Michigan Minds podcast: Reasons for hope amid grim climate news

Matt Davenport:
Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I'm Matt Davenport, a science writer and public relations representative with Michigan News. Climate change is at the forefront of many folks' minds right now. We're seeing disasters like drought, hurricanes and floods growing more intense and frequent fueled by climate change. At the same time, the new presidential administration has vowed to roll back environmental regulations. Today, we're joined by Jonathan Overpeck, the Dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability, who can provide some invaluable insights and context. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dean Overpeck.

Jonathan Overpeck:
My pleasure. It's great to be here.

Matt Davenport:
So, let's start off with what we learned about last year, this year, which was in terms of warming, we've set another record high. What does that mean in terms of what's happening to our planet?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Yeah. Well, boy, you really shouldn't talk about just last year, 2024. We should talk about '23 as well, because the thing that really surprised scientists was how big the jump in global temperatures was in 2023. It was the biggest jump we've ever seen before. And part of that was because we had an El Niño, which is a phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, that when it occurs, it warms the whole planet. But we've had El Niños before. We get them routinely, and we've never seen a jump like this. So, something's happening. And then we expected to cool off a little in 2024. And instead, it got even warmer. And in fact, it actually got warmer by over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is that magical threshold that the global Paris Climate Agreement set back in 2015. So, the planet is warming faster than we thought. It's accelerating the warming.
And so, the big question is, why are we getting all this extra warming? And scientists are scrambling to try and figure that out. And it looks like there may be a poorly understood amplifying feedback in the climate system that relates to clouds, particularly low clouds that make the planet from space look whiter and more reflective. And if we lose these clouds faster as it warms than we thought, the planet can warm up faster. And it could be that's the situation that we've crossed some threshold, where this feedback we call it is kicking in. So, it's a scary lesson perhaps these two years. Another thing that's rather remarkable is 2025 started out warmer even than 2024. And just the last couple days are also record-breaking.

Matt Davenport:
Oh, wow.

Jonathan Overpeck:
Yeah.

Matt Davenport:
Will we learn this year, will we know enough to test this hypothesis about the clouds reflecting some of the radiation away, or will it take some time to figure out what exactly is causing this?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Well, certainly, it takes time. And the question is with more time to observe what's happening in the climate system, rather than just simulating in a climate model, we learn a great deal. So, we are going to be testing this hypothesis over the course of this year and the next. And we'll see how all that ideas stands up. Scientists are looking at other possibilities as well. I won't go into those. But we can look at multiple factors that could be warming the planet faster than we thought it would warm. And probably most important is whether this apparent acceleration in global warming, which we've seen before in the '70s, for example, if this acceleration is real. In other words, are we going to keep accelerating at this new rate? And that would be really depressing news if that's the case.

Matt Davenport:
You touched on this just a moment ago, that magical 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. I'm curious, how in the public sphere should we be talking about this? Where does that number come from? What does it mean and what is the significance of that?

Jonathan Overpeck:
I've worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is an organization of scientists from around the world working on climate, hosted by the World Meteorological Organization in the UN. They asked us, the policymakers of 196 countries around the world that are part of that tree, what constitutes dangerous interference in the climate system? And what they're asking really is how much warming is dangerous and how do we avoid that level of warming. And so, back in the couple decades ago now, people tried to start figuring that out. And by 2015, when they had the Paris Climate Agreement meeting, they came up with the idea that 1.5 was that dangerous level. Now, of course, it's more dangerous for some people, less dangerous for others, depending on where you live and what kind of climate extreme you're vulnerable to. But everyone came around that number as being, if it gets above that, things are going to get really rough on earth.
I think what we've learned since then, of course, is how to adapt and become more resilient in the face of climate change. And 1.5 isn't too bad in the United States, because we're here now and we're still functioning. But in other parts of the world like Pakistan or Libya, where they've had just crushing climate extremes-huge rains, floods, lots of death-of course, 1.5 is pretty serious. And the point is, is we're still warming and we may be accelerating. And so, now, climate scientists are really hoping we can keep it below two degrees sea warming. Right now, though, we're on a path to a good deal more than that. If you take all the commitments of the countries around the world, we're still going to warm more than two degrees, which is depressing, especially if you live in a country where you're more vulnerable.

Matt Davenport:
Well, let me take a step back. What I want to ask is what can we do about that, but I know that's a huge question. So, I'm curious if now might be the time to get into the policy angle where we know the United States, it backed out of the Paris Climate Agreement again. And so, we're talking about how this sounds depressing as someone that watches the news and what our leadership is talking about in terms of climate can exasperate that. But I'm also hearing stories of things that are happening at community level, at local level, where people are still working toward reducing temperature, reducing the impacts of climate change. How do you feel about the trajectory we're on versus what we can do to combat it?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Another way to say this is do I have hope.

