An increase in water vapor in the atmosphere is driving more extreme weather around the world.

How is that playing out here in Minnesota?

John Abraham, thermal sciences professor and mechanical engineering program director at University of St. Thomas, shared more about the little-known but growing climate concern.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

This week brought another significant tornado outbreak to parts of Minnesota.

Downtowns for the Twin Cities, Rochester and Duluth were spared from any storm damage, but are cities safer from tornadoes than rural parts of Minnesota? Does the urban heat island effect spare urban residents from a tornado tearing through their cities?

“The urban heat island probably would not save you if the storm were in a position to enter that urban area,” said climatologist Kenneth Blumenfeld. “We should definitely disabuse ourselves of this myth.”

Blumenfeld, who has researched urban tornados, said the probability of tornadoes striking skyscraper-filled cities like the Twin Cities, or smaller downtowns, are just as high as elsewhere.

“All the big cities, [in] tornado prone regions like the Midwest, the South and the Great Plains, have relatively high amounts of tornado activity — it’s a lesson for all of us that tornadoes can and do hit cities.”

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Electric vehicle use in Minnesota boomed over the past decade due to the popular fleet of Tesla vehicles driving into the market.

However, the Q1 auto sales report from earlier this year, showed a drop in sales for Tesla’s EVs. The indication that there might be a slowing popularity for the brand had some experts blame the company’s CEO Elon Musk and his relationship with American politics. Even Gov. Tim Walz took at jab at Musk and the company’s business woes.

“The governor has certainly continued, to some degree, his feud with Elon Musk,” said Walker Orenstein, energy, natural resources and sustainability reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune. “[Walz] jokes about it not being the best idea, because Elon Musk is a very rich man.”

Politics could be a driving force in the drop in Tesla sales, but Orenstein explained the EV growing market is another culprit.

“Tesla’s share of the EV market was declining well before [Q1 auto sales] — I think that it reflects more options that are available to people,” Orenstein said. “At this point in time, the governor doesn’t need Tesla and Musk quite to the same degree, and that’s because the marketplace for EVs has just grown so much.”

New EV companies, and well-established automakers have been electrifying the EV market across the country, but cold weather and a lack of model options are also the reason why Minnesotans haven’t fully embraced the technology.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

For the past eleven years, the planet has been consecutively warmer each year. It’s a trend that has climate scientists and policy makers worried.

In 2024, global temperatures reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial record, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

It’s the level of warming that those who work for climate solutions have been trying to avoid.

“Now the question is: What are we going to do next? What is the next goal going to be?” said Shannon Osaka, a climate reporter for The Washington Post.

Osaka wrote about extreme weather events linked to climate change, the consequences for slow-moving climate policy and Earth’s temperatures rapidly rising past a critical threshold for sustainable life.

“We don’t know where those tipping points are: They could be at 1.6 degrees [Celsius]; they could be at 2.5 degrees Celsius. It’s like a sort of terrifying dice roll.”

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Craft beer grew in popularity over the past decade across Minnesota, but the brewing process has also created a ton of wastewater.

Now, there’s an experiment to make the process carbon neutral. University of Minnesota professor Paige Novak and Fulton Brewing are working on a new, sustainable way to treat wastewater from the brewing process.

She spoke to MPR chief meteorologist Paul Huttner for Climate Cast.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

When beer is brewed, a whole lot of extra wastewater is produced.

For every pint of beer that’s made, there's usually four to 10 pints of wastewater that’s generated at the same time. This wastewater tends to go to a centralized treatment facility where it’s treated, then cleaned up and discharged to a river.

What happens during that wastewater cleanup process is that a lot of energy is used to pump air into the water, bacteria eat up all the waste, and all that pumping of the air creates a huge energy requirement, and also produces CO2.

It’s a huge amount of energy that we use to clean our wastewater.

If you look nationally, the amount of electricity that we use nationally just for wastewater is about 2 percent. So you think about everything that we do in terms of driving, heating our homes, lighting things, and 2 percent of that is used for our wastewater. It’s a huge amount.

I work in biological wastewater treatment systems. I look at bacteria that can help clean up pollutants, including wastewater pollutants.

What we’ve done is develop a system where we can put bacteria into little pellets. We can add these pellets to a tank. The bacteria are active, so we can put a lot of bacteria in there and keep them in the tank and they degrade all the wastewater.

And if you do it at the site before the wastewater is diluted, you can treat the wastewater differently and actually generate methane gas, which can be used as an energy source onsite.

In addition to using a lot of water, breweries use energy to heat the material to make the beer — also to heat the brewery in the winter. So you get added energy creation at the brewery, and then you save energy for treatment when you go to the wastewater treatment plant.

They have been wonderful partners. They’ve been working with us on this process for years now. We did an initial pilot study at their brewery a few years ago, and that was really helpful to see what didn’t work. And then we were able to get additional funding from the Department of Energy to continue to work on this process.

We just finished up a second pilot study at Fulton where we were able to show that the system worked amazingly well.

I think we, just as consumers, need to keep in mind that there’s all this additional work that needs to be done to keep these processes that supply us with the food and beverages going. So think about supporting clean water use, supporting treatment, and supporting research as you go along your day using these products.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Minnesota has experienced four significant blowing dust episodes over the past few years, and the uptick in frequency has raised air-quality concerns across the state.

Now, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency will start issuing air quality alerts for blowing dust this summer. Matt Taraldsen, MPCA meteorologist, says the fine particle pollution from dust — technically known as PM10 — is similar to wildfire smoke.

“People are very familiar with PM2.5 or fine particle pollution and wildfire smoke,” Taraldsen said. “PM10 can get into the airways and cause inflammation and cardiopulmonary issues even in healthy people — in the right concentrations.”

Dust can travel to Minnesota from Texas or Oklahoma, and high winds can blow in dust from North and South Dakota as well. Low snowpack and dryer conditions in the Midwest have contributed to loose soil.

“It used to be that we would get snow and it would stay on the ground relatively all winter, and that would prohibit any dust from being lofted because it’s under the snow pack,” he said. “But the past several years, with the exception of 2023, we’ve had open and bare ground for much, if not most, of the winter. So anytime you get these big storms that come in, [with] sustained winds, it can pick up the dust in concentrations enough to impact health.”

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.

Minnesota has been a part of the solar energy boom that has swept across the nation over the past decade.

Research has shown solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in the history of electric power generation, but politics on the state and federal level could trigger challenges for the renewable resource.

MPR News Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner talked to Brian Martucci, an energy reporter with the Minnesota Reformer, about the issues solar power could face in Minnesota.

Recycled plastics reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 to 80 percent compared to creating new plastics. But the process isn’t always waste-free.

Eureka Recycling, a 20-year-old mission-driven zero-waste recycler, has upgraded its facility to ensure recycled materials are effectively repurposed.

“It’s incredible how much less energy it takes,” said Miriam Holsinger, co-President and COO of Eureka Recycling.

“We really work hard to keep the material we sort as local as possible — a lot of it stays right here in Minnesota, where it gets turned into new products, and 95 percent of what we sort actually stays in the Midwest.”

Holsinger spoke with MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner about how the climate can benefit from recycling materials.

To hear the full conversation, click play on the audio player above or subscribe to the Climate Cast podcast.