strange. But the whole winter was strange. It was the warmest winter on record in Wisconsin by a lot. We also had our warmest temperature ever during a winter day, 77 degrees [Fahrenheit] in Kenosha [Wisconsin] in late February. That broke the previous record by a full five degrees. We had a snow drought up in northern Wisconsin and that impacted the tourism industry, bad year for lake ice all around the board, skiing, snowmobiling and whatnot. The Birkebeiner [ski race] had to take extreme measures to be held. All the seasons are warming in Wisconsin, but winter has been warming the most since the 1800s. So, this winter was kind of an exclamation point on a long-term warming trend.

Wiberg: Are news organizations contacting the University of Wisconsin [climate] experts regularly?

Vavrus: Oh, I would say yes. I get all sorts of requests from media organizations across the board, sometimes international ones. People are really interested in weather and climate issues, and the impacts that these climate variations have. It’s been gratifying in recent years to see that there is an interest, there is concern, and reporters are hungry to get the right information. So, that’s helpful.

Even things like the wildfire smoke last summer. That was just a crazy event, and we got all sorts of questions about that. The drought last summer, the flip flop in our precipitation we had last year, then of course the crazy warm winters. So yeah, the media has been very interested in recent weather variations and how it relates to long-term climate change.

Wiberg: Do news organization use climate data to communicate with Wisconsin people?

Vavrus: Either they use it directly, or they go through an intermediary like the State Climatology Office or WICCI, to kind of help interpret our understanding of that data. There is a lot of data out there, and it’s not always easy to find, and it’s not always easy to tell which is the reliable data and which isn’t. So, our office can help with that, and help steer people to the right information. Our State Climatology Office issues monthly weather summaries, climate summaries of the past month that provide a synopsis with credible information in it. It goes both ways. Some reporters find information themselves and want to comment on it, and others want us, the experts, to provide them with some interpretation of it.

Wiberg: How do you see the climate change narrative in the media?

Vavrus: I’ve been really impressed by the reporters I’ve worked with. They are generally very knowledgeable, they do their homework, and they want to get it right, which is all we can ask for. It’s a natural partnership, an alliance, because people like me as climatologists, we want to get the most accurate information and news out there to people, and reporters have a vested interest in getting the most accurate and clearest information out to their viewers, listeners or readers. It’s a very natural alliance, we both want to get it right for the same reasons.

Wiberg: Do you think a state like Wisconsin is relatively safe from the visible effects of climate change?

Vavrus: This gets to the question of climate migration, the idea that Wisconsin and the Great Lakes may become a haven or a magnet for climate refugees, in other parts of the country or the world where the climate gets so bad that people are forced to relocate. So, a lot of the speculation has been that because Wisconsin does not have the wildfire problem that California has, we don’t have the sea level rise problem like Charleston, South Carolina, we don’t have hurricanes like New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, that in that sense we are protected. However, it’s misleading because there’s so many challenges that we face here in Wisconsin with our weather and climate. All the flooding events we have, the record precipitation in the twenty-teens, that crazy wildfire smoke and drought we had last summer. Those are other examples of extremes that we deal with, February tornadoes for the first time on record show a lot of challenges that we face, and big severe thunderstorms too, those can be very, very expensive. So, nobody is immune from climate change and the impacts of climate change, including Wisconsin.

There is a lot of research being done to ask the question, in relative terms, could Wisconsin be better off from future climate change than other parts of the country, or other parts of the world? I think that’s a fair question, and largely it comes down to the fact that we have lots of water. That’s not going away. But we need to look at this in a complete way, and not just a simplistically way to say, well, Wisconsin has a relatively cool climate, we have lots of water, therefore people will flock to Wisconsin when the climate gets hotter. That’s way too simplistic.

Wiberg: So, tell me about wildfires in Wisconsin, or the Midwest and Canada. What is increasing the frequency? And how will this impact our Great Lakes Region.

Vavrus: Well, in Wisconsin we don’t generally have a wildfire problem to speak of, not like in California, or the extreme fires we had in Canada or parts of the Arctic. In part because we have a relatively wet climate, in part because of our fire management practices, and in part because they are so well forecasted, people are on guard when we have fire weather.

