Extreme weather events are on the rise, and Steve Vavrus of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts described what this trend has meant for the state in the 2020s. A new online portal to apply for refunds for the Trump administration’s tariffs ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court has Wisconsin businesses like Viroqua-based Wonderstate Coffee and its CEO TJ Semanchin hoping to see repayment.

Steve Vavrus
Co-director, Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts

• The 2026 Assessment Report issued by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts — its first update in five years — examines how weather events point to climate change, which is leading to warmer and more humid air masses, increasingly out of season. It is not typical to hit 80 degrees and have humid weather in the middle of April, according to Vavrus, who also serves as the state climatologist. Those conditions provide the fuel that generates severe storms that result in flooding and tornadoes, he said. The report also offers strategies to protect against climate impacts,
• Vavrus: “One of the key terms or key phrases I like to use is warmer and wetter. That describes the climate change we’ve seen to date, and also the climate changes we’re expecting in the future in Wisconsin. For example, the 2020s are currently the warmest decade in state history. The 2010s were the wettest decade in Wisconsin’s history, and we’ve seen an increasing number of heavy rainfalls punctuated unfortunately with the state record last year, last summer in Milwaukee. dumping 14 and-one-half inches.”

TJ Semanchin
CEO, Wonderstate Coffee

• In late February, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a set of global tariffs set by the Trump administration nearly a year earlier. About two weeks later, a federal judge ruled that companies that paid tariffs on imported goods are entitled to be refunded. An online federal tariff refund portal operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection went live on April 20, and U.S. business owners that paid some $166,000,000,000 in these import taxes scrambled to apply. Viroqua-based Wonderstate Coffee imports nearly all of the beans it roasts and sells from international growers, and the company paid about $140,000. Semanchin said he doesn’t have full faith he’ll see a refund.
• Semanchin: “I’m a pretty optimistic person, so I put our chances at better than 50%. But again, I’ll believe it when the money is in our bank, because again this has been such an uncertain process from the beginning. We’re hoping that the administration doesn’t fight as the portal is open and money actually starts flowing, that they don’t cut off those funds. But we don’t know. We’re not counting on it until we actually have the money in our bank, which might be months or a year from now. We don’t know.”

Watch new episodes of Here & Now at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays.