MADISON, Wis. -- If you agree with the climate scientists who say global warming is accelerating, you may be asking: Is this a runaway train? Or can we really do anything about it?
University of Wisconsin scientist Jonathan Martin told News 3 that if you want to try and maintain a climate system that you're more familiar with and upon which your society is based, you ought to heed every warning you can.
"We, as a society, may actually be contributing to the degradation of the climate system, and you must do everything you can to mitigate against that degradation," Martin said.
One of the first things to look at is utilities. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that utilities pump 30 percent of heat-trapping-gas emissions -- greenhouse gasses -- into the atmosphere in the Great Lakes region. The trick for utilities appears to be how to manage the emissions of these greenhouse gasses.
Madison Gas & Electric claims its new plant will produce 15 percent less greenhouse gasses than if it built two separate plants. Utilities hope to replace some coal at power plants and burn natural gas and the so-called paper derived fuel. They're also in the wind business, and while wind is clean, it's more expensive than coal.
Another front in the battle to reduce greenhouse gasses is what utilities call "demand side management," which means how people are using energy.
"We demand more electricity at about a 3 percent increase a year --a whopping 38 percent over the last 15 years," said News 3 Chief Meteorologist Gary Cannalte. "The EPA reports transportation pumps 23 percent of the total greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere."
Hybrid vehicles burn less gas and that means less greenhouse gas emissions. While hybrids use a combination of gas and electricity for power, others -- including country legend Willie Nelson -- prefer vegetable oil.
"I like it so well that I bought a Mercedes, and it's a diesel," Nelson said. "It's never had anything in it except vegetable oil. And I realized that this could be the future for the farmers."
After learning about a fuel called bio-diesel, Nelson teamed with others to form Bio-Willie, a company that produces vegetable oil for diesel engines. When Nelson goes on the road again, he will fill his tour bus with vegetable oil.
"It doesn't have impact on the environment," Nelson said. "There's less negative impact -- 78 percent less impact using bio-diesel as opposed to regular diesel."
Nelson believes his Bio-Willie fuel will not only produce cleaner fuel, it can be a source of revenue for farmers.
Wisconsin's Summer Temps To Warm 8-18 Degrees By End Of Century
You can find evidence of global warming right in your own back yard, says Chief Meteorologist Gary Cannalte.
Consider Lake Mendota in Madison. Researchers, led by University of Wisconsin limnologist John Magnuson, discovered that ice cover on the lake averages about 40 fewer days now than it did 150 years ago.
"For a long time, the debate was, it's not changing," Magnuson said. "The ice records are a very simple record that says yes, they are changing. The ice on Mendota is like a miner's canary. It's a warning."
Consider LaCrosse along the Mississippi. Warmer temperatures over extended periods of time could very well produce more and heavier rainfall. Will we see the extensive flooding along the upper Mississippi in the spring of 1993 happen more frequently? It's one of the big questions researchers like UW geographer Jim Knox investigates.
"We're seeing a situation where in recent years, we're getting this incredible incidence of large floods on the Mississippi river," Knox said. "I remember talking to this one old fellow, and he says, 'What's going on here? We had the hundred year flood a few years ago ... and now we've had 3 hundred-year floods in the last 10 years. What's going on?' And I tried to explain to him well that, first of all, you have to realize that the hundred year flood doesn't mean that you're only going to get one every hundred years. It means that there's a 1 percent chance in any given year. So I started looking at -- first of all -- the instrumental records. And when I looked at that record, the old guy was right. In fact, you saw -- especially since 1950 -- that the incidence of these extreme floods has been increasing."
Over our planet's roughly 4.6 billion-year history, we've experienced periods of both warming and cooling. But over the past 150 years or so we have pumped a lot of carbon dioxide and methane -- the so-called greenhouse gases -- into the atmosphere. We need this greenhouse effect to keep our climates temperate.
But what happens when the greenhouse traps too much heat? The amount of warming we can expect over the course of the 21st century depends on which computer model you choose to use.
One report from the Union of Concerned Scientists predicts Wisconsin's climate will warm 6 to 11 degrees in the winter and 8 to 18 degrees in the summer by the end of the century. If this prediction holds true, we can expect our Wisconsin summers to feel like Arkansas summers today.
Global Warming To Blame For Floods?
Predicting floods and droughts is a numbers game. Insurance companies and the federal government look back at what happened and develop probabilities of what will likely happen in the future.
When University of Wisconsin geographer Jim Knox looked back at flood records for the upper Mississippi River, he discovered that this traditional way of predicting floods may be flawed.
"Especially since about 1950, that the incidence of these extreme floods has been increasing way more than you'd expect from just chance alone," Knox said. "People blame a variety of factors for this more frequent flooding.
"Most of those things influence greatest the moderate magnitude high frequency floods. What we're talking about here are these more extreme events."
Extreme events -- like the 1993 Mississippi River flood that caused misery up and down the area for 144 days.
Then came the April flood of 2001 -- the second-largest Mississippi River flood in history. The flood records Knox studied began to reveal a trend.
"In the case of the Mississippi, the most extreme events ordinarily are related to snow melt when the ground is frozen," Knox said. "So a lot of these factors, aren't as significant at the time because the ground is relatively impermeable to begin with. So again, the point being when you think about these extreme events, a lot of these factors people have traditionally pointed to turn out to be less significant. And it comes back to climate."
Knox decided to look back -- way back. He studied the sediments from the Mississippi River beds, which provided him evidence of flood activity as far back as 7,000 years ago. Buried in these sediments, as well as other evidence, is the history of the Mississippi.
Scientists can tell from this evidence when it was warm, when it was cool, when the river flooded and when there were droughts. He found that large floods on the upper Mississippi seemed to occur during periods of climate change. What surprised him and others who study floods was that it didn't take that much of a change to alter a pattern.
"No, it doesn't take much of a change of climate to trigger a big change in the magnitude and the recurrence frequencies of flood events," Knox said. "So clearly, this order of magnitude of a couple of degrees centigrade could be quite dramatic."
Other forces can also affect Mississippi flooding. The 1993 flood may have been influenced by global cooling as a result of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Further proof that when it comes to climate, what happens a half a world away affects our weather in Wisconsin.
Storms Of The Future: Watch It
The entire special, "Storms of the Future," aired on WISC-TV3, Wednesday night. If you missed it, it will also air 6 p.m. Saturday on UPN14. The show is produced by
Murphy Entertainment Group.
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"Storms Of The Future" -- Watch A Preview
News 3 presents a prime time special Wednesday at 8 p.m.: "Storms of the Future." It examines how global warming may affect Wisconsin's weather in the future.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