Last year, the Canadian wildfires were a combination of a warm winter, really dray conditions, a lot of wild expanses of land, that is hard to manage because it’s just so vast, so many forests, you can’t just do fire suppression everywhere. Then we had this unusual circulation pattern that set up high pressure over Canada. Which kept drawing down this northeasterly air from Canada where the wildfires were burning so badly. SO, it was just a direct path right into Wisconsin and the whole northeastern U.S. It was by far a record wildfire season in Canada. The fires were going, and the air was blowing during much of the summer, and that’s why we got that terrible episode at the end of June, but then off and on all summer long.

Wiberg: What is your take on how global climate change is and will drive global migration?

Vavrus: I am not an expert on it. From what I’ve heard from experts, it is an open question. We don’t know exactly how climate change is going to unfold in every part of the world. The potential migration would depend on who gets the hottest when and any other factors. It might not even be heat, it might be flooding events, or smoke. Internationally, there is issues about crossing borders, political issues, economic issues, cultural issues, that’s a wildcard. There is always so many factors involved.

Wiberg: What potential experiences will climate driven migration have on Americans? Like the squeezing of the Gulf Coast and the Southwest?

Vavrus: I do think it remains to be seen. One example we had in recent times is Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. A lot of people did permanently leave New Orleans after that. Maybe in part because of the hurricane, or other reasons. But if you look at where they relocated, looking at FEMA maps of where they relocated, they generally didn’t relocate very far away. A lot of them went to Mobile and a lot went to Houston, still within hurricane alley. So, if they were concerned about hurricanes, you’d think they would have moved farther inland. I think that speaks to the pull of geography, family connections, familiarity with the climate. By all rights, if you were trying to flee hurricane damage in the future, you would move to Chicago or Seattle. But that’s generally not where people went, they stayed much closer to home. I think that’s a lesson that it may not be as simple as, you know, wildfires keep striking Northern California, so I am going to move to the Midwest and go to the Great Lakes. Some people may do that, but it remains to be seen whether that’s a large-scale climate migration for the future.

Wiberg: Is there any hope? What can we do? How can we make a difference?

Vavrus: Oh yeah, there is lots of reasons for hope. One of the reasons for hope is that we’re doing a lot better about communicating the topic. I think more people and realizing that climate change is here, and it’s serious, and we need to do something about it. But there’s so many economic reasons pushing us in that direction too. The falling costs of renewables has been a game changer in the past decade. The cost of solar and wind power has plummeted and is now cheaper that fossil fuels.

We’re also realizing there’s lots of win-win strategies. For instance, reducing air pollution from factory exhaust and car exhaust. It would help not only the climate crisis if we can get that under control, but there’s so many particles as aerosols in the atmosphere that come from those pollutants, kind of like the wildfires, that if we control the carbon emissions, from say smokestacks, we also go a long way toward breathing cleaner. So, that’s a big plus.

In terms of heatwaves. Heat kills more people than any other weather-related disaster in the U.S. We’ve learned a lot about how to manage heatwaves so that people don’t die as nearly the rate they used to for the same intensity of the heatwave. We’ve gotten a lot better at public cooling centers, getting the word out with forecasts, checking on neighbors. Various things we can do, green roofs, white roofs, things like that. All of which help to collectively reduce the impact and the pain from heatwaves.

Wiberg: Is there anything else on your mind? What do you want people is Wisconsin to know?

Vavrus: I want them to know climate change is here and now. But there are things we can do about it. The sooner we tackle this, the better, because we are running out of time. We’ve kicked this can down the road long enough and it’s something we need to confront square on, right now. Each of us has a different thing we can contribute. In terms of reducing their carbon footprint, for some people it may be driving less, or driving more fuel-efficient cars, another person it might be living closer to work, so they don’t have to drive as much. Other people, it may be reducing their lighting, they can change the lighting fixtures in their homes to be more fuel efficient.

Something we can all do is reduce food waste. That is cited as the number one thing that we can do, in terms of a lever to recuse climate change. Food production is such a big carbon emitter every step of the way in the process. That’s a great, low hanging fruit in a sense, because nobody wants to waste food for lots of reasons. So, we can have a win-win that way, we can save economically, and we can help the climate crisis at the same time.