Matt Davenport:
Yeah.

Jonathan Overpeck:
And I do have hope. And for sure what the current administration is doing is devastating in terms of climate action and science in the United States. But at the same time that the federal government is really pulling back from doing anything positive about climate change, there are a lot of local governments, state governments that are still acting aggressively on climate change. And there are 24 states, part of a climate alliance, that are working hard to reduce their emissions to zero. Michigan is one of those states. And over half of the country's GDP are in these states. Over half of the population of Americans are in these states. So, we're still going great guns in many parts of this country to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
During the Biden administration, a lot of money was spent on implementing climate action, not just in the blue states that are acting still, but in red states. So, you find states like Texas are just going great guns in terms of deploying renewable energy. Really ironic, because the oil industry down there is doing whatever they can to stop the climate action. So, there's a lot of good news in the United States. But remember, the president pulled us out of the global climate agreement, but the rest of the world is still in. So, there's still over 190 countries still fighting climate change. And that means there's a whole lot of climate action going on around the planet.
The country that's doing the most and being most aggressive is China, but Europe is going great guns as well. So, you add all that together, there's a lot of climate action. And the biggest probably piece of hope is that what's going on as more and more solar, wind, battery storage, a lot of other technologies get deployed, electrified cars and trucks, the prices, the costs of all these technologies go down. They plummet. And as they plummet, they get cheaper than coal. They've already done that. And they will eventually get way below the cost of oil and gas-based energy. And so, the market for energy eventually is going to crush fossil fuels by itself. The problem is it's going to take longer than it should, and therefore the planet will warm up more than we'd like.

Matt Davenport:
In addition to the warming trends, something you study in detail are droughts. If I'm remembering correctly, the work you did coined or helped coin the phrase megadrought. Where are we now, especially in the US, in terms of having water?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Yeah. Well, I've been studying drought for a long time and mainly because I lived out west for a long time. 30 years in Colorado and then in Arizona. And drought's a big issue there. And in fact, the world has had two megadroughts. A megadrought we originally coined is a drought that lasts multiple decades. And we see in recent earth history from tree rings and things like that, that there've been many of these. But the only ones we've had on the whole planet since the global meteorological record began in the 19th century, was the Sahel drought of the '70s and '80s, and then the Southwest United States drought that began in 1999 and has continued to today. And so, that drought is still very much affecting a very large part of the United States. Sometimes it's going all the way up into Canada and down into Mexico. Sometimes it's coming way out in the Central Plains. But the core of it is in the southwest. That's why we call it the Southwest megadrought.
And it's got a couple factors. One is that most people think of drought, "Oh, the rain stopped. We'll wait until the rain starts again and the drought will end." But we have this other thing going on, global warming. And warming, as anyone who has a garden knows, when you get a really extra hot day in the summer, you better water more or your plants will wilt. So, what's going on scientifically is that as it warms, the atmosphere can hold more moisture and it demands more moisture from the land surface. And that could be in the form of evaporation or something that's called evapotranspiration, which is sucking in the water out of the plants and soil. So, that is exacerbating the drought out west. And that is what we call, I like to call anyhow, a ratification. And these two things interplay.
What's going on in the United States is that the dry part of the United States in the southwest is expanding northward and expanding eastward. And that is giving rise to a higher drought risk all the way out to the Mississippi. And I would say even in Michigan and further east. And the more we warm the planet, the larger that drought risk grows. And when I say drought risk, I mean frequency, severity and duration of the droughts. So, this is a real threat particularly to our food supply and the ability to grow crops. And that's why you see people irrigating now, rather than relying on just the rain. Even in Michigan, people put in a lot of irrigation for our cherries and things like that, because it just is becoming less reliable that we'll have enough rain to compensate for these warmer temperatures.

Matt Davenport:
In recent years, I've heard a lot of discussion about Michigan being a climate haven. Especially hearing that, is Michigan a climate haven? Is that too optimistic or is that an accurate term to describe where we're at?

