You say you don't believe in "global warming" after the winter Minnesota just endured?
Neither do we. We've sworn off using that phrase to describe the climate shifts that are increasingly evident throughout the planet, and are explainable by increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. "Warming" poorly describes the cascade of weather-related adversity that has already begun, a new report says, and is very likely to continue for a century and more — particularly if humans do nothing to slow or avert it.
We'll call the unfolding transformation "climate change" for now. But even that term is too benign to convey the worrisome forecast for Midwestern states in the National Climate Assessment, released last week. "Change" sounds potentially beneficial. The trouble the assessment forecasts is not. It's more floods, drought, downpours, late-spring freezes, tornadoes, wildfires, summer humidity, insects and invasive species. It's depleted forests, reduced yields of some crops, poorer air and water quality, fewer refreshing summer nights.
It's also fewer moose, trout, walleyes and other iconic Minnesota species, the National Wildlife Federation warned in a separate report last week.
These new reports differ from their predecessors not as much in message as in immediacy. The previous two National Climate Assessments, in 2000 and 2009, spoke of changes yet to come as a result of rising greenhouse-gas quantities in the atmosphere. The new report describes events already unfolding. It calls on many Minnesotans to update their thinking about climate change, in several respects:
• Don't think that climate change is decades away. It's here, and has been for some time, the report says. For example, since 1991, the frequency of heavy rainfall events in the eight states between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes is up 37 percent compared with the 1901-1960 period. That's among the changes that climate scientists have long predicted would result from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.
• Don't think it's someone else's problem. Minnesotans will likely be spared the direct impact of hurricanes, rising sea levels and persistent drought, though they'll pay for those disasters in higher prices for food, insurance and more. But the direct hits will be bad enough — and already have been. For example, the report notes, 11 of the 14 U.S. weather-related disasters that caused damage of more than $1 billion in 2011 affected the Midwest.
Storms are only part of the regional story, and likely not the most economically threatening. The agricultural, forestry and public-health implications of climate change are bigger worries for Minnesota. For instance, consider the consequences for the tourism industry if northern lakes sit amid grassland rather than forests, and their fish populations no longer appeal to anglers?
