Welcome to God Matters, a program that explores faith and values in public life. Your hosts for God Matters are Dr. Andrew Stapleton, Director of Mission Integration and Mercy Heritage, and the Center for Religion and Public Discourse at St. Xavier University, and Peter Creighton, General Manager of WXAV, 88.3 FM in Chicago.
Hello, and welcome to God Matters. My name is Peter Creighton, and I'll be the host of this edition of the program. Today's program will focus on climate change, which is an area of critical concern for the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters of Mercy have five areas of critical concerns.
Immigration, anti-racism, women, non-violence, and finally, Earth. As their website states, the Sisters of Mercy are, quote, looking for ways to curb climate change, live a sustainable lifestyle, and ensuring the fundamental right of water to all, end quote. To better understand how climate change is affecting all of us, I think it is beneficial to establish a better understanding of what exactly climate change is and how it is affecting our planet. To do this, I recently sat down with legendary Chicago meteorologist Tom Scilling of WGN-TV.
Tom has been a meteorologist at WGN since 1978, and currently serves as the station's chief meteorologist. He also writes a daily weather column for the Chicago Tribune, and is known throughout the city as one of the most reliable weathermen. He was also one of the earliest meteorologists to sound the alarm on climate change. I traveled to WGN studios to ask Tom what exactly is climate change?
Well, climate change is a shift in the long-term trend of the atmosphere. You know, weather is the instantaneous face of the atmosphere. Climate is weather averaged over a period of time. A lot of people make mistakes when they have a cold wave or a snowstorm, and we're talking about global warming and say, where is your global warming now?
Well, they're confusing weather with climate. What you have to do is stand back and look at decades and even centuries of material and data to see what the trend is. And that's what climate is, the long-term average of the weather over a region. What we're doing now is altering the atmospheric chemistry, the chemistry of the atmosphere, and we're loading up the atmosphere with a gas, carbon dioxide, and other gases, methane among them, which hold on to an irradiate heat.
Carbon dioxide, you hear mention all the time, is insidious because once it's produced, it's around for hundreds of years. It doesn't go away. Unless you physically remove it from the atmosphere. So this is a real problem, and we've put so much CO2 in the pipeline that the changes that we see underway right now are going to continue.
When you start changing the temperature distribution of the planet, there are feedbacks that develop. For instance, you melt snow and ice in the Arctic. These are highly reflective surfaces, and when you get the darker ground under which the snow sits, to be exposed more of the year, that ground is holding on to and heating up more than it normally would, which accelerates the warming process. So the warming process melts the snow, and then the process warrally accelerates because of the snow is gone, and the reflective nature of snow is allowing the region that now is snow-free.
The study of climate change is relatively new, only about 50 years old, but Tom discussed how this new science has evolved. When I first heard scientists discussing the Arctic melting and all, I thought, well, you're going to have to prove that to me because just the physics of how we heat this planet differentially, which is what drives the weather, the fact one place gets warmer than another place, and this is why climate change is such a threat because we start fiddling with the way we're heating this planet and the distribution of heat. You change the steering winds that guide the rain systems that support the agriculture on the planet, but there are a lot of other side effects like acidifying the ocean and so forth. I'm going off on a tangent here, but, you know, as time has gone on, I've been doing this for about 50 years, and I see the atmosphere doing things I never saw it do before.
And these dovetails, remarkably with what the climate community has been telling us is going to happen for a long time. For a long time, people debunk climate science by saying the models that we use are not accurate, and that they've been misfiring. They haven't. If anything, the model's been very accurate, and in fact they're slow in developing the changes that are, in fact, we're seeing right now.
And they're going on at a speed that the reason, you know, people come back at us and say, hey, we've always had climate change on this planet, but it's never occurred at the speed that is happening today. By many estimates, 10 times the speed at which past climate changes have occurred. It is the speed in which climate change is occurring, which greatly concerns Tom. But there are a number of other areas of concerns that we all need to be aware of.
You know, in this area, talk to anybody who lives along the Des planes river every time it floods, and they will tell you it's flooding with the frequency they don't remember. And that's true of our major highways and all we have these flash flood situations are rains in our precipitation, this country being delivered in more extreme fashion. Either you're extremely dry or you're extremely wet, and this is exactly what will continue happening on climate change. The jet streams guide our weather systems.
There's some interesting work being done by a researcher at Rutgers University by the name of Jennifer Francis. She believes that the melting of the Arctic ice and the warm pools that develop up there, and I've seen this, are leading to buckling of the jet stream. And when jet streams buckle go way north and come way south, you get your extremes of weather. Also with the pools of warm air that develop, you slow the eastward progression of these buckles, these so-called Rossby waves, and therefore weather lingers over an area for a longer period of time.
