climate change

Benji White pulls into a field and honks his horn. Before the shifter hits park and the doors close behind him and his wife Lori, the silver Ford pickup is surrounded by dozens of Red Angus eager for a handout of cattle cake, a protein-dense pellet.

Last year saw the most destructive Atlantic hurricane season on record. As climate change pushes ocean temperatures ever higher, scientists predict storms will continue growing more severe.

How did we get here? And what steps are we taking to ensure that rising seas and catastrophic weather don’t swallow American communities whole? This week’s episode investigates.

A new report from hundreds of experts and more than a dozen federal agencies is stark: Humans are likely responsible for the warmest period in modern civilization.

The consequences of this warming vary regionally, but scientists and researchers forecast significant effects in Oklahoma and other southern plains states.

Interactions between humans and the environment is a two-way street. Human actions change the environment, and changes to the environment affect human behavior.

David Lopez-Carr, a geographer a the University of California-Santa Barbara, calls it “human environment dynamics.” He studies how climate change impacts food security, crop production and human health, particularly infant mortality.

“Babies and infants are the hardest hit when there is when there are food shortages,” Lopez-Carr told KGOU’s World Views.

Between Nov. 30 and Dec. 12, 2015, 19,385 national delegates from across the world met in Paris for COP21 to discuss rising emissions, green energy, and the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

No matter where you land on the climate change discussion, humans have become a geophysical force that impacts everything from local ecosystems to the atmosphere itself.

“Humans are having, for a single species, pretty much unprecedented effect on their entire biosphere, such that it could possibly be recorded permanently in the geological record,” University of Oklahoma anthropologist Noah Theriault argues. “If an extraterrestrial species came down and studied our planet sometime in the distant future, they would be able to tell there was some big change right around what we would consider to be the geological present.”

But what do you call that?

In Paris last week world leaders reached a groundbreaking climate deal to significantly limit carbon emissions in the coming years, with a goal of limiting the world’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

President Obama and delegates from nearly 200 nations are gathering in Paris to hammer out an agreement to rein in global climate change

World leaders are acknowledging their countries’ contributions to climate change, and are making commitments to improve the environment. But there’s an army of Republicans pushing against Obama’s Paris plan, and U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is one of its generals. 

This year’s El Niño might be the strongest ever. The phenomenon — marked by unusually warm waters in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America — means more precipitation could be on the way for Oklahoma. The state’s wheat farmers are hopeful, but know too much rain at the wrong time can be ruinous.

Mike Rosen runs a grain elevator near Kingfisher. He says Oklahoma’s wheat farmers can’t seem to catch a break.