LOGAN — ‘Is our weather getting weirder?’ was a question a listener wanted addressed.
So, last week, KVNU’s For the People program reached out to Dr. Jonathan Meyer of the USU Climate Center, who stated that it’s a valid question.
“It’s a topic that comes up frequently, whether it’s official interviews like this or just in general conversations, overhearing people in the grocery store or the airport, it’s a topic that’s on a lot of people’s minds, so I appreciate the question,” Dr. Meyer explained.
He said climate scientists have tossed around the idea of feast or famine when it comes to weather with normal weather patterns becoming less and less frequent. The result has been the west coast getting baked, while the east coast experiences extreme winters.
“Meanwhile the west coast is all dry and hot for the winters and we’ve seen that play out for now, three years in-a-row here in the western U.S. But looking back since about the 1980’s that type of pattern, what we call sort of a bimodal pattern of one side being on one half of the weather pattern, and the other half of the country seeing the opposite.”
When it comes to climate change, Dr. Meyer is hoping we have not yet reached the point of no return.
“I really hope that we have not passed the precipice, and I don’t know if anybody can put a specific year or date on when that point of inflection is. But we’ve got to be close to it, and I think people that have tried to put that date into a specific quantified number of when we are past the point of no return, would argue that we are right on that doorstep.”
But Dr. Meyer hopes that we have enough time to make the kind of meaningful decisions from the ground up, and the top down to slow things down.