You can get into more extended periods of either extreme heat or extreme cold. The loss of life in heat waves is amazing. We had a situation in 1995 here in Chicago. We lost over 700 people.
It remains to this day the worst natural disaster in this city, and it was a heat extreme heat situation. But in 2003, 50,000 died in Europe. In 2010, another 55,000 died in Eastern Europe and Western Russia. Moscow had an latitude that's equivalent to Hudson Bay was having 100-degree temperatures.
For weeks on end, this is just amazing. In the past year, we had some conferences looking back at our 1990s, the five heat wave disaster. There were people in from Pakistan and India. These countries suffered thousands of deaths this past summer as a result of extreme heat events.
And then look at the extreme cold on the other end. A lot of people think, because the planet is warming, you can't have cold. Well, what happens is your higher events outnumber your cold events. But you have extremes on the cold end of the spectrum.
Look at the snows that he had bossed in in England last year. See, a lot of deniers say, oh, you people want to always, you want every extreme of weather blamed on climate change. And the fact is, yeah, there's a case to be made that there are, you're laying the ground work for extremes of weather in all kinds of areas. Here's a study that just came out in the past week indicating that tornadoes, while their numbers have gone down, the outbreaks that are occurring are occurring in bigger clusters.
So we get the Tuscaloosa Alabama type tornado outbreak. That was a multistataphear. It went over days time. We had hundreds of tornadoes reported and hundreds of deaths.
But you know, there are other insidious factors. The oceans are acidifying. Coral is dying across the planet. There's a form of bacteria that's poisonous to sea otters in the sense that the fish eat these little creatures, the phytoplankton and so forth.
And some of them are producing poisonous wastes and all the kill the animals that are eating them. We're starting, if we acidify the ocean and start fiddling with phytoplankton, which is where we're going, then we're going to start messing up the food chain because small fish eat phytoplankton, larger fish eat the small fish. And if you start fiddling with the food supply, then this is going to have ramifications that are incredible. In addition to the possible ramifications to the food chain, there's one area of concern that we wouldn't normally think could be affected by climate change.
Because frankly, we don't see them in direct connection between one another. But when you think about it, it does make sense that climate change is affecting immigration throughout the world. Look at this migration going into Europe. Google, climate change and Syria.
In all this trouble in the Middle East, this is one of the most weather-challenged regions of the country. If you look at the temperature over there, it's horrible. They get up to the hundreds. There are dust storms.
They had a terrible drought that started in 2006. They forced in Syria a million 400,000 farmers off their farms because they were failing. They couldn't produce crops into the cities that were already economically stressed. Well, in that environment where you put such pressure on a social system, you're going to get some terrible effects to start happening.
And in this case, we have people leaving the area because of the horrible wars that have resulted. They're migrating. And over history, I went to school at the University of Wisconsin. They had a very interesting approach, a multidisciplinary approach to looking at climate.
And they said that you could look at most of the wars and conflicts through history. And at some point in leading up to those, there was a climate change involved. It wasn't real obvious. But it played at least a role in the discontent that led to armed conflict and all.
So there are all kinds of things. I mean, if you live in a country that suddenly is experiencing drought and you're looking at your neighbor who's producing food because the drought isn't bad there, there's going to be some tension there that develops. You know, the Pentagon is aware of that. They're looking at the opening, for instance, of sea channels up in the Arctic as we melt the ice up there.
There's going to be a story up there to get into those waters and develop resources there that here to have been covered by ice. So there's going to be some political tension up there as people stake out their claims in the Arctic that is opening up now. It's also going to change the way we, you know, transportation moves in those areas. So it's there are a multitude of ways in which climate change extends far beyond just whether or not you're hot or cold.
You're listening to God Matters. God Matters features discussions of current events where religion and ethical perspectives can inform our public discourse and decision-making. Now let's return to the program already in progress. As my conversation continued with Tom Scaling, a question continuously popped into my head.
But I was rather unsure of whether or not I should ask it. As the conversation progressed and Tom continued to present overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, I took that as my cue to ask the following question. Why do so many people believe that climate change is a hoax? There are a lot of answers to that question.
I've wondered too, what drives this denier community that in the face of overwhelming evidence is it continues to say this is a hoax. The only hoax is that there is a hoax. You know, it just, this is not a hoax. It is happening.
And there are all kinds of repercussions of it. We see we've had $188 billion weather disasters in this country since 1980. These can take the form of wildfires. They can take the form of superstorm sandies.
