Climate change — regardless of personal stances — has become a part of everyone’s life. Many are clamoring to find out what might happen in the near future. Professor Rabin Bhattarai and graduate assistant Manas Khan, however, do not want to look at what climate change might do but what it has already done.
“How do things look 50 years down the road? Nobody knows,” Bhattarai said. “Very uncertain. We have the models; they do the best of their job, but still, they’re model estimates and projections. How about we just look at past analysis? We know what’s happened in the past, and that’s something that nobody can refute.”
Bhattarai and Khan used gridMET, a dataset containing weather readings dating back to 1979, for their analyses. They used the dataset to track maximum and minimum temperatures and relative humidity.
Using this data set, Bhattarai and Khan focused on an area quite familiar to any reader of The Daily Illini: the upper Midwest.
“The upper Midwest is one of the major producers of corn and soybean,” Khan said. “That significantly contributes to the GDP of the U.S. If you look at the trend of how extremes are changing in that part of the U.S., they are definitely negatively impacting our agriculture. Not only agriculture but also negatively impacting people who live in cities.”
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As temperatures increase across many upper Midwestern states, cities’ temperatures rise even more. Bhattarai likened these rising temperatures to bubbles trapping heat.
“Urban areas are able to trap more heat,” Bhattarai said. “They are generally warmer than surrounding land.”
Bhattarai and Khan pointed out that these rising temperatures are not just increases in extreme temperatures but temperatures overall. Dramatic increases in nighttime temperatures play a large factor.
“Our days are getting warmer by a small fraction, but our nights are getting warmer by an even bigger fraction,” Bhattarai said. “In the nighttime, your atmosphere can absorb even more heat; it doesn’t cool down as it used to.”
The effects of these consistently high temperatures can be damaging for some populations, as Bhattarai and Khan point out in their article.
According to their study, “Nighttime heat stress poses unique challenges, as it can disrupt sleep patterns and exacerbate health risks for vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions.”
Global warming often describes the overall rise in temperatures worldwide. According to Bhattarai, how this general rise affects smaller areas, like the upper Midwest, can vary dramatically.
“It’s not only that it’s getting hot; that’s fundamental,” Bhattarai said. “But when the atmosphere starts to get hotter than it used to be, that affects (the) overall cycle.”
The disruptions in these atmospheric cycles cause areas to experience more extreme weather conditions, affecting communities in many ways.
“The atmospheric warming affects the hydrologic cycle: your rainfall pattern,” Bhattarai said. “Other things as well: It increases the occurrence of droughts. For example, we have seen more frequent droughts happening in the last 20 years.”
For Bhattarai and Khan, climate change is no longer a reversible problem. The goal must be to mitigate damage in people’s daily lives.
“More people means more infrastructure, more cars, more AC, more food production,” Bhattarai said. “When you look at carbon emission, I would say that unless we do drastic measures, the most optimistic scenario is maybe stay at current level. Going down is kind of impossible.”
The prospects of an improving climate are certainly difficult, and immediate results are out of the picture but hope remains for long-term solutions.
“We can be hopeful,” Bhattarai said. “People are becoming more conscious than they were. They are moving to more energy efficient systems and more greenhouse gas reducing scenarios, so there’s hope maybe 50 to 60 years down the road.”
More information regarding climate change can be found in Bhattarai and Khan’s full study.
