The atypical Mississippi river flooding, like the heightened floods of India and Bangladesh, highlights the global warming that foretells climatic change. So do the tornadoes once foreign to eastern states, and other weather extremes in odd seasons. This flooding threatens farming, ruining land and bearing toxics from landfills and sewers, so much that farmers should be demanding strict environmental regulations of toxics and greenhouse gas emissions causing climatic change. Likewise, when a Kansas nuclear firm spread radioactive nuclear waste on soil, an eight-legged frog appeared. Industrial and transporting firms, along with burning rainforests, emit greenhouse gases and carbons, causing global warming and climatic havoc with our farming. Farmers ought to urge farm groups and government to ban trade acts like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the global General Trade and Tariff Treaty (GATT), both of which empower just 10 corporations and the President to be in charge of judging the use of toxics or emissions. Corporate emissions of chemical gases have scant regulation, without just 10 companies of interlocking directorates in charge, bypassing all public control. There must be a meaningful ban on greenhouse emissions of carbon dioxide lest we risk agricultural ruin through climatic change. Industry should pay for its greenhouse emissions. It ought not to pass flooding costs to farmers, health, or taxpayers. A ban is best. While last year Acres U.S.A. predicted this year’s flood, NASA’s Dr. Hansen was delayed in his “probability” warning of climatic change. In Siberia, foreign firms will cut prime forests, suppliers of oxygen. Logging stripped 95 percent of our prime forests.

Smaller particles like carbon or chlorofluorocarbons by light weight rise to the ozone area, as over the Arctic, depleting ozone with freezing. Climatic imbalance risks farmers. Burnt rainforests invite soil erosion, floods and deserts like the Sahara. Gulf War oil fire emissions circled the world. Volcanoes emit particles to the air. Volcanic activity could have been started by nuclear bomb tests, jolting earth plates. Avert climatic change.

Bernice Russell

Alumnus

B.S. Economics