There was no meteorology program to speak of at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when Ken Dewey started as an assistant professor in 1974.
For Dewey, who graphed temperatures in a "geeky-weird" daily ritual as a boy growing up in inner-city Chicago, to help build a program dedicated to the study of weather was the chance of a lifetime, particularly in a place with the climate variability of Lincoln.
"What most people won't realize is I chose to be here," said Dewey, who is retiring as a professor after 46 years at UNL, including stops in the Departments of Geosciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the High Plains Regional Climate Center and the School of Global Integrative Studies.
"When I got here, I said, 'Boy, this is a really tiny town.' But I came because I liked the university, I liked the people that I met, and most importantly, it's ground zero or the epicenter for exciting, extreme weather," he added.
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Dewey has traveled the state and region documenting all kinds of extreme weather, from tornadoes to snowstorms, droughts to deluges.
The lifelong habit of recording daily temperatures and precipitation turned into Lincoln Weather and Climate, a website Dewey started in 2000 to give insight and context to weather for its visitors, as well as share his photography of the exciting weather events he's covered.
He also remains a mainstay source for local media outlets, sharing weather and climate insights, as well as on social media, where he provides daily — sometimes hourly — updates as weather events roll through eastern Nebraska.
In 2004, when a tornado destroyed much of Hallam — the 2.5-mile-wide twister was the widest on record at the time — Dewey and a team of students were providing the National Weather Service live updates as leader of the Nebraska Vortex Intercept Team.
Those efforts to keep national offices abreast of the weather happenings in Lincoln continued as late as Friday, when Dewey was providing updates on a storm system that dumped several inches of rain on Lincoln.
Dewey's outreach also includes events like WeatherFest, which draws thousands to UNL's Innovation Campus each year for a symposium on severe weather, as well as a camp for high school students from across the country to explore careers in meteorology or climatology.
His knowledge about the subject and passion for teaching led him to be recognized by the National Weather Association for his efforts in 2018.
It's that love for engaging young people, as well as a key choice made when he helped steer the creation of a meteorology department at UNL, that set Dewey up for what he calls one of the most rewarding experiences of his career.
While the ROTC program urged UNL administrators to start a meteorology program in order to keep students from leaving the state, Dewey said he saw in the late 1970s the need for a longer-term vision within the department.
"I knew we had to look at climate, as well," he said. "Weather is great, but climate is what's going to impact your life. It impacts business, it impacts agriculture. In my mind, I was more interested in climate than weather."
Drawing an analogy, Dewey said weather fans are like sports fans only interested in the action of the game, whereas those who study the climate and how it changes slightly over time, creating conditions for weather to happen, are like sports fans who keep tabs on the daily conditioning, recovery and diets of their favorite athletes for years.
About a decade later, James Hansen, then the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted climate scientists had expected the earth to begin entering a cooling phase, but the data showed the opposite was actually occurring.
"Many in my community were skeptical that the climate was going to begin to warm rapidly, and they were highly skeptical that humans were involved," Dewey said.
The early divide — now, 99% of climate scientists concur global temperatures are rising quickly and humans are a major cause — led the issue to become polarizing, then political, and has led to a diminishing respect for scientists and experts.
Dewey said social media has amplified the situation, giving platforms for others to debase scientists and spread disinformation about their work.
"You can have whatever opinion you want, but it doesn't change the facts," he said.
While the predictions and conclusions drawn by climate scientists became a flashpoint among some, Dewey said, or were dismissed by older audiences as a challenge too big and difficult to tackle, the college students he interacted with on a daily basis gave him reason to hope for the future.
"This is a big problem older people have a tendency to have priority paralysis around," Dewey said. "They have too many stressors already, and they really can't come to grips with climate change. But the younger generation still has hope, and they want to know they have an important role."
Over the past two years, Dewey has taught an Honors Program course titled "Living with Our Changing Climate" alongside former state Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm, where students learned about technologies being developed to reduce reliance upon fossil fuels like electric vehicles — the class got to experience driving a Tesla — or how new construction is leading to greener buildings.
None of the students who enrolled in the class were meteorology or climatology majors, he said, illustrating the interest in the topic of adapting to a changing climate and the greater potential for more extreme weather events it brings from students enrolled in a wide array of disciplines.
"Kids that I talk to on campus all love the fact that as an adult, I respect them and encourage their enthusiasm to come up with a solution," Dewey said. "They are the light that will take us through the darkness of uncertainty toward a brighter future."
He said talking and teaching has left him optimistic, even if some see climate change as a "glass half empty" rather than a "glass half full."
"I absolutely love an empty glass. Look at all you can put in it."