They can take the form of more frequent flooding. We're getting more of our rain through extreme precipitation events. We've melted 9 trillion tons of Arctic glacial ice around the planet, 3.5 trillion tons since 1990 alone in Alaska. This amounts to about 75 billion tons of ice that's disappearing every year.
The thick ice in the Arctic that used to survive the summer and then the next minute ice would build on top of it. It's gone for all intents and purposes. We have ice coverage that's at one of its lowest levels since we started with satellite reconnaissance. But you know, I find one of the things that people, they see we've only been looking at it.
You know, we've had instrumentation measuring it since the late 1800s. How can you draw conclusions over short-term trends? We've had satellites looking at the trends in ice and snow only since the late 1970s. So you people, they would say, are overreacting based on trends that are very short-term and likely to go away.
And nothing that we haven't seen in the past will, first of all, as I pointed out, what's going on is going on faster than anything we've ever seen before. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest in at least 600,000 years. And the only way that they can look at the isotopes of CO2 in the atmosphere and figure out where it's coming from. These are not volcanically produced.
This isn't volcanically produced CO2 and all this is being produced by burning fossil fuels, which we're doing around this planet at an extraordinary rate. Now, they'll say CO2 is a great gas. It's a fossilist plant development. Well, it's interesting.
They've looked into that and it turns out the plants most benefited by CO2 increase are weeds and not the kind of things that we want to see. Here's another thing. Some people are bothered by the notion of the government getting involved in any way, shape, or form through regulation or whatever. And they absolutely look at this as opening the door to further government intrusion into their lives.
And they don't want the government intruding in their lives by putting limits on how much CO2 their car can put out or, and they think they're economic consequences that are negative as well. They think if we limit fossil fuel use that there'll be job losses and all the rest. And the fact is, if you look at it the right way, this could be a giant job generator. We're going to generate new jobs for the new fuels that we're developing and all the rest.
At Argon Labs, they're working on nanotechnology now that will improve solar collectors. There's a little sheet I have over here that they gave me. This thing right here will charge your home cell phone. You can plug it right in and it takes the sun's rays and embedded within the sheet are little tiny receptors that are picking up solar energy.
This is the kind of technology they're working on improving and making more efficient. They told me in an interview I did recently over there with Dr. Seth Darlink, who was one of the researchers there. They hope one day to have windows in our homes that will have embedded within them little nanosolar collectors that are collecting sunlight and energy from it and generating electricity, even as the sunlight comes through and lights our homes up.
This is being done in our national labs. We're funding this sort of research. This is where government could be really. I mean, as it was in the space program from which all these technologies spun off, you know, the first digital computer was a government creation.
The two purposes to which it was put when this was being developed at Princeton University in the 1940s was to perfect the atomic bomb. But also they started numerically modeling the atmosphere and that's where computer models started. At any rate, but look at the technologies, every little device that we walk around was started in a sense with that development of the digital computer, which was a government funded effort. Then the space program came along.
They crammed a lot of electronics into a small little pod. So everything was miniaturized. The transistor was developed at Bell Labs and this started the miniaturization process that makes possible the laptop computers or the laptop computers and phones that we use today. So amazing technology is spent out of these efforts and there's no reason to believe that our move to next generation fuels and all don't do the same thing.
Frankly, Tom is painting a pretty grim picture. But within that grim picture, there are still reasons to be hopeful. Well, you know, look at the Paris Accords. I mean, this is the first time the countries of the world sat down and actually have come up with a plan to try and start addressing this issue.
You know, there's precedent for this. Years ago, we had clear-o-fluorocarbon propellants at our aerosol cans. These are propellants that go out and destroy the ozone layer and the world banded together and said, we're going to band these. This included, oh gosh, the gas in refrigerators.
Freon. And you know, what they used to do is when you let a refrigerator that needed to, they would just open up the tablet, then free on out and refill it with a new supply of Freon. And one molecule of Freon destroys, I don't know, how many hundreds of thousands of molecules of ozone up in the upper atmosphere. The ozone layer up there, if you brought it down to the surface and exposed it to surface airbrushes, would compress to about two centimeters depth.
So the molecules are very spread out. And these chemicals we're releasing were punch and holes in this. There's a natural hole that occurs near the Arctic in the winter. It's a seasonal thing.
But the hole is growing larger and there were real ramifications from that. But as the world got together and said, we're going to shift to a different set of chemicals. And at the time, there were the claims, oh, economic disaster. You know, this is going to bankrupt industries.
