This past month, Indiana was bookended by two “thousand-year” floods, coming in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky, in which at least 37 people were killed. This comes on the heels of a July 6 rainfall event in Fort Wayne that yielded 9 inches, as well as a June 13 derecho that snapped hundreds of utility poles.
Then there was the Clear Lake fishkill up in Steuben County that DNR characterized as a “natural event” caused by extreme heat.
We’d better be getting used to such impacts of climate change.
Even more severe temperatures are expected to hit a swath of the country stretching from northern Texas and Louisiana to Illinois and Indiana. First Street’s analysis found that tens of millions more people living in this region are likely to see a heat index above 125 degrees by mid-century. The group calls this area an “extreme heat belt.”
In the 2018 Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment report compiled by researchers from Purdue, IU, Notre Dame, Ball State and the Midwestern Regional Climate Center, they reported:
- Indiana has already warmed 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. Temperatures are projected to rise about 5 to 6 degrees by mid-century, with significantly more warming by century’s end.
- The number of extremely hot days will multiply in all areas of the state.
- Average annual precipitation has increased 5.6 inches since 1895, and more rain is falling in heavy downpours.
“Heavy precipitation and flooding … is likely to increase the frequency of floods in Indiana. Over the last half-century, average annual precipitation in most of the Midwest has increased by 5 to 10%,” the report said. “During the next century, spring rainfall and average precipitation are likely to increase, and severe rainstorms are likely to intensify.”
The Indiana climate study added that the occurrence of extreme heat events is projected to rise substantially.
“Our analysis shows that the state’s average hottest temperature of the year is also projected to rise. Over the last century, the average hottest day of the year was 97°F,” the report explained. “By mid-century, the hottest temperature of the year is projected to be about 8°F higher,” the report said, noting this was hot enough to cause roads to buckle. “… The roadway materials used historically may be inappropriate for these new temperatures.”
“Summers in Indiana will increasingly feel like those we associate with Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states to Indiana’s southwest,” researchers said. “Winters will feel more like those recently seen in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.”
Earlier this month, the federal government announced plans to give Indiana up to $177 million over the next five years to make its transportation infrastructure resilient to things like flooding and extreme heat.
There’s another way to look at the coming climate crisis. While Evansville and New Albany and points south will be baking at the end of this century, Michigan City, Portage, Valparaiso, South Bend, Elkhart and Angola could become “climate refuge” destinations, particularly if the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts flood due to sea level rise, sending a diaspora into the Great Lakes.
The World Bank estimates that more than 140 million people could become internally displaced by the climate crisis in coming decades, including 13 million Americans by 2100, according to a report by Matthew Hauer’s research published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
We’ve seen this kind of population shift before, when 2.5 million moved from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, and approximately 1.4 million Black southerners moved north or west in the 1940s during the Great Migration that came in three waves between 1900 and 1970, followed by 1.1 million in the 1950s, and another 2.4 million people in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Brian Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com, where this column was originally published. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol. Send comments to [email protected].
