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Editorial: Global warming: It's here, it will get worse

Latest IPCC report describes its worrisome impacts.

Editorial, Star Tribune

April 9, 2007

 

Minnesotans might be inclined to take a laconic view of the changes global warming is going to bring to their short-term future. After all, that longer, warmer growing season sounds pretty nice for gardeners and farmers alike. What's not to like?

Well, quite a lot, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists who last week reported on what warming will mean for people everywhere. Their short answer: Much of it won't be nice, even in Minnesota.

 

Scary as it is, this report is the dressed-up version; before it was issued, governments who don't want to deal with the implications of climate change (Saudi Arabia and China chief among them) did their best to water it down.

 

Despite that, the message from the report is still chilling: Climate change is happening now and further effects are inevitable. Their severity can be reduced however, and longer-term effects avoided, if individuals and government will act now to change the human behaviors that are responsible for warming.

 

Minnesota is going to be warmer for sure, but it also could be drier, perhaps too dry in places to take full agricultural advantage of the warmer temperatures. The recent pattern in the northern part of the state -- including the environs of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area -- has not been good. Moreover, if more of the precipitation hitting Minnesota falls as rain rather than snow, that changes the seasonal availability of moisture. Both the state's flora and fauna could suffer significant -- and not beneficial -- changes. Goodbye brook trout, hello rattlesnake.

 

Permanent drought in the Southwest and Mexico also will mean more northern migration and more covetous eyes -- politically powerful eyes -- on Minnesota's "unused" water resources.

 

Then there is the moral element: The poorest areas of the world that have contributed the least to global warming are going to get hit the hardest. Hundreds of millions of people from the soon-to-be-flooded lowlands of Bangladesh to arid sub-Saharan Africa are going to pay a brutal price for the carbon-dioxide profligacy of the developed world, including Minnesota. Incidentally, that profligacy is cumulative. China may be challenging the United States for the current title of polluter king, but it will take China many decades to equal cumulative U.S. damage to the atmosphere.

 

That damage wasn't intentional; we just did not know. But now we do know, and while the changes necessary to minimize the inevitable damage will be expensive and inconvenient, we no longer have an excuse for delay. Everyone in the developed world, Minnesotans among them, must reduce their output of greenhouse gases.

 

And yet even baby steps in that direct are resisted. The Minnesota Legislature, for example, appears reluctant, under pressure from industry, to pass the Global Warming Mitigation Act, a critical piece of legislation to put Minnesota on the road to offsetting the ill effects that greenhouse gases -- our gases -- have had on the one atmosphere this world shares.

 

The scientists who wrote the IPCC report no longer warn of global warming. They're now describing its actual effects. But is Minnesota listening?

 

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