Jonathan Overpeck:
I think the accurate term is relative climate haven. I think Michigan is absolutely a relative climate haven, and the reason for that is we're too far north. Asheville used to think it was too far north for the effect of hurricanes. And we're not going to have hurricane effects here. We are getting more intense precipitation, like the whole planet is getting, because not only is the atmosphere demanding more moisture, it can hold more moisture when the meteorological conditions are right. To squeeze that moisture out, it can come down a lot harder and flood. So, that's why we have floods in Detroit. That's why we've had floods in some of our farmland in Michigan.
But relatively speaking, we're doing a lot better than say Florida or all the south, basically. Another real big problem with climate change are heat waves. It's March. It's going to be 108 degrees in Texas. It's going to be 70 degrees here. So, the point is, is heat waves, yeah, they'll occur here, but they won't be nearly as rough, particularly in summer when they get really hot, than they are in many other parts of the country. The hurricanes we've already talked about. We also don't have sea level rise here. We get variations in The Great Lakes, but it's nothing like what's happening on our coasts, ocean coasts, where you're knocking houses into the… and you'll just continue to knock houses and buildings into the ocean as sea level keeps coming up.
So, this is a relative climate haven for sure. And I think one thing that people don't realize outside The Great Lakes is we have over 20% of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water in The Great Lakes. So, that's an incredible resource that we are working really hard at University of Michigan and elsewhere to figure out how to best manage going forward, because everybody's going to want that water and it's going to be very useful to have that water.

Matt Davenport:
Connecting that idea to the reasons for hope you laid out earlier. You're an educator, too. I'm curious, do you have advice for especially young people who are passionate about fighting climate change at the University of Michigan or beyond, where their efforts might make the most difference, the things they can be doing to work for a cooler future?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Yeah. It's interesting talking to students right now. They're worried that the job market is drying up, because of what the current administration's doing in Washington. And that's not true at all, because Mother Nature, with what we're doing to her, is creating more and more crises related to climate, and environment, and sustainability in the United States and around the world. And so, our job at the University of Michigan is to give the world-class education to our undergrad and grad students that's necessary to be effective in this warming world and with these other challenges. So, this is a great time to get an education that empowers you to deal with not just climate change, but think about water challenges, and food challenges, and biodiversity challenges, and Great Lakes, invasive species, and harmful algal blooms. I mean, the list goes on and on.
And right now, the demand for people trained to deal with these environment and sustainability problems, climate problems, the demand is much larger than the supply. So, there's a lot of private sector. Federal jobs may be down right now, but other types of government jobs and nonprofit jobs will only become more plentiful going into the future. So, this is a great time to be getting the education you need to solve these really important problems that are going to define the 21st century.

Matt Davenport:
So, even with that said, I think it's normal. And we're seeing it prevalent for people to have anxiety about the climate, especially young people. I don't know. Do you have advice for people who are feeling that and ways to cope with that?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Yeah. I think we get that question a lot from students, but I think also from fellow faculty. These are tough times in terms of what's going on in Washington, what's going on in our global climate. There are a lot of other things going on that we worry about, so I think what's important is to figure out ways to be resilient. And one of the ways is to really reach out to your family, friends, and community, to get the support you need. Another is to find things you can do. And there's so many things you can do. So, let's just take climate for example. We can work every one of us on reducing the way we use energy, or at least fossil-fueled energy. We can work on ways to change our diet, a more carbon-friendly diet. And the list goes on.
But probably the most important thing is also to talk to other people. Talk to your neighbor, talk to your friends. Get people talking about climate, and what it means to either get a lot of climate change or to solve the problem, and then make sure you vote and get other people to vote. Because we can see right now viscerally what happens when we elect people who are anti-science, anti-climate action. Things get worse and we have the power to make things better. And a lot of that occurs at the ballot box.

Matt Davenport:
Do you have any strategies when you're communicating with someone where they might be a climate change denier or ambivalent on what's happening?

Jonathan Overpeck:
Well, something to realize, earlier in my career, the term climate denier was a good one. And people still exist who deny climate change. But climate change is getting so obvious that very few people deny it now. People know it exists, they know it's a problem, and they know it has to be dealt with. And it's just a question of how much that priority is relative to making sure you can put food on the table if you're a family or other economic and life, maybe cultural issues that you're trying to factor in when you vote, for example. So, when I talk to anybody, I want to just make sure I understand where they're coming from, and that I respect their views, and we find common ground on where we can have a discussion. Sometimes that's hard, but living out west in very red state, Arizona, I found myself always in that situation.
And there's always a way to connect, and you just got to find that… I like to fish, I like to bird, I like to hike. I like nature. Well, it turns out that's something that's shared by everybody in Michigan, probably. And they can relate to it, and you can have very good conversations. That's the reason, for example, why Great Lakes science and policy is bipartisan, but you got to find that common ground. And I think respect is a really key thing. And you got to build a little bit of a relationship before you discuss things. It doesn't work to just tell people the way you think it is. We see that all the time on TV. It's much better to build a relationship, even if that relationship is very fresh, and early, and to have a discussion and find the common ground.

Matt Davenport:
This has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for joining us today, and sharing your time and insights with us.

Jonathan Overpeck:
It's been my pleasure. I always like to talk about this stuff.

Matt Davenport:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the university's Office of the Vice President for Communications.