Q&A on climate change with Max Berkelhammer
Max Berkelhammer, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago, discusses the key things to know about climate change. In a conversation with Science Sparks, he shares the many ways UIC is addressing climate change in Chicago neighborhoods.
What are the key things to know about climate change?
The idea of the science of climate change is that if you think about an object — any object, a street, a tree, a rock — it’s absorbing energy from the sun. As it absorbs that energy, it starts to heat up, and it emits energy in the form of radiation, a certain type of radiation. It’s called infrared radiation. We don’t see this heat being emitted. It’s actually the basis for night vision. It’s if you have infrared goggles, you can see objects based on the infrared they’re emitting.
But that radiation is emitted from that object, and it starts to be absorbed by certain gasses in the atmosphere. So those gasses absorb that radiation. They start to heat up the atmosphere. And so, naturally, if you put more and more of these gasses in the atmosphere, you’re going to absorb more and more of that radiation being emitted from all the surfaces on the planet, and the atmosphere is just going to heat up.
If there was no atmosphere whatsoever, and there were no greenhouse gasses, the Earth would be freezing cold. All that radiation would just be emitted back into space. But we’re actually fortunate to have greenhouse gases because it keeps the Earth balmy and comfortable. But if we have too much, as the trajectory we’re on right now, the Earth keeps warming up.
What are the primary contributors to climate change?
The primary contributor is rising greenhouse gasses. So more and more of these gasses; those are emitted from the usual suspects, cars and transportation sector, the energy sector. So, natural gas and other ways we heat our homes. And then from the industrial sector, there are other contributors to warming, like, for example, in cities, increasing concrete and surfaces that absorb a lot of energy lead to localized warming. But on the global scale, it’s primarily the rise in greenhouse gasses.
How is UIC involved in community-level climate change research?
There are a lot of people — a lot of faculty, students, postdocs at UIC — working on these aspects of climate change. It’s a great place to be working on this from. And what I think is particularly exciting about studying climate change at UIC is it’s not just coming out of the normal departments, like Earth science, like my own, or biological sciences, but there’s folks in public health thinking about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations in terms of health effects. There’s researchers in engineering thinking about the effects of the transportation sector and building materials. There’s folks in the College of [Architecture], Design and Art who are thinking about climate change as a driver of design and as a shift, as a way we shift the way we think about relationship to the Earth. There’s folks in English, anthropology. Really, all across the university people are thinking about the impact of climate change on people globally, but also in the communities of Chicago.
UIC has such a strong relationship with the communities of Chicago. And so consequently, a lot of that research does focus at the community level. And so some of the work that we’re doing in our lab is thinking about making measurements at the neighborhood scale. So how is climate change having differential effects depending on where you are in the city, and that’s a very real thing. So depending on whether you’re in kind of a greener area of the city, you might not feel the same effects of a heat wave, like a climate-change heat wave, than if you’re in the other part of the city.
And so we are trying through the process of interviewing community members, but also sensing and weather stations and other things at the community level, trying to kind of understand the community-scale impacts of climate change.
