We’re watching the climate change in Kansas and Missouri. Why don’t more of us care? | Opinion
Two days before Christmas, I saw the oddest thing: green shoots of new vegetation springing up on lawns around my northeast Kansas neighborhood. Winter had officially started just a couple of days earlier, but the fresh greenery and the high temperatures in the low 60s felt more like the first stirrings of spring.
A fluke? Or another sign of climate change, something more subtle and mild than the freak December storms, wildfires and drought that have afflicted the region in recent years?
I worry about these things. But apparently I’m in the minority.
Last week, Heatmap News reported its new poll found that Midwesterners are “consistently blasé about climate change.” Fifty-two percent of folks in our region — a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless — say warming “poses little or no risk to their region.”
No other U.S. region is so confident of its ability to come through climate change unscathed.
“The poll doesn’t show that Midwesterners doubt climate change is real,” Heatmap’s Jessica Hullinger wrote. (Disclosure: I’ve written for Heatmap and worked with Hullinger.) “They just don’t think it affects them all that much.”
That might be a big mistake.
Climate change is already taking a toll on Kansas and Missouri, and not just in the form of wintertime vegetation. Both states are enduring long-running droughts that have challenged the region’s farmers and forced some communities to start hoarding their drinking water. That’s probably just the beginning.
“There’s certainly dramatic changes expected,” Chuck Rice, a distinguished professor of soil microbiology at Kansas State University told me. “And we’re already seeing some of those.”
Rice brings a lot of expertise to the topic: He served on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He said he was surprised by the findings of the Heatmap poll.
But he also had an explanation: The Midwest is already a “high variability” weather region. Think about all the times you’ve heard the joke that if you don’t like the weather around here “just wait five minutes.”
“We do get these cycles — drought cycles — daily and weekly fluctuations” in the weather, Rice said. People in regions that have historically had more consistent weather patterns are probably quicker to notice (and be concerned by) big swings in the surrounding climate.
So we’re already used to extreme weather.
More intense rain, longer droughts more common
The problem? Climate change is going to make the extremes more extreme — more intense rain and snowstorms, but also more extended periods of drought. Our big swings will get bigger and more destructive.
“We’ll have a 4-inch rainstorm — the annual average might not look that bad, but it’s the daily or weekly extremes that will be a lot harder,” Rice said.
Already, he pointed out, “we’ve had several large 100,000-acre wildfires that have occurred in central and western Kansas.” And we’re not immune to the effects of climate change in other regions — remember the smoky haze from Canadian wildfires that settled over the region last summer.
It’s difficult to ignore fires, drought and barely breathable air. Accordingly, Rice said he is starting to see a grudging recognition of the problem from the rural Kansans who used to dismiss climate change as “baloney.”
“They may not say the words ‘climate change’” — the term is too “politically tainted” — “but they notice the weather has changed. There’s less snow, more drought, more wildfires,” he said. “I think the last several years have made the real case that some of this stuff is happening now.”
Will that recognition be enough? Rice isn’t sure.
Farmers across the region are accommodating a drier climate with new growing techniques, and his K-State colleagues are researching ways to make crops more drought-resistant. But one climate-fueled extreme weather event could undo that progress.
“When we get a 6-to-8-inch rainstorm event, it’s hard to adapt to that,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”
Those green shoots were covered up on Tuesday morning by a late-arriving snow. So winter still exists in Kansas, after all. But the planet is getting warmer — and so is the Midwest. We shouldn’t panic. But maybe we should be a little more concerned.
Joel Mathis is a regular opinion correspondent for The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.
