The professor’s smartphone got the last word the other day.
“How’s that for timing?” asked Nicolas Zegre, a forester who directs the Mountain Hydrology Laboratory at West Virginia University.
Blatting across his phone was a warning from a weather network he follows. The thunderstorms were cutting an intense, water-logged, lightning-infused swath through central West Virginia. Downed trees and flooded basements were guests of the pattern.
Climate change and the intense weather that comes with it is one of the chief research interests of the laboratory housed in Percival Hall, on the Evansdale campus.
“It’s the way of the world now,” he said.
As in, our world now, he said. West Virginia.
Torrential rains. Tornadoes. Deadly heat waves.
Meteorological byproducts that once didn’t generate much thought in the Mountain State. It isn’t just science, Zegre said. It’s socioeconomics.
And, geopolitics.
Zegre, who spent eight years in the U.S. Army — he was honorably discharged one day before Sept. 11, 2001— knows that unstable weather begets unstable climates of a different kind.
Think the Syrian refugee crisis, he said.
That calamity, he said, began after a prolonged drought collapsed the country’s primarily agrarian economy.
“There was no water, and very extreme temperatures,” the professor said. Call it the politics of survival.
And such large-scale emigration — fleeing the weather, that is — presents very real challenges for receiving countries, he said.
There’s also the coexistence factor of climate change, Zegre said.
In West Virginia, he said, that might mean tasking a highway engineer with the job of designing an enhanced culvert that can handle even more runoff from storms.
Or a county commission dealing with a collection of impoverished homes smack in the middle of a flood plain.
Ideally, it will mean quelling the human-led practices that have contributed to climate change in the first place, he said.
The research by Zegre and his team — bolstered in part through a National Science Foundation award and recently published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology — says climate change, if continued unabated, will make West Virginia 10 degrees warmer by the end of the 21st century.
As the mercury creeps up, the research says, so too does the increase of extreme weather, such as droughts, tornadoes (still not as common here) and those monster storms, such as the ones that sat Zegre’s phone to chirping last week.
Science, at its core, is nonpartisan, he said.
So too is his hope that the above research can be used to form across-the-aisle reforms and other policy that could set the planet right — or, at least slow the environmental damage.
“I have to be an optimist,” he said.
Sections of Beaumot Drive washed away from flooding during an afternoon storm on Saturday.
