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The Minnesota Daily

Serving the UMN community since 1900

The Minnesota Daily

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The Minnesota Daily

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Evaluating threats

“Today, our planet faces new challenges, but none pose a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama wrote in his proclamation for April’s Earth Day. “As a Nation, we must act before it is too late,” he said.
 
As to real future threats, a short distance north of the U.S. capital, smoke was rising over Baltimore as frustrated and disadvantaged youth rioted, torching cars and stores.  Across the nation, the education and employment gap between the children of the well-off and the less well-off widens.  This is just one of the symptoms of unequal wealth distribution in the U.S. 
 
Another “threat to future generations” can be experienced by driving on America’s potholed urban streets; beneath the streets, 100-year-old water pipes steadily deteriorate. In the Midwest, large parts of the Ogallala Aquifer, our largest irrigation water resource, decline by as much as three feet per year as we irrigate crops to make biofuels.  Nature replenishes the Ogallala about one inch per year.
 
Stable water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas (GHG). There has been no global warming in the 21st century; tornado intensity has declined, and no Force 3 or stronger hurricane has reached the U.S. mainland in 10 years. There are good reasons to burn less coal, as it releases mercury, arsenic, sulfur and the soot that has smothered China’s cities. 
 
The latest in a long series of international climate change conferences will be held in Paris in December.  As with the other meetings, little will be accomplished as developing nations led by China and India will insist that developed nations are responsible for atmosphere GHGs, produced as they gained wealth for their people. 
 
China and India will continue to burn fossil fuels as they seek to grow their economies. Developed nations, they insist, owe a “climate debt” to the less developed world, and they suggest a $100 billion annual fund be transferred to less wealthy countries.
 
The Obama administration recently submitted its pledge to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The pledge would lock the U.S. into reducing GHG emissions more than 25 percent by 2025 and “economy-wide [emission] reductions of 80 percent or more by 2050.” As the laws of chemistry and
physics are not taught in law school, Obama offered no specifics on how this would be achieved.
 
The White House’s Climate Assessment implies that extreme weather is getting worse due to human-caused climate change. The U.N. doesn’t agree with him either. In its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Events, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that experts are in “high agreement”  that long-term trends in weather disasters are not caused by humans. Any current drought, flood or storm has a precedent in recent history.
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