Whether it’s the 110-plus-degree days being reported out West, severe flooding events in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, or the 100-degree water temperatures being measured off the coast of Florida, it’s hard not to wonder if these extreme weather events are just a fluke of nature, part of a cyclical weather pattern or a harbinger of something more concerning.
If anyone could make a well-educated guess on the matter, it would be Cameron Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of geography at 91˛Öżâ, who specializes in climate and weather change.
“It’s unequivocal that the climate is warming,” Lee said. “It is unequivocal that human beings’ emissions of greenhouse gasses, through the use of fossil fuels, is what is causing this. That being said, I’m less pessimistic than I used to be about this.”
Lee was about the recent increase in extreme weather events. He has conducted grant-based research on things such as the impacts of climate change on hazardous heat events in California, as well as the relationship between current weather patterns and asthma in New York state. He has also studied the relationship of air pollution to synoptic weather types and atmospheric circulation patterns in Cleveland, the association of circulation patterns to chlorophyll levels near the Florida Gulf Coast and the impact of transitional weather types on winter mortality.
“It is really quite something,” Lee said. “As far as the global temperatures go, it’s being driven by anthropogenic climate change [climate change caused by human activities]. That being said, it’s kind of a nexus of a few different things going on that have put this year so far above a lot of others. That’s a combination of climate change, but also we have an El Nino year that is pretty strong, [and] that has continued to develop. We also have some abnormal warming happening in the Atlantic Ocean, throughout most of our global oceans, too, but it is somewhat independent of climate change. It’s just a few different things that are helping to cause the record warmth right now.”
When asked if he thinks it’s an anomaly or just a sign of what’s to come, Lee said if it wasn’t for climate change, this type of extreme weather would likely only randomly happen somewhere between once every three to 10 million years.
“But we know that climate change is causing the earth to warm,” he said. “Because of this, events like this are probably going to become quite a bit more likely. Where it might only happen once every couple million years according to past history, in the future we can expect events like this to become, I don’t know if necessarily normal, but a fairly mild anomaly compared to the anomalies we can expect in the future.”
Despite this, Lee, who teaches a climate change class at 91˛Öżâ, said he has seen his level of optimism on the topic of climate change increase over the past several semesters of teaching.
“That’s because we are finally starting to have some of the conversations and putting in place some of the necessary remedies to help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” he said. “I wish these conversations happened 20 years ago, but it’s better to get them started now than never.”
While this gives Lee a reason to feel more optimistic when it comes to addressing climate change, he said his level of immediate concern still remains high. Having conducted studies on the effects of high heat on our overall health, he warned of the dangers while on the radio program.
“High heat is extremely dangerous to human health,” Lee said. “One of the ways it impacts us, and this is especially impactful for some of the less fortunate sections of the population that don’t have access to shelter or don’t have access to air conditioning, their body is likely to overheat if they are exposed to the extreme heat conditions for a long time. It’s not just the heat, it’s also the humidity. While we’re not seeing humidity levels being all that alarming necessarily in the Southwest, in the South and Southeast, we can see extremely high humidity levels, and when we combine the heat with the humidity, the way that our body naturally cools itself is via sweating. When sweat evaporates off our skin, that process is actually what cools our skin – the evaporation. When the air is saturated with moisture, with humidity, that process is largely subdued, and that’s what prevents our body from cooling itself.”
Hot days are one thing, Lee said, but it’s the prolonged heat waves where the temperatures don’t even drop much as night that can be especially taxing on the body.
“One of the big things we have seen in past research is while daytime high temperatures can be bad, it’s really the long stretches of extreme heat, the failure of overnight lows to get cool enough to offer relief to some people,” he said. “While you might have a 100-degree day here and there, if it gets back down into the 70s, you can have a little bit of relief overnight. But if you have these 100-degree days that never get, at night, back below 80 or 90 [degrees], then nobody gets relief, and that can really start to build up and take its toll on the population.”