It didn't. The refrigeration industry shifted to another refrigerant gas. And the world goes on. So we did something about that.
So why can't we be proactive about greenhouse gases? And I think it's going to happen. You know, we're so far along and having produced CO2. I kind of worry, you know, whether we're going to be able to do things fast enough.
I don't know about you. But when I think of the sheer size and scope of climate change, it's enough to induce sheer anxiety. But as Tom points out, there is so much that the average person can do to have a positive impact on climate change. Well, I think be politically engaged.
Think about who we're electing. Hear what they have to say on the stand on climate change, what their stance is on climate change. I think that's one thing. And there are all kinds of things.
I mean, turn off your lights. You know, things like that. These are little things. We're going to need help in our automobiles.
We most of us don't build our own automobiles. We have to go out and buy them because we don't have the expertise. So we've got to get industry on board and helping us. We've got to get industry engaged.
And he and I've done some seminars for corporate America that they've sponsored. And they're getting on board. They realize it's not in their best interest to fight climate change legislation and moves to try and mitigate the production of climate, you know, gases and greenhouse gases. So there are positive developments in that area.
And we're going to need their help because we don't generate our own electricity. We don't build our own automobiles. We've got to get companies that have the expertise of doing that to do it in a more environmentally friendly way. And I think there is a move in that direction.
During the end of our conversation, and since the name of our program is God Matters, a program that explores ethical issues in everyday life, I asked Tom whether or not he saw climate change as an ethical issue. Oh, I think it is. Do you know the environmental minister of the Philippines actually broke down? It was right after super typhoon high end had gone into the Philippines.
It produced a 20 foot wall of water. It was like a 20 foot tsunami killed 10 thousands of people. I think the death toll ended up being around 6,000. And his family was missing in that storm.
And yet there was this international climate conference where people were getting together trying to talk about ways to mitigate greenhouse gas production. And he felt it's so critical that even with uncertainty about the fate of his family, he went there and he broke down and he said, we're a poor country. We don't have the resources of the rich countries. Yet we're being bombarded by a breed of typhoon that's occurring that's always been a typhoon grown area.
But they're hitting harder and more frequently than they did even in the past. On top of that, we've got sea level rising. So the storm surges have more of an impact. There are islands that are literally threatening to go away at the South Pacific because sea level is rising.
And yeah, it's an ethical issue. I mean, you know, if you're doing something to alter the environment that's having this impact on other countries, distant countries in ways you don't even imagine, I think that's an ethical issue right there. Yeah, I think we have some responsibility to look at our planet. You know, I think the Pope's encyclical was quite interesting.
And boy, what a development that was because it's funny. There are many people in the religion that are very religious and don't buy into climate change. And when they've looked at people who don't buy into climate change, I think 48% of Democrats are likely to believe in climate change, 27% of Republicans. And if you look at the, what a tea party group, it's down to 8%.
And evangelicals, it's on the low end as well. So to have a major religious figure like the Pope step up to the plate and say, hey, folks, you really do have an issue here that we ought to be taking seriously. It is a very important development. Really is.
As I was wrapping up my conversation with legendary WGN TV meteorologist Tom Skilling, I asked Tom if he had any final thoughts he wanted to share. Climate change is real. It's not a hoax. We ought to take it seriously.
Even though it may not be apparent in your own neighborhood or out of your own window, climate change is ongoing and it's occurring very, very quickly. And I think the melting of the ice in the Arctic is kind of, and what's going on in the Arctic regions are planted is the canary in the coal mine. We ought to watch very carefully that those regions are what happened in Alaska last years and were warned in winter times, more than six degrees in the last half century. That's far faster than other regions of the world.
They just came off one of their warmest winters ever through the Arctic. This has profound effects down here. You might say, well, that's a distant change. No, it affects the jet streams and all the Dye-R weather systems.
So there are consequences in the tropical regions. Raines are coming in more extreme fashion, in extreme rain events, as much as they are in the United States. And so this encourages flooding and so forth. Climate change is a real issue, which has been taken seriously.
But I think that would be my major message to folks, because if we start from that premise, then we build toward, I think, steps and measures and all that we and our industries can take to help us on a path toward a more environmentally friendly future. I would like to thank the one and only Tom Scaling for sitting down with me to discuss this incredibly important issue. I'd also like to thank Carla Thomas from St. Xavier University for helping arrange this interview.
For more information on Tom Scaling, or to follow his weather forecasts, please visit wgntv.com. I'm Peter Creighton, and thank you very much for listening to this edition of God Matters. Be sure to tune in next week at this same time for another edition. Thanks for listening.