Weather events are getting more severe – wildfires in the western U.S. and hurricanes in the east. Scientists say that’s due to climate change sped up by the use of fossil fuels, which trap heat in the atmosphere.
William Gutowski, professor emeritus of meteorology at Iowa State University, said the burning of coal and petroleum releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide can stick around for hundreds of years.
“And carbon dioxide acts a little, rough sense, like a blanket. Because the Earth arrives at its temperature by getting heat energy from the sun and then the Earth radiates energy back to space, and so it loses heat," Gutowski said. "So there’s a balance between what’s coming in and what’s going out. And when we increase the greenhouse gases, we block some of that ability of the Earth to send energy back to space.”
Human actions have led to the warming planet. The burning of fossil fuels over decades along with changes in land use have led to the rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet.
Dr. Toby Dogwiler, a professor in the Department of Geology, Geography and Planning at Missouri State University, said climate varies, but the changes we are seeing are much more than that.
"What's different about what's going on in the last 100 years and, really, a lot in the last 30 years, is the rate," he said. "There's no time in the geologic record where we ever see in all those hundreds of millions of years, there's no time where we see rates of change like we're seeing now. It's never changed this fast. The only reason that it's changing this fast is because of C02 being released by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, things like that. That's the difference. It’s really that simple.”
According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, the annual greenhouse gas index rose 51% from 1991 to 2023. It said Earth’s temperature has risen .14 degrees per decade since 1880. The rate of warming has almost doubled since 1991, and, according to NASA, the global temperature has risen 1.5 degrees since pre-industrial times. And temperatures in Missouri have risen almost 1 degree since the beginning of the 20th century.
Gutowski said, fortunately, ¾ of the Earth is covered by oceans because oceans respond more slowly to the increased heat energy coming in. But oceans are still warming – just more slowly than land, and that causes stronger storms.
“Here in the Midwest, to make it a little bit more local, we get a lot of our moisture, the primary source of our moisture, from the Gulf of Mexico, and, as the Gulf of Mexico waters heat up, that means there's more of that water vapor getting into the atmosphere," he said. "It gets transported into the Midwest and then it condenses and falls out. And the more water that's in the atmosphere, the stronger your thunderstorms can potentially become. You know, it depends on some other conditions, but there's a greater potential for stronger storms when you have more moisture in the atmosphere.”
The effects of climate change are being felt in the Ozarks. One thing the area is seeing more of is heavier rain events, especially in the spring, and drought conditions in the summer.
NOAA said, in the future, winter and spring precipitation is expected to increase while summer precipitation may decrease.
Dogwiler pointed to a thesis done by a former student that looked at high resolution rainfall data at around 18 different stations around the Midwest. Those locations provided hourly rainfall data going back to the 1930s.
"So he was able then to look at those hourly trends and isolate and look at specific storms and how long storms were, how heavy the rainfall was — which we call intensity — the duration, frequency, all those different statistics," said Dogwiler. "And what we see is that, over that period from the 1940s through the mid 20 teens when he ended his analysis, we see a lot of changes. And those changes really accelerated after 1990. We have fewer storms, and the duration of storms is shorter than it used to be, but when it does rain, it rains harder, and we get more rain out of the storm...and we get higher average annual precipitation than we used to. So we're getting more rain, but we're getting it in fewer, more intense events, and that also means that there's a longer period between storms on average. So we’re more exposed to drought, ironically.”
Dogwiler hears people say ‘we’re having a 100-year flood every other year now, but he said the baseline the 100-year flood is based on and the climate it's based on is no longer valid.
"We're in a new climate where there's more precipitation and shorter periods of time, which means now, what was a 100-year flood 30 years ago, is a much more frequent event now, and the 100-year flood today is an even bigger event," he said. "And so that has a lot of impact on our everyday lives, too. Here in the Midwest, whether you're a homeowner in a flood zone or a farmer growing in bottomlands or just a resource manager who's got to figure out, how do you manage zoning and so forth in those areas?"
More severe storms and flooding mean damage to property and infrastructure, which leads to higher insurance costs.
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, from 1980-2024, there were 120 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each that affected Missouri.
And temperatures are getting hotter, which can impact human health, especially those who work outside, the unsheltered, those with certain health conditions and the elderly.
There are still some who don’t believe that human-caused climate change is happening, despite the scientific evidence that shows otherwise. But Jared Opsal, executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which works to educate lawmakers about environmental issues, said more people are starting to notice the changes that scientists have been warning about for years "that, 'oh, it's not like it used to be. Things are different. And, you know, that's scary, and how are we going to adapt?' And that's something that we've been engaging with as an agency is that climate adaptation. So we've been working on the mitigation and prevention side of climate change, and we're going to continue on that front. But we're now getting into that adaptation of what is our day-to-day life going to be like with this new environment that we have? You know, some changes are baked in for many decades. Even if we make all the changes we'd like to, to remove greenhouse gases, some of those changes are going to be with us. So it's, what is that day-to-day life going to be?"
Dogwiler said people need to start talking about climate change even though it's become heavily politicized and it's a heavy subject.
"It's really easy psychologically to just try to ignore it, to put our heads in the sand," he said.
But there are solutions "that can work, that can be market driven, that could be seen as a strong compromise by most people. We just have to get back to a point where we can talk about and consider those," he said.
