On a Thursday afternoon at the Natural History Building, students slowly file into the lecture hall and plop down into their seats, wasting time on phones and laptops until class begins. But this particular lecture begins a little differently than others.

Professor Eric Snodgrass starts out the afternoon’s Severe and Hazardous Weather, lecture with a weather report for the next few days, reeled off just like you would expect to hear if you were watching the local news.

“I have a little different perspective on what an undergraduate gen-ed should look like,” Snodgrass said. “A student should sit down for 75 minutes and take away tangible, useful information about how weather impacts them and the rest of the world.”

Part of the popularity of the course comes from people’s fascination with severe weather events. Not only do stories about events like Superstorm Sandy and tornadoes get massive amounts of hype and coverage, but films about hypothetical scenarios where floods and tornados wipe out cities have also become popular. Cue The Weather Channel.

“The class maintains a certain level of popularity based on the subject alone,” Snodgrass said. “It’s about severe weather, which everyone has to be interested in. You have to live in it. You can’t be sheltered from it.” One of Snodgrass’s goals for the course is to take the existing intrigue about severe weather events and explain why it occurs. He hopes to separate fact from the fiction that is portrayed in movies and TV programs.

Some of the fiction included in media portrays certain severe weather events as the end of the world or the worst thing that could ever occur such as the movies “2012” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” Even though some stories, such as the recent March 24 snowstorm in central Illinois, are over-hyped to sell, Snodgrass said sometimes that kind of doomsday message is appropriate. “I will never take anything away from the tragedies like Sandy or Katrina,” Snodgrass said. But when certain horrific events do occur, “it is important that people hear death and destruction because it’s that bad.” Current events suggest that high-cost events that warrant warnings like these may be increasing.

Dr. Don Wuebbles, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University, is a leader of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. In his studies of climate change, he has found that over the last 50 years, occurrence of severe weather events and the intensity of these events has increased. This is happening in part because of increased heat and less cold temperatures over time. “We’re breaking many more temperature records for hot temperatures, we’re seeing more heat waves across the U.S. and we’re seeing more floods in certain areas,” Wuebbles said. “More precipitation is occurring, but it’s also occurring as larger events.”

Climate is defined as a long-term average of weather. Climate change is not just a single spike or a few spikes in temperature, but an increase in the global average of all temperatures over a long time. When the climate warms, the atmosphere is able to hold more water vapor. Because the atmosphere holds more water vapor, it follows that it can release more precipitation, such as snowstorms or large rainfalls.

In the Midwest more precipitation is occurring and there is also an increased likelihood of droughts during the summer. In certain areas of the U.S., such as the Southwest, the chance of drought has increased significantly. The 2011 drought in Texas and Oklahoma was three times more likely to occur due to climate changes. “This is occurring in a state of background climate that has changed, and that is influencing the weather events we’re seeing in ways that even I find shocking,” Wuebbles said.

Whenever climate change is mentioned, it often turns into a political debate, one Wuebbles is even more aware of after being attacked by blogs, such as one written by former meteorologist Anthony Watts. This happened after Weubbles was invited to give a presentation at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But he doesn’t back down from his statements in the face of opposition. “There is no debate in the science community about the importance of climate change,” Wuebbles said. “The debate is what to do about it, not about the science.”

Those who oppose the findings that climate change and an increase in severe weather occurs say that over the entire U.S., no net increase is happening. Wuebbles is quick to point out that averaging over the entire country is unfair because in certain areas more droughts are occurring, and in others more floods are occurring based on geography.

“Too often the media will play one side versus the other, when the one side is basically a few people, but the media act like they are on equal footing,” Wuebbles said. “That’s just not the reality. Our problem is communicating that to the American people.” Snodgrass is just as adamant about the reality of climate change.

“Climate change is real, and humans are a, if not the, major factor,” he said.

Although his opponents, such as Watts, try to disprove the findings through faulty data, Wuebbles hopes people will read the latest report of the U.S. National Climate Assessment and see the data and analysis for themselves. “There’s a lot of junk out there,” he said. “The scientists have no political bearing in this. We want to get out the truth.”

That truth includes how severe weather is affecting our society. According to Wuebbles, the likelihood of severe precipitation events in the top 1 percent of intensity have increased over the past 50 years. Since 1980, severe weather incidents with damages of $1 billion or more have increased, and in the last two years severe weather has caused over $60 billion in damages. This indicates that climate change and the increase in severe weather is making large influences on daily life and economics.

“It’s an extremely important issue,” Wuebbles said. “It’s going to have huge impacts on our society.” Current data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and models that run on supercomputers, such as the Blue Waters project at the University, show that these events will increase, and are even underestimating how these changes are affecting outbreaks of severe weather events.

Wuebbles also believes people will have to adapt and prepare for these types of weather patterns that are projected to occur more often. The use of fossil fuels, which drives temperature increases, will not be reduced or eliminated enough to reverse the process, alternative fuel sources such as solar power are becoming increasingly important to mitigate the effects that are occurring in the atmosphere. According to Wuebbles, there is no doubt that something must be done to solve the problem, and that the costs of doing nothing will only increase.

Some actions are already being taken. The National Weather Service has recently changed its warning system in response to the massive amount of tornadoes that tore through Joplin, Miss. and other parts of the U.S. in 2011. Those storms had 20-30 minute warnings, yet a large loss of life and physical property still transpired. The new, experimental warning system gives more information to those who control notification systems. It includes information on how much damage can be expected from a storm in a certain area, ranging from “possible damage” to “considerable damage” to “catastrophic damage.”

On campus, severe weather seems to be an intriguing topic, even without the threat of severe events growing. “Look at ( the March 24 snowstorm); look at what it did. Everyone is talking about it,” Snodgrass said. “I think humans are fascinated by the display of power put on by our atmosphere.” The might and destruction of sever weather intrigues all kinds of people, as show by kids playing in snow, adults chasing tornados and meteorologist Jim Cantore wading through a flood on The Weather Channel.